Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
“The Moved Mover” — Reflection by Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Isaiah 56:1,6-9/NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (Matthew 15:21-28/NRSVUE)
One of the things I miss about living back East is easy access to Dunkin Donuts. I know there’s a few in our area now, but it’s kind of a hike to get to them so I generally don’t bother. In Massachusetts, they’re absolutely everywhere (I never had to drive more than a mile to get to one). Heck, there was even one in the tiny Ohio town I lived in before coming here that opened about the time I moved in; it was kinda like they knew I was coming and built it in my honor.
Because I went to that Dunkin every day (sometimes more than once), I got to know the folks that worked there on a first name basis, and ended up having many of those conversations that you have while waiting for your coffee at a drive thru window; these generally involved recaps of our respective weekends, and a lot of complaining about things like the lousy weather and the plight of the Cleveland Browns. One thing that never came up, though, was what I happen to do for a living.
As you know, I don’t often sport the outward trappings of a minister (except for a stole on Sundays, and a robe on Christmas Eve and Easter), but I’ll throw on the black shirt and white collar every now and again when I need to.
So one morning, I was on my way to officiate a funeral and stopped at Dunkin to grab a cup of iced coffee on the way. When I got to the window, a young man named Dylan was working; our paths crossed there frequently and we talked all the time. But when Dylan saw me that day, his eyes suddenly got all wide and he lost the ability to speak. He just pointed at my neck with a look of terror on his face and he somehow managed to get out these two words: “You’re a…”
I’d forgotten that I was all dressed up for the funeral, but once I remembered, I had a pretty good idea about what was troubling Dylan, so I took a stab at finishing his sentence for him. “Minister,” I said; and at this point he suddenly went all catatonic on me again.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he replied, “I’m just trying to remember all of the stuff I’ve said to you that I probably shouldn’t have said to you. I’m really sorry.”
All I could do was laugh and reassure him that all was good.
Let’s be honest, though — we’ve all been in Dylan’s shoes before; we’ve all said things we shouldn’t have said, things we might not want folks to remember we said, thing we’d reel back in, even though we also know we can’t; we can only deal with the consequences of having said them.
As you heard today’s passage from Matthew’s Gospel did you find yourself wondering whether Jesus might have felt the same way? I mean if he had known that someone was committing his conversation with this Canaanite woman to memory — if he had known that people all over the world would still be scrutinizing his words two thousand years after they left his mouth — would he have said some of what he said a little differently or, perhaps, not said it at all? Then again, maybe the things that Jesus says here are ones that we were meant to hear and need to hear.
Let’s begin by acknowledging the elephant in the room: In this story, Jesus is impatient, harsh and rude; we witness a side of him here that we don’t often see in the Gospels. Most of the time, he’s kind and compassionate and loving. Today, however, not so much.
For starters, Jesus refuses even to acknowledge this Canaanite woman’s desperate plea for help. And when he does finally respond, all he says is that he has nothing to offer someone… like her. Then compares her to a dog before her reply to that insult triggers some kind of change in him.
Look, I get it: it’s uncomfortable to think about Jesus behaving this way, so we might be tempted to skip right over this problematic passage. It’s so much easier to focus instead on the Jesus who walks on water, or sits with a child on his knee, or feeds the five thousand. But this exchange with the Canaanite woman is just as much a part of Jesus’s story as those things are — and besides, no one ever said that understanding Jesus was going to be easy.
To put this passage in some context, as it begins Jesus and his disciples have just left the Israelite town of Gennesaret after healing people on the and dining with unclean hands in the presence of the disapproving Pharisees. Jesus turned that meal into a teaching moment about how God’s commandments are more important than human rules and regulations, about how the way we choose to behave towards others matters more than how and what we eat.
In today’s story, Jesus and the disciples head to the district of Tyre and Sidon, which is in the land of the Gentiles. There’s no reason to believe that they’re going there to share the good news with the Gentiles because all of the people with whom Jesus engaged up to this point have been other Jews. So why do they go there?
Well, Jesus is feeling a little burned out as of late. He’s actually been trying, without success, to take a break for a while now and he probably goes to Tyre and Sidon figuring that the Gentiles there wouldn’t want or need or expect anything from him. Jesus’s God-given mission — at least as he understands it at this point — is to spread the gospel among his own people. As we’ll all soon find out, though, Jesus was very wrong about that.
In fairness, Jesus had a bunch of good reasons for wanting to get away from it all. He’s been rejected at his own home synagogue; demanding people are following him wherever he goes; his never-ending arguments with the Pharisees have left him feeling frustrated. You can’t really blame him for wanting to be alone — after all, the human response to stressful situations is generally to try to avoid them.
And it is really important for us to remember that Jesus is human. Because we tend to focus so much in church on the divinity of Jesus, we often fail to acknowledge the humanity of Jesus. But today’s story depicts a very human Jesus, and it’s a bit unsettling to see him this way.
We could concentrate all of our attention on Jesus’s miraculous healing of the Canaanite girl because it is consistent with all the other things that he does, but, if we were to do that, we’d be ignoring the realities of this text. Or we could simply look the other way and pretend that Jesus didn’t say what he said here, but there’s really no good reason to believe that he didn’t say it.
The truth is this: a desperate woman in a foreign land comes to Jesus, bows down at his feet, and begs for him to cast an unclean spirit out of her daughter, and Jesus treats her badly. After telling the disciples that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” Jesus then says to this poor woman in need, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
There was absolutely no love lost between the Jews and the Canaanites. The former saw the latter as inferior beings, they were not God’s chosen people; and Jesus definitely understood this. And in the ancient Near East, calling someone a dog was about the worst thing you could do; and Jesus knew this too.
We can sugarcoat it in order to come to terms with it somehow, we can twist it around so that we can reconcile it with whatever picture of Jesus we have (or want to have). Maybe Jesus said what he said in order to test the Canaanite woman’s faith. Maybe he used the word “dog” as a term of endearment. Yeah, sure.
The more obvious explanation is that, Jesus, who was fully human (as well as fully divine), was susceptible to all of life’s pressures and society’s prejudices just like we are; he got tired and grouchy and frustrated just like we do; he sometimes thought of the world in terms of who’s in and who’s out just like we do.
And since Jesus was a dedicated and observant Jew, he probably would have seen the Canaanites as people who were beneath him simply because of who they were and where they were from — as people who were neither worthy of his attention nor part of his mission.
I know it’s difficult to think about Jesus thinking and acting in this way, but both Matthew and Mark saw fit to tell us that he did. And yet, we also have to acknowledge that this story doesn’t end there.
After Jesus refers to her (and hers) as dogs, the Canaanite woman doesn’t walk away; she stands her ground and advocates for her daughter — good for her. She doesn’t respond to Jesus with some great profession of faith, she challenges the validity of Jesus’ own words by simply turning them around on him. “Yes, Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” is what she says. No Jesus, you’re wrong — even people you may see as dogs are worthy of God’s grace. Oh, by the way, Lord, Son of David, this dog is also able to see you for who you really are, which even your own disciples can’t seem to do at this point.
And how does Jesus respond to her? By admitting she was right and giving her what she had been bold enough to ask for in the first place. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish,” is what Jesus says.
If we allow our vision to clouded by this miraculous healing, we might miss the more significant miracle that happens here: Jesus, the Son of God, actually learns something; he is opened up to a new way of seeing things; as a result of his interaction with people — outsiders, no less — Emmanuel, God among us, actually changes his mind.
Jesus realizes that the mission that God has chosen for him (and chosen him for) is much greater and broader than he had previously thought. His calling isn’t simply to offer God’s blessing to the Israelites, his calling is to share God’s grace with the whole world.
We look to Jesus in order to know who we are called to be, and it is difficult to envision a more important example for us to follow than this one. Truth is, we are constantly limited by all sorts of biases and preconceived notions, and Jesus, because he is fully human, is susceptible to these very same limitations.
But Jesus was also open to considering new ways of seeing and being; indeed, as his encounter with the Canaanite woman shows, he was willing and able to change for the better.
And this is one of the greatest gifts given to us by our strange and mysterious God, this God who chose, for reasons unknown, to take human form and be one of us:
by showing himself to be open to new possibilities, he inspires us to be affected by them like he was;
by embracing an expansive and inclusive vision of salvation, he challenges us to transcend the limits of our prejudices like he did;
by sharing with us his experience of humble learning, he invites us to learn from our mistakes like he did.
I’ve never really understood the rationale for (or, frankly, the appeal of) seeing God as some kind of unmoved and unmovable mover. If the stories of the Hebrew Scriptures are to be believed, God changes God’s mind — generally in response to some kind of human word or deed — on more than one occasion. And Jesus — Emmanuel, God with us — clearly does too, as we see in today’s story.
A Creator who is and continue to affected by what they’ve created, a God who evolves with us as a result of being in an ongoing relationship with us. That’s what God is about. Thanks be to God for that.