Preached at Holy Cross, Seend
Romans 11.1–2a, 29–32; Matthew 15.21–28
“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
“That pack of dogs!” It isn’t a very nice way of talking about a group of people.
The exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman makes us uncomfortable because it shows Jesus cutting across one of the sacred principles of our own time and culture: not being nasty to people because of their nationality or race – or at least not being caught out doing so in public. The Canaanite woman is at her wits’ end, needing help for her possessed daughter; Jesus tries to ignore her, then implies that her people are dogs. It doesn’t strike us as very Christlike.
Jesus was truly human as well as being truly God. All human beings have a culture and a background – and that always involves complicated relationships with people not like us.
The Jews and the Canaanites had been living intermingled with one another for over a thousand years by this point, and there was plenty of bad blood between them. When the Jews came into the Promised Land after Moses led them out of captivity in Egypt, the Canaanites were one of the groups of people already living there. The Jews claimed they were just returning to their ancestral homeland; the Canaanites thought that was poppycock. The Jews said the Canaanites had a nasty history of sacrificing their own children. By the time Jesus came along, “Canaanite” was no longer the term in daily use anyway – the politically correct nomenclature was “Syrophoenician”, which was used by Mark when telling the same story. So Matthew’s use of the archaic term hints that he’s reaching back into history for something.
There’s something else to keep in mind: what happened just before. Notice how this morning’s reading starts: “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” That leaves me curious as to where “that place” was.
It turns out that place was Gennesaret, by the Sea of Galilee, not much over twenty miles from where Jesus grew up, the area where He had started His public ministry of preaching and teaching, and a heartland of conservative Jews. What happened there was that as He was being mobbed by a crowd desperately seeking help, some Pharisees came up from Jerusalem – which was a hundred miles away – and started giving Jesus a hard time, telling Him He was breaking the Jewish religious traditions. Jesus in turn says the Pharisees are the ones promoting false teaching: in fact, they are blind guides, leading the people into a pit.
So Jesus has just had a spicy exchange with the self-appointed defenders of Jewish orthodoxy. For some reason, after that happens, He leaves the Sea of Galilee and goes to Tyre and Sidon, to what is now the coast of South Lebanon, away from the main Jewish centres of population and into the very heartland of the Canaanites.
It’s as if Jesus were actively seeking an encounter with a Canaanite, and perhaps the curt way Jesus treats the woman is a piece of theatre to hammer the lesson home for the disciples. Jesus’ behaviour still leaves me fairly uncomfortable, but it is also the frame for rich symbolic meaning. Three times in a row this canny old dog recognises Jesus’ true nature even as the people who are waiting for the Messiah miss it entirely.
The first time, she calls Jesus “Son of David” – and so Jesus is – not just a literal descendant of King David according to Matthew’s genealogy, but also spiritually in His line as the true King of the Jews.
Jesus, however, ignores her even though she has recognised something about Him that the holy men of Jerusalem haven’t – He insists He has only been sent to the Jews.
But she persists – in fact, she calls Jesus Lord and kneels before Him. She doesn’t explicitly say that Jesus is God, but she seems to instinctively recognise something divine.
Jesus again gives her a harsh brush-off, telling her it isn’t fair to give the children’s food to the dogs. Once again, she shows a remarkable sign of recognition – she acknowledges Jesus as master, while the people who think of themselves as God’s children alternate between mobbing Him like a celebrity and attacking Him. Jesus ends by declaring her faith truly great.
You may be surprised that there have already been two Canaanite women mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel before this. Like King David, they also appear in his opening genealogy: you know, the one with all those confusing names that we always ignore on the way to the excitement of Jesus’ birth. Tamar and Rahab are two of Jesus’ female ancestors. Tamar plays a significant role in the later part of the Book of Genesis; Rahab does in the Book of Joshua. Neither of those Canaanite women was too worried about respectability. Both were very sharp-witted, and both proved to be more righteous than the Israelite men they encountered.
Jesus is Himself, therefore, partly descended from the dogs He has just insulted and, for all the centuries of tension and contempt between Canaanites and Jews, this Canaanite woman is cut from the same cloth as her forebears who also saw what Jewish men, who thought they were especially close to God, missed.
This is one of the first signs that Jesus is sent not just to one people but to the whole human race. God’s chosen people are now all those who choose to follow God through His Son Jesus Christ.
And what of the Jews who don’t follow Christ? Paul’s letter to the Romans was written about thirty-five years after the encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman, to a mixed Church of Jews and non-Jews in the cosmopolitan capital of the Empire. The excerpt we heard is from an impassioned section we’ve been going through over the last few weeks, where Paul addresses his own people, the Jews.
Most of the Jews may have rejected Christ, but God has not rejected the first people He called. “The gifts and calling of God are irrevocable”, Paul writes – God doesn’t withdraw His gifts or renege on His promises, even though human beings, Jews and Christians alike, have a one hundred per cent record of breaking the promises they make to God, at least some of the time. The covenant God made with the Jewish people through Abraham remained valid in Paul’s time, and remains so today, even though in Christ God is now calling people of every race and nation to be His own.
“Just as you were once disobedient to God”, Paul writes, “but have now received mercy because of their disobedience” – it was precisely because the Jews would never keep their side of the covenant with God that God had to come into the world as Christ – and so save the rest of us. All of us have been “imprisoned in disobedience” – so that God can be merciful to us all.
Where our two readings this morning meet is in pointing out that everybody needs mercy sometimes. None of us would like to be confronted with God’s perfect justice – and all of us need God’s perfect mercy. In this sometimes merciless culture, remember that God has been merciful to you; try to be the person who shares that mercy with others. And when God seems to have left you without justice, don’t be afraid to be like the Canaanite woman and pester God to live up to His own promises to you.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.