"Air quote" Jesus
17 August 2014
Proper 15A
Parish Church of Trinity Ashland
(Oregon)
Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133; Romans
11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28 (|| Mark 7:24-30)
God, take away our hearts of stone, and
give us hearts of flesh. Amen
Today’s
Gospel bothers me. It should bother
you. Did you hear Jesus being so
hard-hearted, so stingy with God’s blessings to that foreign woman? Did you notice that Jesus threw her a racial
slur? “Heal your daughter? I’m sorry,
but my calling is to go to children of Israel only, not foreigners like
you. It’s just wrong to take the food
for the children and throw it to dogs.”
The
way Jesus reacts is quite offensive to us of modern sensibilities. But it
was also offensive to ancients: Luke dropped this story from those he borrows
from Mark’s Gospel. And Mark and Matthew both seem to want to soften the
harshness of the saying by putting the Greek word for “little dogs” or
“puppies” on Jesus’ lips, rather than the more common word for “dogs,” which would
have been the usage in Jesus’ native Aramaic.
Even thus softened, however, the saying remains a slur, harshly
excluding the woman and her daughter from God’s grace.
Scholars
both ancient and modern try to soften the slur by suggesting that Jesus meant
it ironically. In modern tellings, he
would have put “air quotes” around the phrase:
“It is wrong to take the children’s food and give it to the ‘dogs.’”
Maybe,
but there’s no way of telling since there was no punctuation to help us
determine what was meant. Besides,
such irony still would be very harsh.
White people are well advised:
the N word used ironically by an African American is one thing, but
something entirely different on the lips of a European American.
Jesus’
reaction here 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. Again, Jesus' talk here about God’s blessings
almost as if they were a zero sum game is strange. In his previous
feeding of the crowd (including children), there was a ridiculous overabundance
of leftovers. But here Jesus is so focused on his mission to fellow Jews
that he cannot hear the woman. Jesus, ever true to his calling of
feeding the lost children of Israel, feels he has to limit the scope of his
work, be stingy with grace.
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. It’s almost as if the bigot before us in
the story can only ironically be
called “Jesus.”
The
doctrine of the incarnation as defined by the early church is clear: Jesus was fully human and fully divine. In his person, the Love that lies behind and
under all things is most perfectly seen and made known. But he remains one of us, a human being. Two complete natures united mysteriously in
one person. The tradition of mixing a
little water into the Eucharistic wine before the prayer of consecration from
earliest times has always been taken as a symbol of this: those two natures were complete and separate,
yet once mixed, cannot be separated.
That’s why the early church and the Mainstream of the Church ever after
has said it is right and fitting to call the mother of our Lord not only the Christ Bearer, but also the God Bearer, the Theotokos, the Mother of
God. You can’t separate the divine from
the human in Jesus, just as you can’t say he was a 50-50 hybrid: no—he’s 100% God, 100% human being, united and
inseparable.
Confusion
on the subject is understandable. God
and human being are two opposite poles: God is being itself, perfect,
unchanging, all knowing, all able, ever the same. Human
is imperfect, growing, changing, learning, forgetting. Various Christians from the beginning have
erred in understanding Christ by stressing too much one nature at the expense
of the other. The Proto-Evangelium of
James, for instance, has a baby Jesus, just weeks from birth, giving long
sermons, working miracles, and even blasting naughty playground mates with
lightning: too divine, not human. Some today seem to believe that the virginal
conception of Jesus in Mary’s womb is a doctrine about the absence of a human father more than it is about the presence of a unique relationship
between Jesus and God: too much God, not
enough human. Arius argued that Jesus,
fully one of us, later became the Son
of God at his baptism: too human, not divine.
That’s why the Creed responds and says that the Son was eternally
begotten of the Father from before all time.
The
classic way of talking about this is that Christ was human in all things except in sin. This makes sense when you understand that
sin is something that alienates us from God.
How could God made flesh alienate himself from himself? But sin is also something that alienates us
from others. And Jesus most definitely
alienated those about him. His own kin
accused him of neglecting his family duties; his religious opponents said he
was a blasphemer.
The
problem of course, is that our conceptions of right and wrong, righteous and
wicked, are social constructions. And
over the centuries, we human beings have been able to learn and improve our
moralities, even if we haven’t followed them.
Jesus in this story is most definitely following the morality of his
age. In that sense, he is human in the
best sense of the word.
But
Jesus did not limit himself to the moralities passed on to him. In this story, he listens to the woman, who
persists in her request despite Jesus’ initial reluctance. And by listening her, he recognizes
something amiss in how society has formed him as a human being.
It
is this very trait of Jesus—his transparency to the presence of God, his
willingness to learn and to change—that is the hallmark of his divinity. The letter to the Philippians calls this kenosis:
the Son’s emptying himself so that he can be filled with the
Father. Christ shows us the face of God
because of his openness to reimagine the world, to re-look at things, in the
light of the basic truths he had come to learn, truths like how God was a God
of welcome, not rejection; of abundance, not scarcity; of all peoples, not just
the Jews.
This
story says that Jesus can learn! He accepts the human dilemma of not knowing
everything and possibly getting something fundamental just plain wrong because
of our heritage and formation. And it is
because he is so open to learning and the unexpected grace of God that he
actually shows us God in human form. Like
the water and wine, his humanity and divinity are united, mixed and impossible
to separate! It is in how he handles his
humanity that his divinity most sharply revealed.
The
foreign woman for her part also accepts her own and Jesus’ humanity. She has heard Jesus teach and seen him
heal. She wants what he has. And when he tries to exclude her with a
racial slur from the tradition that has formed him as a person, she accepts it,
not losing sight of the fact that she wants what Jesus has, even though he is not
offering it to her. “Sure, I may be a
dog, but those dogs sure can eat the crumbs and lick the floor clean, can’t
they?”
Jesus
is overwhelmed by her nerve, admits his own deficiency, and calls her reaction
“faith.” She is showing the same openness
to grace that he is showing. She is
accepting the unfortunate facts of life as well, not letting them force her to
close her heart and stomp off offended at our “air quote” Jesus. So he heals the daughter.
Jesus
turns back from—repents, as it were—the casual callousness that his focus on
mission and its boundaries that his religion has set. He is not so much turning from an act of his
that alienates him from God as he is opening himself further to the unexplored
country to which God is leading him, and to which God is leading the
woman. This scene embodies another
land, where, as St. Paul says, “In
Christ, there is no Jew nor Gentile, no slave nor free, no woman nor man.”
Sisters
and brothers: we are far too hard on
ourselves. We are far too hard on
others. We tend to focus on failings and
make this close our hearts where we need to open them. We like to think of things in binaries, polar
opposites: good or bad, sinner or saint,
appropriate or inappropriate, politically correct or incorrect, citizen or
alien, God or human. And we use these
polar opposites to judge, to whip into shape, and to exclude. Sometimes our best values and our religion
tell us to do so. We are far too hard on ourselves and others.
But
Jesus leads on a less obvious path, one where the love of God, the first given
of the universe, leads us to strange and new places. In recognizing ourselves
as God’s own beloved ones, we admit freely our own failings, disabilities, and
strength, as well as those of others.
And we turn it all over to God. The
key is closing our mouths and opening our minds; listening, really listening.
This
week I welcome each of us to that unexplored country. I invite each of us to find one way to be make
things easier on ourselves and one way to make them easier on someone else. Listening, really listening to others will help
us find a good way to do this.
In
the name of Christ, Amen
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