women

Descended from Dogs – Sermon Preached on 16th August 2026 (Eleventh Sunday after Trinity)

by

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.”

A manuscript page with two lines of Arabic script above and three below a framed illumination. Within a red border, Christ stands at left in a magenta tunic and blue cloak, barefoot, with a dark beard and a gold cruciform halo, his right hand raised and extended forward, his left hand lowered. Behind him stand two men, the nearer one grey-bearded in an ochre robe, the second visible only as a head and shoulder. At right a woman kneels facing him, wearing a grey-lilac veil and cloak over an orange-red robe, both hands raised with palms turned upward. Between the two figures a small tan dog stands on green ground with its head lowered. The background shows a grey wall with two dark arched windows, a magenta building with an arched doorway at right, an open doorway at upper left, and a gold sky. Red punctuation dots are scattered through the Arabic text.
Ilyas Basim Khuri Bazzi Rahib, Jesus and the Canaanite Woman (ca. 1684). Part of an illuminated set of the Gospels in Arabic, produced in Egypt. Now belongs to the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, USA.

“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.

Read more

Motherhood and Apple Pie: Sermon Preached on 10th March 2024 (Mothering Sunday)

by
Surreal apple pies in an MK Cirulionis fantasy landscape

Preached at St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 3. 12-17; John 19. 25-27

“…he said to his mother, ‘Woman, here is your son.’”

A mother helps her young daughter to make apple pie.
Who could argue with the idea of motherhood and apple pie? Well, most of us.

“Motherhood and apple pie!”—Who could argue against motherhood and apple pie? The Cambridge Learners’ Dictionary tells me that this is a phrase we have imported from North American English, and is “used to represent an idea of perfect home life and comfort.” All those of you in the congregation who are mothers can confirm, that’s what motherhood is, isn’t it?—Perfect home life and comfort!

Or maybe not.

Our Gospel reading for Mothering Sunday is not, thankfully, some sanitised, cartoonish, version of what motherhood is about. This is motherhood at its rawest—Mary watches Christ, even speaks with Christ, as He is put to death. The trauma from experiencing the death of a child, including an adult child, is perhaps greater than that of any other type of bereavement. One can scarcely imagine what it feels like to witness it at first hand, in these circumstances. As some of you know, my sister died when we were both children, and I know only too well how devastating the death of a child is to a mother – and to a father. Yet, look at the memorial tablets on the walls of our parish churches and it is obvious this was a distressingly frequent event until the last hundred years or so—and it was frequent even for the well-off. Such is the human condition.

To love is to open yourself to hurt. To bear children is to open yourself to being hurt, through the hurts they themselves live through, and sometimes even directly by them. So God too, in creating humanity in His image and thus granting us free will, opened Himself to being hurt by the life He had given birth to.

And here is the unique thing about the Christian understanding of God: Jesus Christ was God made one of us, and in that He exposed Himself to one of the worst fates the world can inflict on anyone—a brutal, humiliating, public, death, in front of his mother.

Motherhood as a perfect home life and comfort? If, only.

Read more

Jesus Making Us Uncomfortable: Sermon Preached on 20th August 2023 (11th Sunday After Trinity)

by

Preached at Christ Church, Worton

Readings – Romans 11. 1–2a, 29-32; Matthew 15. 21–28

“He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’”

We often hold to a stereotype that Paul’s letters are full of judgement and chauvinism and sexism, while the Gospels show Jesus to be a paragon of tolerance who is only ever nice to people. This morning’s readings show that stereotype up for the misreading of the Bible that it is. In our Epistle, St Paul writes to the Christians in Rome, a very mixed group of Jews and Gentiles, that while he remained proud of his Jewishness, God did not discriminate between different groups of people – and indeed that God allowed all of us to sin, so He could be merciful to everyone.

A woman kneels before Jesus' feet clasping her hands, while to his left, a bearded man with his hands held out aggressively pleads with Jesus.
Jean-Germain Drouais, Christ and the Canaanite Woman (1784). In the collection of the Louvre, Paris.

In contrast, in this morning’s Gospel reading, where Jesus encounters a Canaanite woman seeking healing for her daughter, Jesus is rude, and a bit of a bigot, calling the Canaanites “dogs”. Now, by this time, the Hebrews and the Canaanites had a history of bad blood that went back more than a thousand years. Two peoples sharing the same piece of land for a long time sometimes develop a strange sort of relationship – a hatred that seems particularly intense to outsiders, but which sits alongside great mutual familiarity, indeed an intimacy that can exist even in the absence of love or good feeling. People from Northern Ireland are familiar with this phenomenon.

For Jews, Canaanites were not merely polytheistic pagans – and that would have been bad enough, but the nasty stench of child sacrifice also still lingered over them in the Jewish imagination. The Jews, moreover, believed God had given them the whole region as their homeland more than a thousand years before—but the Canaanites still showed no sign of leaving. So, if Jesus were just another wise teacher, just another Jewish holy man, we might not feel so shocked to hear Him dismiss the Canaanites as ‘dogs’. We all have our off days, don’t we? But it’s quite another thing to hear God incarnate, God made human, display such prejudice. If Jesus’ words and actions here make you feel uncomfortable, don’t try to smooth away either your feelings or the biblical text, but bear with the discomfort for a while.

I wonder what would happen if this encounter took place today, and was recorded by a passer-by on their mobile ‘phone. As we all know, saying the wrong thing while being recorded—and we are recorded more than anyone until recently would have thought possible—can end someone’s career, even if it’s only a single incident, an ‘off-day’ in an otherwise blameless life. In today’s culture, if Jesus referred to another nationality or ethnicity as “dogs”, he’d probably be ‘cancelled’. We are not always a very merciful culture.

Read more