Fire and Salt (Proper 21B)

 

Fire and Salt 

29 September 2024

Proper 21B

Homily preached at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church

Grants Pass, Oregon

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, Ph.D, SCP 

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass 

Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50

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

Yikes!  “Hack off your foot, poke out your eye, chop off your hand—if any of these cause you to stumble!”  How in the world to preach this saying of Jesus?  It is not only harsh—insanely so!—but doesn’t even make sense.  The imagery here is deliberately grotesque: If your hand makes your feet stumble, maybe you should walk upright or lift your arms, not cut off the hand!.  Of course, stumble here is simply a metaphor for moral failing, for sin.    But even as a metaphor, this is one of most macabre “hard sayings” of Jesus.   The image is so grotesque that Matthew (18:8-9), who normally follows Mark when he uses his material, reduces Mark's seven verses to two, while gentle Saint Luke omits it altogether (17:1-4).

 

Taken literally, this saying actually led third century Church father Origen to cut off body parts that had gotten in the way of his efforts at chastity.  As a result, Origen—one of the age’s best preachers and scholars of scripture—was never named a saint or a doctor of the Church. In fact, one of the first canons of the Council of Nicaea was to ban such self-mutilators from the priesthood. 

 

The saying thus is not an announcement of divine law, but a vivid and sarcastic reply to the disciples’ complaint that starts the reading: “Jesus, look at that guy there!  He is not one of us, but he uses your name to heal people. He is ruining our brand, infringing on our trademark! We told him to stop but he won’t. You make him stop. Punish him!” 

 

They have just failed to drive out an evil spirit from a boy afflicted since childhood (Mark 9: 14-28), but this interloper seems to be succeeding just fine.  Jesus replies, “Don't stop him. Just using my name might bring him closer to the kingdom. Whoever is not against us is for us.” 

 

Clearly, not all of Jesus’ followers agreed.  The oral tradition turned the saying into its opposite “whoever is not with me is against me,” and this twisted Q form of the saying shows up in both Matthew (12:30) and Luke (Luke 9:49-50; but cf. 11:23). 

 

The historical Jesus was more welcoming and inclusive, less controlling and hierarchical than his followers.   I just saw a great Brazilian movie about a religious man falling in love with a younger man who tries to save himself and his friend both by telling him how much Jesus hates same-sex love.  “Don’t you believe in God?” he asks his friend.  The young man replies, “I do.  But I think God isn’t an uptight nasty piece of work.  I think he’s like my mother, and is pretty chill about stuff.”  “Pretty chill.”  I think that’s what the Bible is trying to say when it says “God is slow to anger and of great patience.”   “Pretty chill.”  That describes Jesus too, except for when he faces the one thing he can’t abide:  using religion and God to abuse people, especially the vulnerable,  

 

“Punish that competitor!” the disciples say. Jesus replies the strange exorcist is actually on their team!  Even a simple kindness like giving someone a sip of water advances the kingdom. And petty nastiness, sticking out your leg to trip up any of Jesus’ “little ones” can lead to worse things than being drowned in the ocean.  This is a warning to keep Jesus’ own over-zealous followers from running roughshod over people like the unnamed healer. 

 

My son Charlie, when he was in 8th grade and suffering all the slights and insults an insular and clique-ridden group of American middle schoolers could dish out to a stranger who had grown up in China and Africa, hung a poster in his room given to him by an older sibling.  It declared, simply, “Mean People Suck.”  

 

That’s what Jesus is saying here.  “Mean people suck.  Especially when they’re mean in my name.  That strange healer is one of my little ones whether you like it or not, whether he recognizes it or not.  And doing harm to him is worse than being drowned in the ocean.  You want me to stop him, to control him, cut him off?  Wellif it’s cutting off you want, you should start cutting off your own body parts.”  Elsewhere he says it less gruesomely, but still in vivid, grotesque imagery:  “If you see a speck in someone’s eye, don’t try to remove it until you have removed the log stuck into your own eye!”   If you want to give someone hellfire and punishment, think about what you just might be attracting for yourself by being mean!”  “Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.”  

 

Jesus concludes, “Everyone will be salted with fire.”  The two great means in the ancient world of purification and preservation, salt and fire, are going to be the lot of us all.  How to be saved from suffering in that fire or drying up by that salt? You yourself must be salt for the world, leaven for the loaf, light in darkness. “Have salt in yourselves, by being at peace with one another.” 

 

He is saying,  We need to live in peace with each other, and not constantly go about seeking the punishment or correction of others.  Purification is a serious business, getting rid of faults is too. The only way we can do it without being destroyed by it is by gently caring for others.  Be a light, not a judge. 

 

For Jesus, God is not a mere tribal deity, not a petty partisan. God blesses both the righteous and the wicked by making the sun rise on both and sending the clouds to rain on both (Matt. 5:45). He is Israel’s God, to be sure, but only so that Israel can be a city on a hill, a light on a candlestick, salt to give flavor to and preserve the world (Matt. 5:14-16).  God is not just for Jews, not just for the “righteous,” not just for Jesus’ authorized franchise-holders, but for all.   Because we are all in God’s hand, we must embrace the tensions implicit in diversity.

That ultimately is what the parable of the wheat and the weeds is all about—don’t worry about which plants are good or bad, because if you pull up the bad you’ll surely kill good ones as well. Wait until the harvest comes, and God will sort it out (Matt. 13: 24-30).  

 

It is also what today’s Hebrew scripture is about:  Moses’ deputies come to him and ask him to silence the two commoners prophesying in the camp.  They do not know that the two were part of the 70 chosen to have God’s spirit but who failed to show up to meeting.  “Silence them?” replies Moses, “Oh I wish that all of the people were prophets like these two!”  

 

Jesus urges solidarity among all God’s creatures. That’s why even unbelievers’ offers of glasses of water build the Kingdom. That’s why Jesus here says the strange exorcist is one of his own “little ones” in need of protection from being tripped up.  

 

Living peace doesn’t mean making nice, papering over evil, or thickening our conscience with an amoral detachment. Ask any marriage or family counselor, any labor mediator, or any mediator or negotiator in international or inter-ethnic conflict. They’ll all tell you that truly seeking peace is not easy, and not harmonious. It is not a hold hands and sing kumbaya, a false “let’s all just try to get along.”  It is about honestly addressing real problems.  It is about doing so in a spirit of shared endeavor, of mutual effort to let shared desires and aspirations force us to listen carefully to the other party.

I think one of the reasons that the current Bishop of Rome holds so powerful a grip on our imaginations, why he speaks to many who have not listened to anything from a Pope in decades, is this:  Francis is a gentle soul, who leads by example.  His words have special power because he tries to model them in his life.  He is careful not to assault or berate those who may have differing views.   I think he would understand Charlie’s poster: “Mean people suck.”   So would the four Americans he regularly holds up as the leading spiritual lights of the American Experience:  Lincoln, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King Jr.  All were stalwart lights who did not shy away from honest difference and controversy in proclaiming the truth, but all were careful to not condemn and demonize others, even those who persecuted them.  They too, lived as examples of their message of peace.  They were unexpected prophets running within the camp, strange off-brand exorcists healing people all the same.     

 

Jesus calls us to be good yeast leavening, bright fires enlightening, and tasty salt enriching and preserving, the world.  He calls us to be prophets running through the camp alight with the flame of God’s word.  He does not call us to demonize, exclude, judge, or ostracize. 

God alone will bring this world right. We all will be purified and healed, rubbed through and through with God’s salt. We all will be put through God’s fire. I firmly believe that—all of God’s creatures will one day fulfill the measure of their creation.  And because of this, we must live humbly and simply, praying for each other, including our enemies, and seek to help each other, work for justice, and live in peace. 

 

In the name of God, Amen

Superpowers Jesus (Proper 19B)

 

Superpowers Jesus? 

15 September 2024

Proper 19B

Homily preached at the Mission Church of the Holy Spirit

Sutherlin, Oregon

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Psalm 19; James 3:1-12; Mark 8:27-38

 

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

A clip from the British television series Outnumbered went viral a few years ago (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYjfDvg1WgE).  In it, a young boy and his sister ask a priest uncomfortable questions about Jesus:  “When King Herod was trying to kill Baby Jesus, why didn’t Baby Jesus zap him?”  …  Because Herod was an insignificant little speck to Jesus, and Jesus could have squished him with a hippopotamus or something.”  Little sister replies, “Jesus wouldn’t do that, he was meek and mild.  Beside, he knew all he had to do was wait until Herod was in Hell, where he could roast forever until his eyeballs exploded.”    Brother resumes:  “When Jesus was a bit older and the Romans were searching for him, why didn’t Jesus shape shift and become a Roman soldier and wait until they fell asleep and then stab them all to death?”  The priest finds his voice, “Jesus wasn’t a Power Ranger.  God sent Jesus to sacrifice him for our sake.”  “Well, wasn’t that a bit selfish of us?” the boy answers.  Sister adds: “Why couldn’t God have done it a bit differently, like writing everyone a letter and asking them to be a bit better or something bad might happen?”   Big brother: “When Jesus was being crucified, why didn’t he ask God to send a meteorite down and kill all the Roman troops and let him off the cross?”  Priest: “God sacrificed Jesus for us because he was the most precious thing for him.”  Little sister: “So why then did he kill him?” 

 

We often, like these annoying children, mistakenly think that Jesus should have superpowers. 

 

There are plenty of stories in the Bible that might lead us to this conclusion—Jesus healing the sick, raising the dead, walking on water, turning water into wine, “torching on” at the Transfiguration and finally, flying up into heaven like Superman at the Ascension. 

 

But as we have seen again and again in the last weeks, many of the stories about the marvelous deeds of Jesus in the Gospels are told as ways of hinting, from a post-Easter perspective, at who Jesus really is and how he interacts with each of us.  Biblical scholars of all backgrounds agree that the historical Jesus was a faith healer of great renown put to death by the Romans with the punishment they reserved for insurrectionists.  Beyond that, opinions vary.  What is sure is that these stories of wondrous deeds should not be read as if they were in comics of the X-men, Captain America, or Superman variety. 

 

Belief in Jesus as a super-hero is belief in an idol.  That’s what today’s Gospel reading is all about.  

 

Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah, the Christ.   That means he is the ideal King or Priest of the future promised in the Hebrew scriptures.  This promised Anointed One was to set things right, vindicate the right and punish the wrong, set up God’s kingdom here.  Many believed he would be a military figure who would liberate the nation, and establish a new Davidic monarchy.  Some expected a prophet or priest with wondrous powers to heal the sick, feed the people, and confound the enemy.

 

The bottom line?  They wanted a Messiah who would fix this broken world in an obvious, clear way that they expected, one that sounds suspiciously like super-powers, maybe not shape-shifting or X-ray vision, but at least the ability to zap enemies.

 

Peter’s experience of Jesus and his healings leads him to confess that he is the Messiah.  But Jesus quickly tells him that what he expects of this hoped-for future King of Israel is all wrong: he uses a common Aramaic expression to refer to oneself in s self deprecating manner:  “this human child you see before you” (literally, the son of man) is going to die at the hands of the elites. 

Christians after Jesus’s death, including the writer of the Gospel of Mark, would look back on Jesus’ life and words and understand them in light of Good Friday and Easter.    His use of  “Son of Man” came to be linked with a mysterious salvific figure in Daniel 7, seen in the distance coming in clouds of glory looking something like “a human being” (a son of man) who receives kingly dominion over all nations and then destroys the evil kingdoms ruled by “beasts” or wild animals. 

 

They understand Jesus as saying this figure, which they see as the “Messiah” will suffer, suggesting the “Suffering Servant” of Second Isaiah, a figure representing God’s people and their sufferings in history, and never linked to the Messiah there.  Second Isaiah sees the nation’s suffering as not in vain, but rather as a witness to help bring people of all nations to knowledge of the true God, a suffering that is for the benefit of others because it brings the possibility of God’s peace and grace to all.

In today’s story, this linking of the idea of the Messiah and a suffering servant upsets Peter. Jesus is saying “Put away any hope that I am somehow—magically, militarily, or otherwise—going to make the hated Roman oppressors go away, or somehow win over the powerful elites in Jerusalem.”   These elites, after all, were in bed with Romans exploiting the very people Jesus has been healing and to whom he has been preaching the arrival of God’s kingdom.  “God wants me to go to Jerusalem to confront the powerful. Those powerful people will reject my message. If I go on preaching my message and go to Jerusalem, I will have to suffer and be killed. No superpowers are going to save me from that.  But despite this I still trust in God.  And then he quotes a poetic expression of hope in God from the book of Hosea, “[the Lord] has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence” (6:1-2).

Peter just cannot believe what he has just heard. “God blesses the righteous and punishes the wicked,” he thinks. “Don’t be so negative. Where’s your faith, Jesus?” he says. “How can this be the kingdom of God when evil triumphs by killing you?” he says, “Going with the Messiah means going with the winner.  Be a winner, not a loser.  Use your superpowers.” 

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

 

Then, as if to underscore the point that it is Rome that is the Super Power, Jesus summons the crowd and announces, “Whoever wishes to come after me must dis own themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.”  This refers to the fact that prisoners who were to be executed by crucifixion had to carry the crossbeam to the place of execution. So 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 here is not praising suffering for suffering’s sake, and extolling the virtues of a stoic victim-hood.  Sometimes this wrong idea is actually used to encourage passivity and enabling behavior by the abused or the oppressed.

 

Similarly, Jesus is not here simply predicting in full knowledge of Good Friday and Easter what was going to happen to him.

 

Orthodox Christology is that Jesus is wholly God and wholly man, and that he suffered like us in all ways save for sin. That for me means that He shared our unknowing fear of the future.  It took Good Friday and Easter and then a great deal of reflection and further experience for Jesus’ followers to understand and see the ultimate significance in the words “Son of Man,” “I will be killed,” “take up your cross and follow me” and “after three days God will raise me up.”

 

What Jesus here is calling for is this: those who wish to follow him should actually follow him.   Follow God’s call and empty yourself.  Let go, and let God.  Work for God’s kingdom, announce the liberation of the captive, help the sick and the downtrodden—and do this even when you know it may not do any good.  Do it even if it may ruin you or kill you.  Take up your cross and follow him.   Don’t try to be a superhero or expect a super-hero to help you.  Be willing to put your head in that hangman’s noose.  Follow Jesus.  Empty yourself.

Superheroes use force and flash, shock and awe.  A person carrying his cross loves, simply loves.  Superheroes struggle for outcomes and results.  A cross-carrier simply does the next right thing God puts in front of her, and does not worry about outcomes.  Superheroes work in zero sums. A crucifer trusts that death is not the end, and that in the end all will be well.  If all is not well, then it is not yet the end. 

 

It is a matter of trust. Belief in God is not just intellectual assent to the idea that “God exists.” It is confidence in God’s love and goodness, and in God’s ability to finally bring things aright. This is not a naive and silly “everything is gonna be OK.” Nor is it “God will zap my enemies and magically make my problems go away.”

Jesus was no superhero, and did not expect the Father to be one.  He accepted and embraced his humanity, and calls us to do the same.  Acceptance is only possible because of trust.  He asks us to trust God even when God calls us to stick our heads in a noose. 

May we all learn acceptance, and trust in God.  In bearing our cross, may we get up off our knees, stop our worship at the idolatrous altar of superheroes and superpowers, and follow Him whose love beacons to us all to follow.  

In His name, Amen.

 

Nine-Eleven 23 Years On (reflection)

 

I want to tell you today a story when my family and I felt God’s love, felt that God was caring for us. But note that without sticking to a Sgt. Joe Friday-like “just the facts ma’am” attitude, there is always a risk that as you tell such a story you may say truly hurtful things about other people, people who may not have experienced a sense of God caring for them.  My story took place 24 years ago today, when terrorists used airplanes as bombs to attack U.S., killing about 3,000 people and injuring more than 6,000.   

 

In 2001, I was working at the Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland.   I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three weeks to prepare for and carry out a program.  At that time, Narita Airport in Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place to spend more than 1 hour on transit. I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an early morning flight on September 11 out of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul. 

 

About a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my dear wife Elena about—what else?—money and family finances.  We had two kids in college with one starting the next year, and it was a sore topic. The argument was so heated that Elena stopped talking to me. 

 

Knowing that my schedule required me to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife.  And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not on speaking terms. 

 

So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so Elena and I could have breakfast together before I left.   

 

The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul.  The morning of my flight, we got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast together.  We started to talk again and were ready for me to go off for 3 weeks. 

 

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12:00 noon flight from Reagan.  We headed down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C. 

 

Twenty minutes later, as we emerged from the park onto the broad bottom-lands of the Potomac near the Kennedy Center and Georgetown, my Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river, in Arlington.  It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that couldn’t be!   There were lots of sirens too. 

 

Just as we took the turn onto the 14^th Street Bridge across the Potomac, a Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as they shut down all traffic across the bridges.   

 

“Please officer, can you let us get over?  One last car? Otherwise, I’ll be late for my flight at Reagan.” 

 

“You won’t be flying anywhere today.  The FAA just shut down all air traffic in the continental U.S.  Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the nation is under attack.  The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just minutes ago.” 

 

I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated, told the driver to take me back to my home.   It took 20 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back.  Cell phones were not working.  The traffic of the city had quickly slowed to full gridlock in the entire DC downtown center. 

 

Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details started coming out.  I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me time for breakfast with my wife. 

It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into the Pentagon. 

 

Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with the love of my life, I would have been on that plane. 

 

When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be alive.

 Our son Charlie hugged us as well.  He already knew then that the father of one of his best friends at high school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing.  His remains were never found. 

 

So what is my take-away from this story?  How does it relate to the love of God? 

The easy meaning is that God looked after me and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me from dying that day).  There are many, many examples in scripture where God turns bad things into good. 

 

But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were not saved from taking that flight.  I think I heard once that the wife of Ted Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last minute.  She died on the flight together with everyone else. 

 

A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many additional years of sweet, wonderful life.  God gives us way more than we deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come.    But again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared. 

 

I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for intervening and keeping me from harm that day.  Because despite the apparent randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me and still feels to me like God was looking out over me and my family that day.  

 

But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn deeply those not spared, and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists.  I would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died didn’t deserve to be saved. 

 

I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the random victims of terrorism or even natural disasters, or in the great amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all.  I still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father. 

Remember: Jesus ended up on a cross.  This does not prove that his faith and hope were empty wishes.  The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be the norm of human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have never yet seen. 

 

I feel that each day in my life in the last 23 years has been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God.  The most important work I did at State Department came after the attacks.  My calling as a priest came about 5 years after them.  Shortly after that, came the blessing of 10 years of helping Elena as her principal caregiver as she faced the aggressive Parkinson's disease that eventually killed her, and of 10 years of my calling as a full-time parish priest at Trinity Ashland.  Then came the blessing of finding myself and recovering from the grief of losing spouse and parish ministry: I started singing in high end choirs, learning how to feel things again, started dating again (this time, men, given what I had learned about myself over the years).  And in June I married a new love of my life, Will. We are very happy, and good for each other.  And I am making real progress in my work on a life project, the Ashland Bible, a translation from the original languages into modern and inclusive English.   The last 23 years have been a grace.    

 

And maybe that is the real point:  all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. They are gifts from a loving God.  We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see despite the occasion horror, and know in our hearts that God loves us all.  Though we do not understand how the world's brokenness can continue in the presence of such love, we can hope with St. Julian of Norwich that in the end, all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well.   

 

 

A Dog Named Hoover (Proper 18B)

 

Le Christ et la Cananéenne - Francisco Antolinez y Sarabia - Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Agen

A Dog named Hoover

8 September 2024

Proper 18B

Homily preached at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church

Medford, Oregon

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

The Rev. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Isaiah 35:4-7a; Psalm 146; James 2:1-10, (11-13), 14-17; Mark 7:24-37

 

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.” 

 

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.  They say basically that here Jesus is using "air quotes" and not really intending a slur. Perhaps.  But 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 the diminutive is probably intended to identify dogs that are not quite so wild and feral as the mangy that used to plague me as I ran the rural roads of Northern Taiwan preparing for a marathon.  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:  like those who feel discriminated against when the job they applied for goes to a coreligionist of the employer, this scene focusses on the conflict between 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 also 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