A Dog named Hoover
9 September 2012
Proper 18B
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
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 in the primarily Gentile territory of what is now
Southern Lebanon. In keeping with Mark’s
Gospel’s Messianic Secret—the idea that Jesus deliberately kept things on a low
key until after his resurrection—he is incognito in a a house. But a local woman enters and asks him for
help. Strike One—women were not supposed to directly engage with
strangers who were men. In Matthew’s telling of this story, she is a Canaanite.
This 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. She begs Jesus to cast
out the demon.
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.
In Matthew, Jesus ignores her. It is almost like he cannot hear her.
She only gets louder.
In Matthew, 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 is traveling in what is primarily Gentile country. The verses preceding this story, which we
read last week, tell of Jesus breaking down barriers of clean and unclean in
Jewish Law. 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 and Mark both do 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 in Matthew 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. In the next story in
Mark, read today, Jesus proceeds into the Decapolis, also gentile territory,
and there heals a deaf man. No longer
does he seem exclusively focused on Jews.
Reading this story as if the
Syro-Phoenician 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 unclean foreign 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
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