Reading: Matthew 15:21-31
Today’s reading is set in a time of increased tension and increasingly open conflict between Jesus and his followers, and the powers of the day – King Herod, the local Pharisees, and the religious and civil authorities in Jerusalem. When Herod has John the Baptist violently beheaded during a palace party, and suffers no consequences for it from either the authorities above him or the people below him, the forces against Jesus see that it as a good time to step up their opposition to him.
Jesus and his disciples retreat for a while to the region across the lake, which leads only to more wondrous acts of the kingdom of God – including the feeding of more than 5,000 people with a few loaves and fishes, and Jesus walking on the water through a storm to be with the disciples on their way back across the lake.
Now, back in Herod’s territory, they find that religious leaders from the Temple in Jerusalem have made the trip north, to intensify the attack on Jesus. They are in a battle with Jesus for the allegiance of the people of Israel, and they start challenging Jesus publicly on matters of faith and spiritual practice, trying to trip him up and undermine his credibility among the people.
Jesus answers them well, and actually puts them on the defensive. But after one encounter, Jesus again withdraws for a while from the battle – this this time retreating even further away, to the land of Tyre and Sidon, more Gentile than Jewish in character.
Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
Jesus did not answer a word. So, his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
“Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Then Jesus said to her, “Woman,
you have great faith! Your request is granted.”
And her daughter was healed at that moment.
Jesus left there and went along the Sea of Galilee. Then he went up on a mountainside and sat down. Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.
Reflection
I don’t remember which intersection – which cross-road, it was. There are so many now in the city, where sad-looking people with cardboard signs stand quietly waiting for people to share some of their money with them.
The light had just turned red, so I was first in line to have to stop. I was in the far-left lane up against the median divider where one of those persons – maybe a middle-aged man, it’s sometimes hard to tell, quietly squatted with his sign held up in front of him.
I could have ignored him. He didn’t look up and make eye contact, so it was up to me to decide if I would include him in my world that day or not. My windows were rolled up to keep in the air-conditioned coolness and keep out the humid early-afternoon swelter, so there was strong disincentive against opening up contact between us.
But it was hot out there. I knew how much I would not want to be sitting in the heat, under the blazing sun, early in the afternoon in the middle of the traffic.
So I looked in my wallet. Pulled out a 5. Rolled down the window. When he looked up at the sound and stood to walk over to my opened window, I placed the 5 in the ball cap held out to me. I said, “It’s hot to be out there.” I was trying to be sympathetic, but realizing it sounded like I needed to justify my charity. Without judgement, she said (yes, it turns out it was a middle-aged woman), “Thank you. God bless you,” and then squatted back down on her spot as I rolled my window back up.
I felt good and bad, charitable and
uncharitable all at the same time.
And I know I would not have done that – any of the little I did, if anyone else had been in the car with me. I would have felt a need to explain. To justify. To defend my actions.
Because I know all the arguments. That really most of them are not all that poor. Or they’re just sponging off society. his is not the answer to the problem. One-off charity is ultimately not what either they or I need. My little act of charity will not accomplish much. Really, I’m just doing it to make myself feel good, not really because of sympathetic or transformative solidarity and identification with those who are poor and / or homeless.
But I was alone in the car that day. I did not have to fear any fall-out from sharing some of my money with a random person at an intersection on my way through the city I call my home.
And I realized how often it is fear – fear of all kinds of things, that keeps us from reaching out in love and care to others beyond, from freely sharing God’s love for all when “the all” that’s in front of us, is someone really other than who we and our family and friends are, or want to be part of.
The reading today is a strange one. In it, Jesus is acting very oddly. He starts out trying to ignore a desperate plea for help from a woman wanting healing for her daughter. Then, when pressed, he tries to come up with reasons – some of them quite derogatory, for not doing anything to help her. So uncharacteristic of Jesus. Not at all like him.
And I wonder if at this point in his journey into his mission, he is feeling overwhelmed. Unsure. A little afraid.
Right from the start – and he’s got used to it, there was tension and conflict between him and others like him, and the religious and civic establishment, the powers of the day. His concern is to help the people of Israel be reformed, renewed, reborn as people of God in the world. And with that always comes friction and conflict with people in power and people with power, whose agenda is something other than the well-being of all.
But now things have suddenly been ramped up. The other side has upped the ante.
King Herod has had John the Baptist – another leading reformer, and Jesus’ cousin, beheaded as part of a palace party, and has suffered no consequences. Who will be next? Is it now going to be open season on the reformers and the rabble-rousers? Suddenly it really has become a life-and-death affair to be living and working towards the kingdom of God.
Also, the big guns – some of the religious and civil leaders in Jerusalem, have now come up to Galilee, to ramp up the campaign against Jesus. They’re starting to engage him in public debate about faith, God and spiritual practice – things the ordinary people care about, and are trying to trip him up. Make him say things that will discredit him in the eyes of the people. Undermine his support. Maybe catch him out in something they can nail him for.
So, Jesus retreats. The second time in just a few days, the way Matthew tells the story. And this time, further away. To mostly Gentile territory.
To pray, probably. To catch his breath? To get direction from God about what to do now? And how to do it, now that the landscape has been changed? To see the next step more clearly?
And suddenly from out of the crowd there appears this Syro-Phoenician woman calling out for him to help her by healing her daughter of demons. A foreigner to the covenant community of Isarel. An unclean person, who has demons in her household. And a woman. Three strikes.
At this point in the way things are going, this woman is a risk for Jesus to be associating with. She is not the kind of person anyone wanting to be seen and followed as a holy man in Israel should be making part of his circle. This could really cause him trouble back home.
So is Jesus a little overwhelmed at this point? A little unsure of what to do? Maybe a little unnerved by what the consequences might be if he reaches out to her? Is this why his first choice is not to respond? To try to ignore her, turn a deaf ear to her cries, a blind eye to her troubles?
Is he suddenly like Peter when Peter was out of the safety of the boat and walking on the water in the storm? He started out okay. Was doing well. Going well in a good direction, across the waves and through the wind. Until something made him notice the wind. How strong it was. And how much it was against him. And he started to stumble and sink.
Like Peter needed to, Jesus also reaches out for a lifeline to help him get through. Forced by the woman’s persistence to say something, he says, “Sorry. I can’t. I’m here for the people of Israel. They are my mission.”
We know the line well. Sorry, I have to take care of my own; they are God’s calling on me. I think we need to get our own house in order, before we start reaching out to others. Why are we sending so much aid to other countries when we can’t feed our own people? Why are we taking in so many immigrants, and taking care of them, when our own people are suffering?
But the woman persists. She doesn’t accept the limitations on God’s love that Jesus is proposing as a way out of this encounter. Her desperate need expresses itself in a giant faith that somehow there is some goodness of God, some goodness in the world, some love of God’s people for her and her daughter.
To which Jesus says, “But the food for the children is not to be given to the dogs.”
What!!??
I can only think this was a saying common among Jews of Jesus’ day. That he heard more than once on the lips of others. And that it comes to his own lips now under the pressure of the situation.
But the woman is not deterred in her need and her faith. “But even the dogs get crumbs that fall from the children’s table.”
At which point Jesus stops. Is stopped in the tracks of his retreat. And says, “Woman, what faith you have. What a great faith. Thank you. Go home, your daughter is healed.”
And, the story says, from that point on, Jesus returned to his mission and his journey into the kingdom of God as it is on Earth. He began once again to teach wherever he was, heal whoever came to him, and lived towards the renewing and rebirthing of the people of Israel by living out God’s love for all.
Is it too much to say that maybe the Syro-Phoenician woman, and the way she would not let Jesus go, and the way the big question of whether or not to reach out to include an unclean foreigner got boiled down to an up-close, personal, face-to-face encounter – whether or not to reach out in inclusive love to this one person in need in front of him, was God’s clear answer to Jesus’ prayer about what to do now, and how to do it? Is it too much to say that that day, that particular foreign woman in her need, saved Jesus from the temptation to be less than he is, and was called to be?
We suffer all kinds of fears that hold us back from being what we are, and are called to be and to do.
Like if someone had been with me in the car that day, the fear of what the other would say and think of me. Fear of having to defend a foolish, charitable act. Fear of having to justify goofy support of lost causes. Fear of appearing foolish or naïve in the eyes of others when we follow what our deepest hearts impel us to do.
Sometimes we’re afraid of our weaknesses, emptiness and powerlessness. We doubt that anything we say or do, or offer or give will make any real difference. So we don’t. We don’t send in a donation. Don’t reach out to a neighbour who could use a friend. Don’t volunteer for a few hours a week at the GBF, the good bank, CityKidz or the hospital. Don’t go to be part of a rally. Don’t sign a petition. Don’t include the needs of others and of the world in our daily prayers. Don’t vote.
Sometimes we’re afraid what it might cost. Like twelve or fifteen years ago when I thought seriously that our congregation was at a point – I don’t remember the circumstances, but I really thought we were at a point when it was maybe time for us to work through the United Church study and discernment program about whether to become an officially Affirming congregation – to be a congregation intentionally open to, and affirming of persons of all sexual orientations and identities.
But I was unsure of how it would be received. I was overwhelmed by how much work would be needed to do it honestly and well. I was afraid of how it might affect us, and what tensions it might bring to the surface among us – how it would stir up the water.
So I didn’t do it. I came up with all the usual reasons we give, not to do it.
The thing that saved Jesus was the face-to-face encounter with the woman in need. And that she would not go away. And that she would not let him go away, without getting involved and doing something to help her.
Sometimes we think our salvation and the will of God for our lives is in insulating ourselves from the scary, hard, overwhelming, risky things of life. To create a space of safety, retreat and withdrawal for ourselves. To let the problems and needs of the day to remain abstract and one step removed.
But maybe our salvation – what helps us keep becoming who we really are and are called to be as children of God, followers of Jesus, and part of the body of Christ in the world today, is to let ourselves not be so insulated and withdrawn. And to let ourselves see, hear, be confronted by, be and let ourselves be called and brought to new life by particular needs of the world around us.
If even Jesus had to be saved by an unlikely, unclean, unwanted woman in great need, who are we to think we also don’t need that kind of difficult encounter and God-induced opportunity in our life as well?
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