The Canaanite Woman, from the Très Riches Heurers
du Duc de Berry. The Conde Museum, Chantilly.
A Dog named Hoover
9 September 2018
Proper 18B
Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church
Ashland, Oregon
9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
God, take away our hearts of stone, and give us hearts of
flesh. Amen
In today’s Gospel, Jesus is
traveling in the primarily Gentile territory.
A local woman enters and asks him for help. This is a violation of
propriety: in that society women were
not supposed to directly engage with strangers who were men. In Matthew’s
telling of this story, she is labelled with the anachronistic Old Testament word
Canaanite: an unclean and idolatrous pagan. In Mark, she is a called a Greek,
of mixed Syrian and Phoenician stock: a New Testament
contemporary way of identifying a mixed-heritage pagan, coming from the two
great oppressors of the Jewish people from before the Romans arrived.
This gentile woman is worried about
her daughter, whose abnormal behavior appears to result from possession by
something 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. 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.”
In Matthew, Jesus ignores her. It is almost like he cannot hear her. She only gets louder. 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 bigoted.
Christians have tried to explain
away the slur 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. 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 in either case, the slur remains a slur,
and stays offensive.
Jesus' talk here about divine
blessing as a zero sum game is strange. In his previous feeding of the
5,000, there was a ridiculous overabundance of leftovers. Jesus’ parables
talk about the crazy profligacy of God’s grace.
But the pagan 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?” Jesus says here: “this food is too good for you, you dogs,”
and she replies, “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 your table!”
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 pagan!
She’s a she!”
The exorcism is performed at a
distance, 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 the story as if Jesus is a
bigot and the woman an activist who shakes up Jesus’ world so that he becomes
WOKE is a misreading. The tribalism and
sectarianism at work in this story is a classic case of a conflict of basic
moral imperatives: the call to special
benevolence to those who share your family, religious, and national ties and
the call for general benevolence to all people. Jesus turns away here not so
much from falling short of the mark or a rebellion against God (a “sin”), but
from a misapplying of right principles to the harm of a very real human being
right in front of him. When she says
she’s a dog named Hoover, he reframes things and realizes that despite his
upbringing, this woman too is part of his tribe, the human family.
Reading this story as if the
Syro-Phoenician woman is a model 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 turns it on its head.
Jesus in response 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, as the Tractate to the
Hebrews teaches, 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
of Jesus here listening to the outsider and actually changing his mind. Her wit and snappy response makes him laugh,
and his mind opens. He sees that it is
not a zero sum, and that all his stories about a profligate loving God actually
mean something. God’s grace is wider 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 by showing him how similar they
were and as a result Jesus would bless her.
None of us should afraid and ashamed
to approach God when we feel the need for 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 we think may separate us from his
grace. That is precisely the time that we, like this woman, this dog
named Hoover, need to focus on the love and compassion 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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