Beyond Winning and Losing (Proper 17A)

Beyond Winning and Losing

28 August 2011

Proper 17A

Beijing China

Exodus 3:1-15; Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c; Romans 12:9-13; Matthew 16:21-28

From that time on, Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life? “For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.” (Matt 16:21-28)

God, breathe into us a desire to change—
take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend in Washington DC about baseball.  I had become a great lover of the Baltimore Orioles and going to Camden Yards for a lazy afternoon watching and cheering, and, well, what later was to come to be called “just chilling.”  My friend, though from the DC area, hated the O’s and was a loud supporter of their arch-rivals, the New York Yankees.  “How can you love the Yankees,” I said.  “Anticipating my next line, he replied, “The best team money can buy.  Okay, Okay.  But I like to go with the winner.  And the Yanks win more than anybody else.” 

Go with the winner.  It is a common strategy for  enhancing our power and making ourselves feel good.  When I was growing up, there was a song that summed it up pretty well, “I’m in with the in crowd.  I go where the in-crowd goes.  I’m in with the in-crowd, and I know what the in-crowd knows.”    If you want to get ahead in this world, go with the winner. 

Today’s Gospel reading from St. Matthew tells the story of what happens just after Peter first tells Jesus that he believes that he is the Messiah.   Matthew has interposed the “you are Peter and upon this rock” episode we discussed last week between the confession and today’s reading.  But in Mark’s Gospel, Matthew’s source here, immediately after the confession Jesus and Peter have a little set-to.  And it’s all about Peter wanting to be in with the in-crowd, wanting to go with the winner. 

You see, Peter has confessed Jesus as Messiah and Son of God based on what God has told him in his heart.  But he thinks that this means that Jesus is going to quickly fix this upside-down world, punish the bad guys, and make it a great thing to be one of God’s chosen, the ultimate in-crowd.  He thinks Jesus is a winner, and he is going with the winner. 

But Jesus says, “You got the part about who I am right.  But not what it means." Jesus says, “Messiah doesn’t mean conquering hero in the sense you think it does.  What it does mean is this: I am going to have to go to Jerusalem, and there the authorities will torture and kill me.  But I still trust in God and know that there will be a final vindication of our hopes.  But don’t expect a military victory from your Messiah.  It’s not in the cards.  God has something else in mind though I can’t tell you what it is. All I know is that God will come through. But not in the magic way you think he will.’”

Peter reacts strongly:  “Messiah means anointed by God, and that means conquering hero.  Look it up in the Bible.  It means you are going to blast those Romans and those bad Jewish Leaders collaborating with them and oppressing the poor.  Come on, Jesus!  You’ve healed the sick, and raised the dead.  You’ve done marvels never seen.  That means God is with you.  Buck up, don’t be so pessimistic.  Have some faith.  You are Messiah and you win prevail.  You have super-powers, Jesus! That’s why I’m with you.  I’m going with the winner.” 

Jesus’ reply is biting: “Get away from me, Satan.”

He knows that Peter’s pep-talk is not in accord with reality or with what God wants. He must go to Jerusalem to bear witness of the Kingdom of God to the authorities, and he knows what this means. The powers that be will not let it go unchallenged. It is in their nature that they respond brutally to any challenge to their power. Accepting God’s will means accepting that, and in persevering in following God’s call despite what it means for him. To think or feel otherwise is a defection from God’s intent, and to argue for such opposition to God’s will.  So he says Peter is tempting him, just like a devil. (“If you are the Son of God, turn these stones into bread! Turn these oppressors and pagans into stone!”) 

Both Mark and Matthew tell this story.  Luke has deleted it, probably out of respect for Peter and a desire to not advertise that Jesus called the main leader of his disciples a “devil.” 

The Gospel of John, apparently had similar concerns as Luke.  Though the focus on leadership in the Fourth Gospel is usually on “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” at the distinct disadvantage of Simon Peter, and there is no scene specifically about a confession of Peter at Caesarea Philippi per se, the story in John 6 is told this way (John 6:67-71):  when many people following Jesus because of his marvelous works hear his discourse claiming to be the bread from heaven that they must eat, they leave in a huff.  Jesus asks the twelve “Will you also leave me?”  Speaking for the Twelve, Simon Peter replies, “Where would we go?  We know you have the words of eternal life.”  Jesus then replies, “Ah yes.  It was indeed I that chose you all, wasn’t it?  All the same, one of you is a devil!”  John adds, “He was talking about Simon Iscariot” (that is, Judas).  Where Luke has deleted the story as a scandal against the first of the Twelve, John says that the stories going around among early Christians about Jesus calling Simon a devil just after he confesses Jesus were about Simon Judas not Simon Peter!

Anyway, in just a few verses in Matthew, Peter goes from being called the Rock of the Church to being called the Devil himself! 

How can this be? 

The fact that we find it incongruous and a little schizophrenic tells us about our own desire to “go with the winner.”  The question lying behind our discomfort at the contrast is this “Well, was Peter a winner or a loser?  Is he being praised here or condemned?  Is he good or is he bad?”   We are torn, like Peter who does not want his Messiah to be predicting his death by torture, between our expectation (Peter should be the Rock!) and the reality (Jesus calls him a devil!)

Then, as if to answer our unspoken questions, Jesus starts teaching his disciples this, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny themselves, take up their own cross, and follow me.”  The point is that we have to lose our desires, lose our preconceptions and expectations, lose ourselves if we are going to follow Jesus.

What Jesus means is something like “If you want to follow me, you must give up any claims you may think you have of owning yourself. You’ll have to stick your head in the hangman’s noose to follow me.”

Jesus is not praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood, or worse, of a vicarious suffering for someone else’s wrongs. “This is my cross, and I’ll have to bear it” is the proverbial expression of the idea. Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.

What Jesus is calling for is this: He wants those who wish to follow him to actually follow him: follow God’s call, work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when we know that it may very well have a high personal price.

His declaration of his future as a suffering Messiah leads the way—just as he emptied himself and gave himself over to do God’s will, even if it spelled horror and disaster for him, so also must we. 

It was clear in Jesus' Palestine who the winners were:  the Roman Pagan occupiers and their Quisling darlings the Temple leadership and Jewish political leadership, the very ones who were oppressing “the poor” to whom Jesus was announcing the “Good news of the Kingdom.” 

Just as he had to give up his desire to “go with the winner,” and stick instead with the path God gave him to walk, so must we. 

Jesus forces us to transcend “winner” and “loser.”  To follow him, we have to stop worrying about results and who wins and who loses.  To follow him, we have only to focus on what God demands of us to do next. 

I get a little uncomfortable when people say, “have you accepted Jesus?” as if “accepting” Jesus made you a Christian.  Jesus doesn’t ask us to “accept” him, to make him part of our life and calculations. 

He demands that we let him take charge entirely.  And not worry about results. 


I also get uncomfortable when people preach the Gospel of Wealth, "if you do what God commands, God will bless you, and you will be heatlhy, wealthy, and happy."  This Polly-Anna take on the world seems too close to Peter's arguing for Jesus to man up and be a winner because God, the ultimate winner, will bless him and make his wishes come true.  It does not sound at all like the Way of the Cross Jesus says he is embarked on and which he calls us all to. 

The fact is, just as Martin Luther so well put it, the follower of Jesus is at the same time a winner and a loser, a righteous person and a sinner, Simul Justus et Peccator.  What really matters is our trust in God, our faith.  If we let it dictate our actions and our judgments, and we stop worrying about whether the results will be success or failure.  We are then on the risky path that Jesus trod. We are then in the life he calls us to. 

The difference between Jesus and Peter in this scene is this: Jesus is open to God and whatever God can throw at him, and trusts. Peter thinks he already knows what he can expect from God, and grasps at that expectation, to the point of getting upset when told that it just isn’t what God is going to do.  But God isn’t finished with Peter yet.  Peter will go on, Rock of the Church and Devil in the flesh, Simul Justus et Peccator, Simul Victor et Victus.   And on this Rock, God builds his Church: his congregation of losers who are winners, his gathering of misfit and messed-up saints, his poor who are rich, his last ones who are first.   They, like Jesus, just keep trying to follow God, come what may.  Like Peter, they do this even when they fail spectacularly.  They get up, pull up their socks,  and, keeping their eyes on Jesus, move ahead.   

Following Jesus means letting go, and letting God. It means doing the right thing even when counting the cost tells us it will be hard. It means stone cold clear assessment of what we face, and not putting on the rosy lenses of self-deception in order to work up a false sense of that all will be well when it won’t be. It means accepting that God’s plans may not be what we thought they were. But through this all, it means trusting God--beyond the limits of reason, beyond the limits of our experience, beyond the limits of our fear—because God’s basic nature is to love us unconditionally.

May we all learn to so trust in God.

In the name of Christ, Amen.

Upon the Rock, Against the Gates (Proper 16A)

Upon the Rock, Against the Gates

21 August 2011

Proper 16A

Beijing China

Exod. 1:8- 2:10; Psalm 124;  Rom. 12:1-8; Matt. 16:13-20

When Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, "Who do people say that the Son of Man is?" And they said, "Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets." He said to them, "But who do you say that I am?" Simon Peter answered, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God." And Jesus answered him, "Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven." Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that he was the Messiah.  Matt. 16:13-20

Today’s Gospel tells about Jesus giving Peter a new name and what are called “the keys of the kingdom.”  In popular imagination, that means Peter has become the doorkeeper of heaven:

Bill Gates dies.  When he gets to the Pearly Gates, there is a long line of people waiting to be interviewed by St. Peter before he’ll let them in.  He goes up to the front of the line and waits on the side close to St. Peter, who turns to him and asks him if there is anything he can do for him.  “I’m Bill Gates.  I was one of the richest men in the world and gave hundreds of millions of dollars for projects to help the disadvantaged and stop malaria.  Can’t you get me around this long, long line?”  St. Peter replies, “Oh no, no.  This is heaven’s door.  All are equal in the sight of God.  There are no favorites here, and certainly neither rich nor poor.  You must go and stand in the line and wait your turn like everybody else, Mr. Gates.”  After what seems an eternity, he is only half way up the line when from the rear comes a commotion, “Make way, make way for the Archbishop!”  At that a man in a cope and miter, attended by several fawning assistants, quickly goes to the head of the line, where St. Peter stops his current interview, talks to the Archbishop briefly, and then admits him without further ado.  Bill Gates asks the woman in front of him to hold his place in the line, and somewhat self-righteously goes back up to confront the Saint.  “Yes, Mr. Gates?” says Peter.  “I thought you said ‘there are no favorites here’ and ‘all are alike in the sight of God.’”  “Yes, that’s true, and your question is… ?”   “What about that guy in the funny hat with the gold shepherd’s crook?  He cut the line and you let him.  That’s not fair.”  St. Peter, with a look of sudden recognition on his face replies, shaking his head, “Oh no!  But he was an archbishop! It’s been a thousand years since we’ve had one of those get in up here!”

 

 
Despite the popular image of Peter as the heavenly doorkeeper, that image is not what today’s Gospel is about.  

The scene takes place in Gentile territory, near the city Caesarea Philippi,  or “Herod Philip’s City named for Augustus Caesar,” as opposed to Herod’s great capital, Caesarea Maritima, or “the City named for Caesar on the Coast.”  Philip’s Caesarea was in the foothills of Mount Hermon, a great peak in what we now call the Golan Heights.  It was originally called “Panea” or the City of Pan, and is now in Arabic called Banias.  

 A Greek Shepherd pursued by Pan, in a Red-figured Greek Vase.

It was a center of worship of the Greek god Pan, half man half goat.  Pan was a nature and fertility deity, usually represented in a state of sexual excitement and playing reed pipes.  The rituals associated with the cult involved drunken orgiastic rites on occasion using, well, ... goats.    The Temple of Pan was located at the mouth of a large cave from which then flowed a spring that was the headwaters of the River Jordan.  The cave’s mouth is in a large face of exposed bedrock, upon which the Temple of Pan was built.  The cave opening looks like a spooky gate in a city wall, leading to the underworld.  That’s probably exactly the reason that people placed Pan’s Temple there.  

 The Ruins of the Temple of Pan beside the cave mouth now called the "Gates of Hell," Banias, Golan Heights.  

The scene in the Gospel is striking—Jesus takes his closest followers, most of them in their twenties, with him on a day trip to a place that later Rabbis would rule as totally off-limits for followers of God, a place seen as “Sin City.” Maybe Galilean Jews like Jesus and his followers had a saying,  “What you do in Caesarea stays in Caesarea.”  

It is here that Jesus asks his followers, “Who do people say I am,” and “Who do you say I am?” 

It is Simon who replies, “You are the Messiah.  The Son of the Living God.” 

Jesus replies by telling Simon that his recognition of Jesus’ identity did not come from publicly available data, but rather from God speaking in his heart and mind.   

And then he turns the tables.  He tells Simon who he thinks he is.  He gives him a new name:  Rock.  In the Aramaic they would have been speaking, the word is Qepha’.  It is where the name Cephas, one of the Greek names for Peter in the New Testament, comes from.    When you translate Qepha’ into Greek rather than just transliterate it as Cephas, it becomes Petros, our familiar name Peter. 

The rock image used in the name is significant for two reasons.  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the Rock of Israel, the one reliable thing they can cling to when all else fails or fades, is God himself.  It is also the place where God puts you when he wants you safe, “the rock that is higher” than the turmoil you see about you.  It is also the stony, hard facts of life in the desert, from which God can make water spring. 

So he is reminding Simon of the source of his knowledge and of his strength. 

But “rock” also evokes the solid and reliable foundation of the house built by a wise man in the parable of Jesus, as opposed to the foolish man’s foundation of sand.  As an image it stands in polar opposition to the stony façade upon which the Temple of Pan, standing there in front of them. 

“You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  The Greek here uses two different words, one masculine (petros “stone”) and one feminine (petra “massive outcropping of bedrock”).  But again, in the Aramaic Jesus would have been speaking, there is only one word—Qepha’. 

Now Roman Catholics have traditionally differed in their interpretation of this verse from Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Christians.  Rome has always insisted that it is the person of Peter, and the role he plays (the “Petrine Office”) in the Church that is the foundation stone Jesus refers to.  For them, it is the Roman Papacy.  They link it to Peter later becoming Bishop of Rome and say that it is the role of the Bishop of Rome as the leader of all the other Bishops, increasingly monarchic over the centuries, that is at issue.   Predictably, Protestants have always the “Rock” at issue is faith alone, apart from works—the confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God made by Peter in the story—that is the bedrock of the Church.   The Eastern Orthodox have generally said that the Rock is divine revelation, the act of God making Jesus’ identity known  (“flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in Heaven”). 

The fact that Jesus here follows his play on words with an immediate statement of Church authority (“what you bind on earth, God will bind, what you loose, God will loose”) and ultimate success (“the gates of Hell shall not prevail against you”) has lead most modern scholars from all these traditions to agree that the story in Matthew is indeed about the leading role of Peter in the early Church rather than later papal presumptions, salvation through works alone, or Eastern Christian mysticism.  

Within three decades of Jesus’ death, Christians were divided between Jewish congregations who saw James the Brother of Jesus as the natural heir to Jesus as leader and wholly gentile congregations who saw Paul, the missionary who had converted them, in this role.  Matthew’s story here is, as it were, taking the “compromise candidate” for Church leader.  Rather than either of the favorites of the two major parties in the early church, Matthew’s source says it is Peter.  James came to believe in Jesus only after the resurrection, and the Jewish communities he led wanted to turn gentile converts into Jews of one kind or another; Paul became a Christian long after Jesus death, only after an infamous career of persecuting the followers of Jesus and then seemed to go to the polar opposite extreme by insisting that his Gentile converts not observe Jewish Law.  Peter, however, was the one who was personally close to Jesus during his lifetime,  was the leader of the inner circle of the Twelve that spent the most time with Jesus, and was a Jew who came to accept and even embrace the outreach of this originally strange sect of Judaism to non-Jews and non-observers of Jewish Law.

 “You are Rock, and upon this Rock I will build my Church.”  From all the other stories we read in the New Testament, this “Rock” was not all that solid to begin with.  “Rocky” might be a better way of describing his impetuousness, and extremes in devotion followed by extremes in failure.  In Mark’s version of this story, immediately after the confession of Peter, Jesus does not give him the keys to the kingdom, but rather criticizes him for not accepting his prediction of the coming passion and scolds him and says, “Get behind me, Satan!”  (Mark 8:27-30; 31-33).   Elsewhere, we read of Peter’s silly reaction to the marvelous epiphany on the Mount of Transfiguration.  We elsewhere see him walking on water through faith and then, faith faltering,  sinking into the waves.  We see him sleeping through Jesus' prayers at Gethsemane, and then denying Jesus three times during the Passion.  But finally, after Jesus has appeared to the women, Peter is the first male disciple (at that misogynistic time, the first legally acceptable witness) to see the Risen Lord.  One of the earliest fragments of early Christian tradition found in the New Testament is preserved in St. Paul’s formulaic recitation, “For I passed on to you what was first passed on to me, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared, first to Cephas and the Twelve, . . . then to James and the apostles” (1 Cor. 15: 3-7).

So the name “Rock” reminds Simon of who it is that is his rock.  It is this connection that gives authority and power to Simon’s (Peter’s, Rock’s) ministry. “I will give you the keys of the kingdom.”   The image of keys that open irrevocably or close definitively is take from a series of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures and Intertestamental literature.  The idea is that Peter’s actions will be definitive and reflect the will of God (cf. Isa 22:22, 23; Job 12:14; 1 Enoch 1-16).    

“What you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, what you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”  This is a passive construction and euphemism for “What you declare as binding, God will bind.  What you declare as loosened, God will loose.”   So in Matthew’s view, it is Peter’s ruling on the terms and conditions of gentile entry into the Church that take priority over Paul’s or James’, and this because Peter’s rock was God himself, as shown by his early confession of Jesus as Messiah and Son of God.  

The Church built on this Rock, says Jesus, will be able to defeat even the “Gates of Hell.”   The image is a common Old Testament image for death itself (Isa 38:10; Job 38:17;  Psa 9:14;  Wis 16:13).    

But set here in Caesarea Philippi, the reference could also be a image of the Church’s attack on and defeat of the evils of the world, as represented by the Temple of Pan build on the rocky outcrop sitting beside the mouth of the cave containing Pan’s Spring.  Gates were traditionally a symbol of defensive military action, not attack.  So here Peter’s rock-based witness and ministry and the Church founded upon that rock are seen as a vanguard in an effort to reclaim this enemy-occupied territory we call our world.    Based on the Rock of our Salvation, we simply cannot be defeated by the horrors of the world we see before us, including sick religion and death itself.    

All of us, in a way, are like Simon standing with Jesus in Caesarea Philippi.  What we see in front of us is not all there is.  What we see with our eyes and handle with our hands do not tell us who Jesus is, or who we ourselves truly are.  And Jesus is asking us, even today, “Who do people say I am? And who do you say I am?”  He is offering us new names and true identities, the authentic names and selves we were created for but which we have wandered far from.

Faith is trust in unseen truth, and looks beyond the visible, beyond the temptations and distractions around us, beyond the Temple of Pan, the Gates of Hell, and beyond the messed up lives we see about us and which we lead.  It looks even beyond suffering and Death.  If we rely on our Rock, and build upon the firm foundation of Jesus Himself, then our unstable, unsteady selves, our “rocky” selves, will be transformed.  And together, as community in Him as He is in community with the Father, we will be unstoppable in charging up the rocky slope, breaking down the gates of Hell and Death, and changing ourselves and the world.   

In the name of Christ, Amen. 

A Dog Named Hoover (Proper 15A)

 

A Dog named Hoover

14 August 2011

Proper 15A

Beijing, China

Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133  Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

Jesus left Gennesaret and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly. (Matt, 15:21-28; || Mark 7:24-30)

God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of flesh. Amen

I once had a friend who was facing a pretty horrible situation tell me that he did not feel he could pray and ask for God’s intervention or even sustenance because, as he said, “I’m just too rotten a person.  I’m not even sure there is a God, and if there is, I definitely am not the kind of person he would be interested in helping or listening to.” 

The fact that society at large and religions in particular create and define themselves by establishing boundaries can be a real burden to those who find themselves outside of those boundaries.  My friend had a hard time believing in God, and clearly rejected many of the rules and moral strictures he thought were taught by the Church, but curiously had let these seep into his heart and sprout into a sense of guilt and shame that made it hard for him to approach God in prayer. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus encounters a person who by all standards is outside the boundaries of the right and proper—he is traveling near the primarily Gentile territory of what is now Southern Lebanon, and a woman approaches.  Strike One—women were not supposed to directly engage with strangers who were men.  She is a Canaanite.  Matthew’s use of the Old Testament word Canaanite is deliberate, and against the common usage of the period:  she is thus portrayed as an unclean pagan who might be engaging in idolatrous worship possibly involving sexual rites or child sacrifice.  Strike Two.   In Mark’s version of the story, she is a Greek, of mixed Syrian and Phoenician heritage.  A half-breed pagan to boot, coming from the two great oppressors of the Jewish people before the Romans arrived.  Strike Three.  In the telling of the story, she might as well be wearing a bell and calling out before her, unclean, unclean. 

But this gentile woman is worried about her daughter, whose abnormal behavior appears to result from possession by something or someone outside of herself.  The woman has heard that this Jewish wonder-worker Jesus can expel such spirits.  So she approaches and loudly begs him to heal her daughter, using language that is more Jewish than pagan, “O Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me and my daughter.”  The reference is probably to an inter-testamental belief that King Solomon, literally the “Son of David,” could heal the ill and cure such possession.  She has heard that Jesus is perhaps a descendant of David and has some of Solomon’s legendary power to heal. 

Now the way Jesus reacts is quite offensive to us of modern sensibilities.  It was also offensive to ancient sensibilities, and that is the reason that Luke drops this story from those he borrows from Mark’s Gospel. 

Jesus ignores her.  It is almost like he cannot hear her.  

She only gets louder. 

In the Creed, we say that we believe that God became incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became truly human in the person of Jesus.  But we usually don’t like to see Jesus as quite this human.  Here he seems to be cold and unfeeling. As she gets louder, he ignores her all the more.  

His reaction is strange, given the fact that he has already in this Gospel healed a gentile in gentile territory,  that the verses preceding this story tell of Jesus breaking down barriers of clean and unclean in Jewish Law, and that the gist of many of his parables seems to be the overflowing abundance of God's goodness and grace.  But he remains silent. 

When the disciples just can’t bear the commotion any longer and ask Jesus to break his silence and just send the woman away, his reply is that is he is focused on his work in calling his fellow Jews to change their hearts and ways, and can’t take the time for this woman.  She begs him directly, “Lord, help me.” 

His reply here is no longer simply cold and unfeeling: “I can’t take food set aside for the children and throw it away for dogs to eat.”  The slur implied by the word dogs, seems downright racist and rooted in religious bigotry.  

Christians have tried to explain away the slur, or take it off of Jesus’ lips ever since:  As I said before, Luke simply deletes the story and does not include it in his Gospel.  Some of the Church Fathers say that Jesus was simply testing the woman’s faith by using the slur ironically to see if she would persist (as if this makes the slur all that less offensive!)  Others have tried to take the sting out of the phrase by noting that the Greek word used in the text is a diminutive kynarios “little dog,” instead of the more common kynos “dog.”   So Jesus presumably would be saying,  “It’s wrong to take babies’ food and give it to puppies.”   But again, I don’t think this necessarily makes the slur less offensive.  

Again, Jesus' talk here about the economy of divine blessing almost as if it were a zero sum game is strange.  In his previous feeding of the crowd (including children), there was a ridiculous overabundance of leftovers.  But the point appears to be that Jesus is so focused on his mission to fellow Jews that he cannot hear the woman.  Matthew, with his concern for keeping Jewish Law and portraying Jesus as the new Moses, does not appear to notice the ugliness of the scene as it unfolds.  

My friend, with his fear to pray to God because he was somehow unworthy, or beyond the bounds of grace, would feel right at home with this portrayal of a Jesus wholly consumed by boundaries and limits. 

But the Canaanite woman persists. She takes Jesus’ harsh word and turns it on its head with a bit of wit and chutzpah:  “Oh, but dogs under the table can eat the crumbs that fall, can’t they?”  It is as if he had said, "this food is too good for you, you dogs," and she had replied, "So I'm a dog.  Don't call me Rover, call me Hoover.  'Cuz I can hoover up all those scraps just as they fall from your table!"   This kind of “battle of the wits” exchange is seen in Middle Eastern and Arab literature regularly, and is akin to the Rap world’s commonplace of a contest of insult and replying insult (“Yo’ momma is so fat that…..” “Oh yeah?  Well yo’ momma…”)

Jesus’ reply is amazing.  “Great is your faith, woman!”  The rhetoric and word order stresses GREAT.  “You are a GIANT in faith, lady.  Finally, I find someone who gets it, and surprise, surprise, she’s a gentile!  She’s a Canaanite! She’s a she!”

The exorcism is performed at a distance, almost by divine remote control, just like in the two other stories of  Jesus healing at a distance, the healing of the centurion’s servant (Matt. 8:5-13) and of the royal official’s son (John 4:46-54).   Note in all cases, the healing at a distance is done for people seen as beyond the pale.  These are stories about the far reach of Jesus’ grace, not about the worthiness or lack thereof of the recipients. 

Reading this story as if the Canaanite woman is a model of faith for us to follow misses the point:  this is not a story trying to say that if only your faith were great enough, God will hear your prayers and grant you your wishes.  Faith here is not a magic trick.   In such magical thinking lies only pain—because when bad things happen to people, whether they are good people or bad people, this way of thinking chalks it up as the fault of those who did not get their way with God.  And if good things happen, then it is the result of the successful use of the trick.  Such a view reduces the Lord’s Book of Blessings to simply a Book of Spells.  

Put bluntly, this story isn’t about you, and about whether you are worthy or faithful enough for God’s blessings.  The focus of the story is Jesus, not the woman.   In this scene, Jesus, who loves  a good joke and regularly tells parables with brutally witty edges, is bested in a contest of wit by the wise-cracking woman who is desperate for her child’s health.  She takes the callous slur Jesus has unthinkingly adopted from his upbringing and how he has been taught about what is right, and turns it on its head.  Jesus in response, instead of glowering and shouting  “BLASHPEMY, OFF WITH YOU, PAGAN WOMAN!” and blasting her right then and there, he laughs out loud, sees he has been had, and recognizes the faith, the trust, in the woman’s heart that drives her persistence and audacity. 

And so he turns back from—repents, as it were—of the casual callousness that his focus on his mission and on the boundaries his religion has set.  To be sure, we believe that Jesus was like us in all things but sin.  He is not so much turning from sin here as he is opening himself further to the unexplored country to which God is leading him.  This scene anticipates the great shift in the Christian faith from mission only to Jews to mission to all.  It anticipates the great vision of St. Paul where “In Christ, there is no Jew nor Gentile, no slave nor free, no woman nor man.”

To me it is very comforting to think that Jesus could be shamed by a joke into changing his view and learn thereby to spread God’s grace more widely than he previously had thought appropriate. 

To me it is very comforting to think that a Canaanite half-breed pushy woman talking out of turn and beyond the bounds of propriety could get the best of Jesus and as a result Jesus would bless her simply because of who and what he was, and would bless her despite, not because of, who and what she was. 

None of us should feel like my friend, afraid and ashamed to approach God when we need God.  Maybe a little bit of pushy persistence on our part is in order, a bit more witty and humorous audacity.    The woman was desperate and willing to go all out on the off chance that what she heard about Jesus as a healer was true.  When God appears forbidding and unwelcoming to us, that is precisely the time we need to remember the words of the prayer, “O God, whose nature is always to have mercy” and that, despite whatever it may be we think separates us from his grace.  That is precisely the time that we, like this Canaanite woman, this dog named Hoover, need to focus on the Mercy of God rather than on the boundaries that exclude us, or what people say about God's judgment. 

In the name of God, Amen