Dogs, Dirt, and the Deep, Deep Depths of Grace
8-17-14 (Proper 14A/Ordinary 20A Semicontinuous)
Genesis 45:1-15; Matthew 15:10-28
Dogs, Dirt, and the Deep Deep Depths of Grace
Every summer at church camp, we’d take some time that first night together to go over the major list of “Camp Rules.” One of the big rules we went over was that we wanted the campers to not have their tech out at camp. When I was a camper, it was “No walk-mans, boom-boxes, or CD players.” When I was a counselor, it turned into iPods, iPads, computers and, most of all, cell phones. We had good reasons: camp was a place to come and disconnect from the distractions and the fast pace of the “outside world” so that you could reconnect with God in God’s world.
So when the camper caught me over by the camp store with my own phone in hand, carefully responding to a message I had just received… well, I’m sure you can imagine his reaction. “Why’d you take away my phone when you have yours in your pocket?! What gives?!”
We had our reasons, of course - I was a program coordinator that week, and I had a responsibility to have my phone with me. The message I had received actually was from another program coordinator - they wanted to see if I could do archery with their group later that day. If there’d been an emergency, I had the camp nurse and the camp director both on speed dial. And since I was also working at a local church as a youth pastor, I needed to keep my phone on hand in case the head pastor called with something he needed!
In the end, it was a classic case of “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.”
We’ve been there before, both on the receiving end and on the end giving the sheepish look before blustering out some kind of excuse that demonstrates why we’re in the right, even though we’re making a hypocrite out of ourselves in the process.
The passage we just heard plays right into this kind of attitude - Jesus is once again laying into the Pharisees. They’ve just told him how insulted they are that he and his disciples “break the tradition of the Elders” by not ritually washing their hands before they eat. But Jesus turns their insult right back against them to point out that they don’t follow the tradition, either - they’re hypocrites! And then he launches into the lesson where we start in our reading for today. He makes it clear - it’s not about following a ritual handwashing ceremony, but about having a clean heart, because it’s what comes out of the heart that makes a person truly “dirty.” Jesus once again challenges the very parts of Jewish culture that built up walls and divisions in the name of “religion,” drawing the disciples ever closer to the real heart of the law: right relationship with God and with God’s creation.
And then they move on - they go away from the Jewish village of Gennesaret, where they had been healing and preaching, and move to a Gentile district: that of Tyre and Sidon. In the very text itself, Jesus begins to put his most recent words into action. He and the disciples unashamedly walk into a place that they should have avoided because it would have made them unclean. But that’s when things go differently than we’d expect. This woman - a Caananite woman - a Gentile woman from a people known to be idol-worshippers… she cries out from the crowd, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David,” and she tells Jesus that she has a daughter who is afflicted by a demon. It’s a situation that we’ve seen before in the Gospels - and it’s a situation where we know what to expect. The request is made, the disciples tell Jesus to turn her away, and Jesus turns the situation around on its head to show that the disciples are still not getting it.
But that’s not what happens here. In one of those incredibly rare moments in the Gospels, Jesus shows a different side of himself - and it’s not pretty. It’s not a side of Jesus we’re used to encountering - because the very first thing that Jesus does when this woman comes his way is to flat-out ignore her. He doesn’t answer her plea, but just keeps going. This doesn’t stop her from pleading her case, however - and so the disciples urge him to send her away. Jesus states, neither specifically to the disciples nor to the woman who has come to him, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And then, when this woman - this Gentile woman who has acknowledged him as Lord and as the Son of David, no less… when she comes and kneels before him, calls him Lord again and asks for his help… when she does all these things - Jesus calls her a dog. Jesus uses a deeply offensive ethnic slur from his culture to address her, saying “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
Jesus used an ethnic slur.
There’s no way around it - and scholars throughout the years have tried a lot to soften the reality. For example, they argue that the word Jesus uses is diminutive - it’s not the “standard” insult that would have been given, but saying something somehow gentler by calling her more of a lap-dog or beloved family pet dog. But then you have to ask: does that really make the insult any more acceptable? If Pastor Jeff Mims from the Second Missionary Baptist Church came into my office and needed my help, if I called him “Boy” - would that be any less a slap in the face to him than if I just outright used the “N-Word” to address him? Much as I may try to explain it’s because he has a youthful face, or because I’m trying to be colloquial… I don’t think he’ll be any less insulted.
But this woman is determined - insult or not, she presses on. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
And here’s where it all hits home for Christ. Again, some commenters try to play it off as Jesus testing this woman, or doing it all just to make a point - but it doesn’t sit right, it doesn’t work for me that a person in desperate need has to pass a test for Christ to show compassion. Especially after he just fed 5,000 in his compassion only a chapter earlier. Instead, Jesus realizes he’s had a moment of humanity. Whether it’s grief coming out as irritation, as he’s still fresh off the mountain and fresh from the loss of John the Baptist, or whether it’s simply Jesus having a moment where he shows himself to be more just a product of his culture - after all, there was plenty enough bad blood between Israel and Canaan; in fact, it’s still playing itself out, even today, as Israelis and Palestinians continue to battle over territory and nationhood.
Regardless of the rationale behind this peculiar and uncomfortable moment in the Gospels - we see that it happened. And we struggle to find a way to deal with that - we sometimes forget that Jesus was human. And in the process, we try to ignore what it means to remember that Jesus was human because we know our own weaknesses and flaws. But once we accept this moment and recognize it, we see that there is still an amazing thing that happens in this scene - and it’s something we can latch onto and make our own, perhaps more strongly than had it just been another pronouncement of Jesus against the Pharisees. Because you see… Jesus realizes what has just happened. When this Canaanite woman makes such a bold statement to him, he hears what she has to say and he hears the wisdom in it. And when he hears that wisdom, he allows it to affect him, to change his mind, even. And he recognizes it as faith. He doesn’t bluster and puff up, he doesn’t try to defend himself or prove that he was right to say what he said in the first place - he doesn’t say “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.” He lets himself be humbled by the worth of another person and responds once more with compassion and the woman's daughter is healed.
This is the transformation of the Gospel - we even get the chance to see it happen to Jesus. The Christian life doesn’t call us to be color-blind, to suddenly be “perfect” Christians who never slip up, who don’t succumb to cultural prejudices, viewpoints, or ideas. But it does call us to be able to recognize when our thought processes need to be transformed by the Gospel, when we need to look past the assumptions and judgments we may make at first, and to see another human being in need. And that can be a hard thing to do - if even Jesus came face to face with racism and prejudices in his own walk, we know that it’s an issue we have to deal with, ourselves. But as we look at the other, as we allow ourselves to be challenged and changed… we allow God to be at work in our midst - and in so doing, we make one more place where the Kingdom can shine through.
It’s in this one unparalleled moment that Jesus’ ministry transforms and transitions - he expands his ministry to encompass a greater inclusion of Gentiles as well as Jews into the Kingdom of God. And all because he comes face to face with his own embedded culture and the ways in which it viewed others, and lets the simple spoken truth of a Canaanite woman sink in and affect his thought. When it happens to us, we can pray that we have the same ears to hear, the same heart to understand, and the same spirit to be open to the way that our own minds and spirits might be changed as we own up to the prejudices and presuppositions in our own culture. Because only then can we truly become part of that one, true Kingdom. To God be the Glory. Amen.
Genesis 45:1-15; Matthew 15:10-28
Dogs, Dirt, and the Deep Deep Depths of Grace
Every summer at church camp, we’d take some time that first night together to go over the major list of “Camp Rules.” One of the big rules we went over was that we wanted the campers to not have their tech out at camp. When I was a camper, it was “No walk-mans, boom-boxes, or CD players.” When I was a counselor, it turned into iPods, iPads, computers and, most of all, cell phones. We had good reasons: camp was a place to come and disconnect from the distractions and the fast pace of the “outside world” so that you could reconnect with God in God’s world.
So when the camper caught me over by the camp store with my own phone in hand, carefully responding to a message I had just received… well, I’m sure you can imagine his reaction. “Why’d you take away my phone when you have yours in your pocket?! What gives?!”
We had our reasons, of course - I was a program coordinator that week, and I had a responsibility to have my phone with me. The message I had received actually was from another program coordinator - they wanted to see if I could do archery with their group later that day. If there’d been an emergency, I had the camp nurse and the camp director both on speed dial. And since I was also working at a local church as a youth pastor, I needed to keep my phone on hand in case the head pastor called with something he needed!
In the end, it was a classic case of “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.”
We’ve been there before, both on the receiving end and on the end giving the sheepish look before blustering out some kind of excuse that demonstrates why we’re in the right, even though we’re making a hypocrite out of ourselves in the process.
The passage we just heard plays right into this kind of attitude - Jesus is once again laying into the Pharisees. They’ve just told him how insulted they are that he and his disciples “break the tradition of the Elders” by not ritually washing their hands before they eat. But Jesus turns their insult right back against them to point out that they don’t follow the tradition, either - they’re hypocrites! And then he launches into the lesson where we start in our reading for today. He makes it clear - it’s not about following a ritual handwashing ceremony, but about having a clean heart, because it’s what comes out of the heart that makes a person truly “dirty.” Jesus once again challenges the very parts of Jewish culture that built up walls and divisions in the name of “religion,” drawing the disciples ever closer to the real heart of the law: right relationship with God and with God’s creation.
And then they move on - they go away from the Jewish village of Gennesaret, where they had been healing and preaching, and move to a Gentile district: that of Tyre and Sidon. In the very text itself, Jesus begins to put his most recent words into action. He and the disciples unashamedly walk into a place that they should have avoided because it would have made them unclean. But that’s when things go differently than we’d expect. This woman - a Caananite woman - a Gentile woman from a people known to be idol-worshippers… she cries out from the crowd, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David,” and she tells Jesus that she has a daughter who is afflicted by a demon. It’s a situation that we’ve seen before in the Gospels - and it’s a situation where we know what to expect. The request is made, the disciples tell Jesus to turn her away, and Jesus turns the situation around on its head to show that the disciples are still not getting it.
But that’s not what happens here. In one of those incredibly rare moments in the Gospels, Jesus shows a different side of himself - and it’s not pretty. It’s not a side of Jesus we’re used to encountering - because the very first thing that Jesus does when this woman comes his way is to flat-out ignore her. He doesn’t answer her plea, but just keeps going. This doesn’t stop her from pleading her case, however - and so the disciples urge him to send her away. Jesus states, neither specifically to the disciples nor to the woman who has come to him, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And then, when this woman - this Gentile woman who has acknowledged him as Lord and as the Son of David, no less… when she comes and kneels before him, calls him Lord again and asks for his help… when she does all these things - Jesus calls her a dog. Jesus uses a deeply offensive ethnic slur from his culture to address her, saying “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
Jesus used an ethnic slur.
There’s no way around it - and scholars throughout the years have tried a lot to soften the reality. For example, they argue that the word Jesus uses is diminutive - it’s not the “standard” insult that would have been given, but saying something somehow gentler by calling her more of a lap-dog or beloved family pet dog. But then you have to ask: does that really make the insult any more acceptable? If Pastor Jeff Mims from the Second Missionary Baptist Church came into my office and needed my help, if I called him “Boy” - would that be any less a slap in the face to him than if I just outright used the “N-Word” to address him? Much as I may try to explain it’s because he has a youthful face, or because I’m trying to be colloquial… I don’t think he’ll be any less insulted.
But this woman is determined - insult or not, she presses on. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
And here’s where it all hits home for Christ. Again, some commenters try to play it off as Jesus testing this woman, or doing it all just to make a point - but it doesn’t sit right, it doesn’t work for me that a person in desperate need has to pass a test for Christ to show compassion. Especially after he just fed 5,000 in his compassion only a chapter earlier. Instead, Jesus realizes he’s had a moment of humanity. Whether it’s grief coming out as irritation, as he’s still fresh off the mountain and fresh from the loss of John the Baptist, or whether it’s simply Jesus having a moment where he shows himself to be more just a product of his culture - after all, there was plenty enough bad blood between Israel and Canaan; in fact, it’s still playing itself out, even today, as Israelis and Palestinians continue to battle over territory and nationhood.
Regardless of the rationale behind this peculiar and uncomfortable moment in the Gospels - we see that it happened. And we struggle to find a way to deal with that - we sometimes forget that Jesus was human. And in the process, we try to ignore what it means to remember that Jesus was human because we know our own weaknesses and flaws. But once we accept this moment and recognize it, we see that there is still an amazing thing that happens in this scene - and it’s something we can latch onto and make our own, perhaps more strongly than had it just been another pronouncement of Jesus against the Pharisees. Because you see… Jesus realizes what has just happened. When this Canaanite woman makes such a bold statement to him, he hears what she has to say and he hears the wisdom in it. And when he hears that wisdom, he allows it to affect him, to change his mind, even. And he recognizes it as faith. He doesn’t bluster and puff up, he doesn’t try to defend himself or prove that he was right to say what he said in the first place - he doesn’t say “Do As I Say, Not As I Do.” He lets himself be humbled by the worth of another person and responds once more with compassion and the woman's daughter is healed.
This is the transformation of the Gospel - we even get the chance to see it happen to Jesus. The Christian life doesn’t call us to be color-blind, to suddenly be “perfect” Christians who never slip up, who don’t succumb to cultural prejudices, viewpoints, or ideas. But it does call us to be able to recognize when our thought processes need to be transformed by the Gospel, when we need to look past the assumptions and judgments we may make at first, and to see another human being in need. And that can be a hard thing to do - if even Jesus came face to face with racism and prejudices in his own walk, we know that it’s an issue we have to deal with, ourselves. But as we look at the other, as we allow ourselves to be challenged and changed… we allow God to be at work in our midst - and in so doing, we make one more place where the Kingdom can shine through.
It’s in this one unparalleled moment that Jesus’ ministry transforms and transitions - he expands his ministry to encompass a greater inclusion of Gentiles as well as Jews into the Kingdom of God. And all because he comes face to face with his own embedded culture and the ways in which it viewed others, and lets the simple spoken truth of a Canaanite woman sink in and affect his thought. When it happens to us, we can pray that we have the same ears to hear, the same heart to understand, and the same spirit to be open to the way that our own minds and spirits might be changed as we own up to the prejudices and presuppositions in our own culture. Because only then can we truly become part of that one, true Kingdom. To God be the Glory. Amen.
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