Matthew 15: 21-28; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-36
Bethel and KUMC 8/17/08
Rev. Marc Sherrod, ThD
I came across a commentary on this passage that cited the Greek word “ecrazen,” which the NRSV translates as “shout,” but perhaps an even better English rendering is “scream.” This mother screamed at Jesus, “have mercy on me, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” And I thought of the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s famous painting, The Scream, the subject, standing on a bridge, painted in surrealistic brush stokes, it’s head eerily elongated, hands about to clasp cheeks in a gesture of sheer exasperation, and with terrified eyes -- a painting that serves as a kind of icon for the modern soul in emotional torment and anguish.
And I thought, Munch’s painting and Matthew’s description of this desperate Mother’s reaction to Jesus, do, in a way, interpret one another – that moment when you feel you are just about to explode from all the pent-up pain and sorrow that life has thrown at you. So, variously, she “screamed,” “shouted,” “pleaded,” “begged,” “cried out” -- choose a verb that might begin to capture what a mother, or any parent, would feel if your daughter was thought to be possessed of a demon, when you’re at the end of your rope, having exhausted all avenues for help and healing.
And she screams, not just once, but the Greek verb tense indicates it was a continuous action; she keeps dogging Jesus and his disciples – no thumbing through yet another magazine in the waiting room for this woman.
In the ancient world, demons could be used to explain anything that violated the status quo -- physical and mental illness, for example, could be thought to result from demon possession; and so, exorcism, or the casting out of demons, was closely linked to healing and health. Conventional wisdom held that through magic and incantation, through the use of such earthly matter as spit and dirt, as Jesus exemplified on another healing occasion, that demons could be driven out from their victims, made to obey a higher power.
Not only do we modern-day children of the Enlightenment and science have a hard time accepting the idea of demon-possession and exorcism, but we know the end of the story as it pertains to Jesus; we know about the cross and salvation and all the theological “stuff” that goes with his story because we read the story backwards.
But in his day, in the eyes of the people who actually saw and talked with him, Jesus was known less as a savior-figure and more as a healer, for hurting people, above all else, desired help for disease, no less than we. Jesus was not unique, as many wonder workers and healers criss-crossed the empire and the area surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, offering help and hope to the desperate.
What’s more, the placement of this confrontation in Matthew’s narrative has Jesus in the territory of unclean Canaanites, a mostly rural people, as he has moved north of the sea of Galilee with his entourage. Just before moving he goes north into the region of Tyre and Sidon, Jesus has gotten entangled with the scribes and Pharisees, who have come out from Jerusalem to challenge his authority.
Verses 1-20 of Matthew 15 show him chastising these religious leaders for their misconceptions concerning Judaism’s purity laws: the Pharisees seemed to elevate the ritual observance of hand-washing, to the point that ethical behavior appears to be secondary . . . or at least, Jesus is trying to convince them that evil thoughts and intentions regarding actions like adultery, theft, slander are far worse than skipping the hand-washing part of a religious ceremony. Dietary and food laws were hot-button, contested issues in the early church, issues that divided Christian Jews and Gentiles Christians, and that’s probably the backdrop against which Matthew has Jesus puzzling over these matters of ritual purity and, furthermore, whether certain Christians of an ethnicity like that of this Canaanite woman, should be entitled to eat at table with Jewish Christians.
I know. It sounds more than a little trivial that food and rituals associated with hand washing and sanitation could occasion such controversy in the church, but as Matthew writes his gospel 60 years or so after the death of Jesus, who could eat with whom and whose rules you followed were matters of deep and abiding controversy -- not unlike the different protocols and theologies of the table that various contemporary denominations attach to the Lord’s Supper, including who gets invited to partake of the sacrament.
It’s clearly intentional on Matthew’s part that his narrative sends Jesus north, past the area around the Sea of Galilee, into a region where Jews normally did not go – it’s another border-crossing pregnant with meaning, into a land where Gentiles predominate and Greek, not Aramaic is the primary language. As the Jesus movement of the late first century spread, this Canaanite woman, with her confession, “Lord, Son of David” was surely meant to put her in the vanguard of those Gentile believers coming to faith in Christ and at a time when the Church was trying to expand its own boundaries beyond Judaism.
Having just debated the Pharisees and scribes on the adequacy of Jewish purity laws, Jesus now comes face-to-face, that is, if he hasn’t kept his back to her, with an unclean woman, meaning she was not a Jew. Worse, she was a Canaanite, a particularly loathsome and despised kind of Gentile, and the fact that she had a demon-possessed daughter would have made her even more suspicious and stigmatized in the eyes of any law-abiding Jew.
Think in the not too distant past about how we, as a society, panicked at the AIDS epidemic and shunned any with that diagnosis or disease, or perhaps, in the back of our mind, as we walk through an airport even today, and notice people wearing a surgical mask or notice how some folks are just plain different from us, perhaps thoughts of purity and danger, to borrow the anthropologist Mary Douglass’ insightful phrase, flash through the mind.
Desperate people do desperate things, and so this outsider screams at Jesus and his disciples, screams for her daughter and all those daughters and sons who could care less about labels, less about the posturing of religious teachers or preachers, who just want some relief from their pain and suffering, who want the demon banished.
Surprisingly, Jesus keeps her at arm’s length. After all, she is a Canaanite, a member of that indigenous, rural population located north of the Sea of Galilee. We know that Jews had a tense relationship with Samaritans. What we may not realize is how Jews, historically, had experienced extreme conflict with Canaanites. .
Go back to the book of Deuteronomy, and we read this chilling permission given to the children of Israel during the wilderness sojourn: in the land I am giving you, “you must not allow a single living thing to survive – utterly annihilate them – the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites” (Deut. 20:16). These were the native peoples who occupied the land before Joshua and the armies of Israel crossed over the Jordan River from the east, to subdue and conquer.
But despite Deuteronomy’s mandate for extermination, a remnant of the Canaanites did survive, apparently by fading into the rural countryside, and their descendents were still there a thousand years later in the era of the Roman Empire and Jesus. But, no doubt, the awful legacy of racial animosity lingered, perhaps the whispered memory of threatened genocide always there in collective subconscious of those native people whose families still survived. Imagine, given her people’s history, what courage it probably took for her to approach Jesus on the day in question?
And perhaps, we can also conjecture that, as a law-abiding Jew himself, Jesus is yet ambivalent about her cleanliness as it relates to his own purity. Just earlier, he has been debating ritual purity in the abstract, as it were; but now, he has come within touching distance of one whom his own religion and culture deemed untouchable.
What will he do?
Jesus, shockingly, and in contrast to the image we have of him, not only does nto answer her plea, but he even uses a racial slur against her, referring to her as a “dog.” Why on earth should I take food for the children of Israel and throw it to Canaanite dogs? I, for one, feel like doing a double take -- did Jesus really say that?
But she herself, as it turns out, is the one who is going to take the high road, to continue to “dog” Jesus, unrelenting in her pursuit of healing for her daughter, and, she doesn’t mind pulling out all the stops, attempting, first, a high form of Jewish flattery to get his attention. “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me.” Moreover, she discloses the worst about her family to him, whatever it takes to gain a hearing. My daughter is demon-possessed, she confesses.
Well, what do you do with a pushy Canaanite woman who won’t shut up? First, Jesus tries to ignore her; then, his disciples try to get rid of her; and finally, Jesus dismisses her by saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
“Charity begins at home,” goes the old saying. Or, as another old saying goes, “But we’ve always done it this way,” and Jesus seems, at first, to have been caught up in this climate of a centuries-old suspicion and mistrust of anything Canaanite.
But even dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from the children’s table onto the floor, she insists. It is as if they are playing the old children’s game, in which the two of them look steadily into each other’s eyes, each trying to make the other blink first. Jesus all but claps his hands in the woman’s face, but she does not blink.” (Seeds of Heaven, 64).
Did a wry smile cross the face of Jesus? Was there a slight nod of his head and twinkle in his eye to acknowledge her own cunning word play and dogged determination?
We don’t know how Jesus felt about losing a theological argument. It’s a first. But he recognized truth when he heard it, and saw a Canaanite ready to join a flock bigger even than the one he had been sent to. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done as you wish.” Or, as one paraphrase has it, “woman, your faith is something else. What you want is what you get! Right then her daughter became well” (The Message, Mt. 15:28)
It’s a remarkable story, isn’t it?
It’s remarkable, as are all stories of healing, when health gets restored, especially when it involves a daughter, whom we surmise was still dependent on her mother. Even more, perhaps, we like to see the underdog win the day occasionally, because it reminds us that we all were once underdogs and outsiders. There are strong words of pastoral comfort and consolation to any who struggle with disease or whatever may seem like a demon in your life, words about being persistent, and maybe especially, a suggestion that humility is a very important aspect anytime you’re asking for help.
This mother unapologetically knew her place and didn’t mind prostrating herself in the dirt, even if she had to do so to a Jew.
It’s also a remarkable story because it allows that the status quo doesn’t always have to stay that way. Sometimes, it can take a bit of adjustment on our part, but in the end, usually, a lot has to change if the kingdom is going to truly come. It’s not easy to get used to new ideas. Even Jesus had to be badgered a bit before he came around and showed mercy to this Canaanite woman and her daughter.
Jesus, who preached strong words to Pharisees and scribes about the dangers and exclusion of Jewish purity laws, still had to deal with the existential reality of being pestered by someone who was unclean. At first, he demurred, but in that silence that filled the time between his two responses to her, that silence in which lies the destiny and hope of the universe, he changed his mind, reached out, rewarded this mother’s faith and persistence, and healed her daughter of the demon that he taken over her life.
Jesus, at least in Matthew’s portrait, seems to have had an “ahaa moment” himself, coming to a new sense of his own destiny within the ever-widening mercy and purposes of God.
Thankfully, the setting apart of certain ethnic and racial groups to a privileged place in the Church are practices that we, by and large, have overcome and left behind.
And, I must say I greatly admire any church daring enough to put on their billboard out front, those two wonderful words, “Everybody Welcome,” for that may well be the essence of the Gospel and the final measure of who we’ve been called to be and become as the disciples of Jesus.
One of my favorite stories is a little conversation the Methodist Bishop William Willimon reports having with another minister. (You can make the “they” whatever Canaanite or group of Canaanites comes to your mind)
“Do you get any resistance to their being here?” asked the bishop.
“Resistance?” the minister replied. “I suppose so, but that’s part of the job, isn’t it. After all, they weren’t my idea, they’re not my group.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I mean by that just what I meant when one of our members came to me to complain about ‘why you want those people to come to our church.’ I asked him, “I want to have them? What on earth do you mean by that? Their presence here is not my idea. I didn’t invite them. Why on earth would I want them. Let the record show that I didn’t invite you either. Why on earth would I have invited you. Let’s get this straight once and for all, this is God’s church, not mine, and certainly it is not yours.” (Last Word, 131)
In the future, whenever I get discouraged with those who’ve forgotten whose church it is, who bring way too much negativity and selfishness to the table, I am going to remind myself of Jesus and this Canaanite woman.
I am going to remember, first, her persistence in believing God wanted to include her even if Jesus and his followers at first didn’t seem to care, as well as her humility in seeking healing and the gift of faith. She had learned to face her own demon and that of her child, knew she needed help, and knew where to seek help, even if help wasn’t immediately forthcoming.
And then, secondly, I’m going to remember that it apparently took Jesus a few moments before he changed his mind, and I’m going to try and be just a little bit more patient with those who need just a little more time themselves before they can actually have the mind of Christ and practice the kind of faith Jesus recognized in this Canaanite woman, the kind of faith he asks that we all have.
May God, then, grant us faith to face life’s pain and troubles, grace so we can be merciful towards other sinners, and the courage to see the new light God is always bringing into the world. Amen.
