The Canaanite Woman, painting by Michael Cook
A Dog named Hoover
20 August 2023; 9:00 am Sung Mass
Proper 15A
The Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass OR
The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133 Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
I once had a friend in trouble tell me that he did not feel he could pray and
ask for God’s help 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 God would be interested in helping.”
Society at large and religions in particular create and define themselves by establishing boundaries—the believer vs unbeliever, righteous vs the wicked. This can be a real burden when we find ourselves outside of those boundaries.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus encounters a person who by all standards is outside the boundaries—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 pagan, in Matthew anachronistically called a Canaanite, that Old Testament people seen as the Israelites’ ultimate enemies, unclean pagans engaging in immoral idolatrous worship. 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.
She might as well be wearing a bell and calling out before her, unclean, unclean.
But this woman is worried about her daughter, afflicted with mental illness, thought to be the work of evil spirits. She has heard that this Jewish wonder-worker Jesus can expel such demons. So she rushes up 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 cure bodily or mental ills. 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 Matthew’s 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.
When the disciples just can’t bear it any longer and ask Jesus to break his silence and just send the woman away, his reply is “I am focused on my work in calling my fellow Jews to change their hearts and ways; I 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, it’s downright nasty: “I can’t take food set aside for the children and throw it away for you dogs to eat.” The slur implied by the word dogs, seems downright bigoted.
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 putting “air quotes” around the slur makes it any 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 “doggie,” instead of the more common kynos “dog.” But this just means dogs trained or used by people, still loathed and seen as unclean, instead of vicious and mangy wild or feral ones. It does not make 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 of praying to a God who supposedly judges him unworthy and beyond the bounds of grace, would see someone familiar, I think, in this portrayal of an unfeeling Jesus wholly consumed by boundaries and limits.
But the 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 dogs," and she had replied, "Meh! So I'm a dog. But don't call me Rover, call me Hoover. 'Cuz I can hoover up all those scraps just as they fall from that high and mighty table of yours!" 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. I’ve never seen such trust! Finally, I find someone who gets it, and surprise, surprise, she’s a pagan! 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 or male lover (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 who don’t think their worthy to have Jesus come under their roofs. “But speak the word only and my soul shall be healed.” These stories about how far Jesus’ grace reaches, not about how unworthy the recipients supposedly are.
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 wits by a wise-cracking woman desperate for her child’s health. She takes the callous slur Jesus has unthinkingly adopted from the society around him, 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 of, as it were—the casual callousness that his previous focus on mission boundaries had 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 because of, not despite, 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 when we must learn to ignore a nasty, forbidding Jesus, whether he is using air quotes or not. That is precisely the time that we, like this Canaanite woman, this dog named Hoover, need to focus on the Mercy of God in Jesus rather than boundaries and rules or what people say about God's judgment.
In the name of God, Amen
