Jesus and the Canaanite Woman

Matthew 15:10-28

Jesus and the disciples have gone into strange territory.  Into the land of Tyre and Sidon.  Tyre and Sidon are coastal cities located on what is now the southern coast of Lebanon.

So Jesus and his disciples were outside of their own home and their own ethnic and cultural community.

I can imagine a different language was the dominant language. 

And the people looked and dressed differently and probably behaved differently than the people they were used to in Galilee.

We don’t know if this was the first time that Jesus and the disciples visited Tyre and Sidon, but still we can imagine that it was not a place where they would particularly feel at home.

And the historic relationship between the Hebrews and the Sidonians was not very friendly.

So Jesus and his disciples very likely had grown up with impressions and judgments of those people – those Sidonians, those Tyrians.  And these judgments would yield plenty of opportunities for them to suspect the Sidonians or to keep from associating with them, perhaps even resent them.

What Jesus had just taught his disciples and challenged the Pharisees with – was that it was not external ceremony of washing hands that made someone pure, it was the nature of their heart.

As we have it in another part of the Bible – “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16:7)

And this teaching was now being tested in the midst of the Sidonian streets.  Different smells, different sounds, different values of cleanliness. 

And along comes a woman from off the street.

And Matthew calls her Canaanite.

This goes far beyond calling her Sidonian or Tyrian.

This invokes the stories of the centuries and millennia of hostility between Canaan and Israel – something like what we experience nowadays as the hostility between Palestine and Israel.

This Canaanite woman comes to Jesus and begs for him to help her daughter – her daughter who is possessed by a demon  

Jesus is silent.  But his disciples become very vocal:

“Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”

Why are the disciples concerned?  Perhaps they are annoyed at the woman’s persistence.  Perhaps they fear the attention that they are getting from the Sidonians.

Perhaps people were looking at them, staring, whispering.

Jesus then articulates clearly to the Canaanite woman that he was sent for the lost sheep of the house of Israel – (implying, “not Canaan”)

Why does Jesus say this?

I wonder if Jesus was saying this as a way of teaching his disciples the implications of what he had taught the Pharisees a while before.

What happens when our cultural prejudices about

who people are,

and what they deserve,

come face to face with real human need and real human hurt?

Jesus articulates in words for the hearing of the woman and the disciples, the assumptions that the disciples are carrying about the scope of God’s blessing. 

Who’s in and who’s out.

“Canaanites need not apply.”

I was called to Israel’s sheep.

But the woman is not deterred; she really believes that Jesus can help her daughter.

She comes before him and kneels.

“Lord, help me.”

Jesus continues the logic of the cultural prejudices that exist in the judgments that he and the disciples learned.

“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

And the disciples nodded to one another in pious agreement with this truism that they have heard from many a respectable elder in their home communities. 

Gentiles, non-Jews, were spoken of as “dogs” – dogs being dirty but also violent and less intelligent

And this woman, persevering in her faith, replies.

“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat from the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

The woman takes this truism and turns it around.

Even if you think of me as a dog compared to the children of Israel – dogs are not wholly disregarded by the master of the house.

And if a dog is allowed to eat the crumbs that fall from the table,

How much more might other human beings made in the image of God receive from the abundance of God’s blessings.

And the disciples suddenly realize the full implications of Jesus’s mission as Jesus calls out to the woman, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”  And her daughter is instantly healed.

We have to imagine how powerful this experience must have been for the disciples.

Here they see their prejudices exposed in the light, melted by the warmth of love.

How might our society, and we ourselves allow for this kind of transformation?

What is the way forward to allow the light and heat of love change us and change our society?

I think Jesus shows us.  It’s not in the avoidance of conversation and conflict, it’s not in keeping to our separate communities.

It’s in engaging, learning of one another; it’s in communicating our prejudices, bringing them to light, allowing them to be subverted by the real human experience of suffering or joy.

It’s in allowing ourselves to see again the scope of God’s care for all of creation.  Regardless of difference – God’s care is abundant and transcends boundaries that we have constructed in our minds –

It has broken my heart to follow the news about Michael Brown of Ferguson, MO and the consequent protests and counter-protests which have been in the headlines this past week.

Michael Brown of Ferguson Missouri was a young man who was killed because of prejudice ignited by fear.

Prejudices can create irrational fears and hatred in us. 

We become suspicious and when we are in a situation where our suspicions are set off by fear, we can shoot.

Most of us don’t shoot and fatally harm the objects of our suspicion.

We have less deadly, but still harmful ways of handling those that we hold under suspicion.

We might avoid talking to someone, or speak about them to others in ways that might damage their reputation.

When we allow our prejudices to be unaffected by the compassionate love of encountering a real human being before us who might be calling out for care, for respect, for help,

When we remain unaffected by compassion the result is disastrous to individuals and to communities.

This is why it is so important for all of us to be lifelong learners.  Because education, learning is a lifelong sculpting project,

Cutting off the baseless opinions and prejudices and bringing to full form and shape a character which is beautiful because it is sculpted in the fully human form.

When we allow love to bring light and warmth to our hearts and to our communities, spaces of hospitality and advocacy are created where there formerly might have been hostility and hand-wringing fear.

And love is the great motivator for learning and changing.

When we begin to understand someone or some community who we formerly feared or avoided, we begin to have compassion.  And when we begin to have compassion we begin to want to better understand.

Understanding gives birth to love and love in turn fosters greater desire to learn, to understand.

Love gives warmth to our heart and light to our eyes – so that we can see and receive new information, new experiences and allow them to change our old ideas and old experiences.

We as a society like to think that we have become “colorblind,” that we have left race behind.  And so we ignorantly dismiss people when they claim that Michael Brown was shot down in large part because of discrimination by race. 

What we don’t understand is that there are still so many people in our society and still so many structures in our society that work with unchecked assumptions and suspicions of people based on race.

And we are among those who carry those unchecked assumptions about how the world is and who does and does not deserve equal treatment.

Jesus taught his disciples that God cares about the heart and not about the appearances – and this he demonstrated to them when his love broke through the barrier of the cultural judgments that he and the disciples had inherited

And we can read this story and realize the profound good news of this love of God’s

God loves all people, men, women, and children, black, white, Jew or Palestinian and God loves them

not in spite of their differences

but like a good artist

Precisely in light of all of their created differences. 

Because God’s the one that created them in the first place.

May we bravely by the light and warmth of love, allow our hearts and minds, ways of speaking and relating to be changed as we receive our neighbors near and far.