Whose property is always to have mercy

Today is a pretty exciting day if you spiritually abide in those Christian situations where a lectionary is followed. If you’re in a non-denom (denom, not demon, I am not that dyslexic) or Baptist setting, you are probably going to hear the next sermon in whatever series you are in the middle of. You probably have nothing to be anxious or worried about, exegetically speaking. And if your church follows the 1662 lectionary, you’ll have whatever text is appointed as usual. You may all count yourselves as blessed among all your fellow creatures. Because if, like me, you follow the ACNA lectionary, or the Roman Catholic one, or the Revised Common effort, you’ll perhaps have the dread of hearing one of the most abused, misused, and mangled texts in the whole Bible. Yes, my dears, today is the day we get to hear about the healing of the Syrophoenician, or, as Matthew refers to her, the Canaanite woman’s daughter.

In the mainlines, this is usually how the text is handled:

If you didn’t take the time to watch, to sum up, the person behind the pulpit feels that this is “not a good moment for Jesus,” what with the apparently obvious racial slur. Fortunately, the woman being a woman “turns the insult on its head,” and “calls Jesus out even when he is having a bad day.” So then, duly chastened, Jesus heals the daughter.

Personally, I find that this next person, who is dressed up as superhero in order that he may better conduct divine service on Sunday morning, cannot be surpassed by anything on the internet:

A long time ago there was a much plagiarized post on Patheos distilling the intuitively felt belief that Jesus didn’t learn from very many people, but he did benefit enormously from being corrected about his latent racism by this woman. He was, you know, only human—emphasis on the ‘only’ there. He was pretty great and all, but we all have our weaknesses. We all make mistakes. You shouldn’t feel too bad about your latent racism because even Jesus harbored bitter and wicked prejudice in his heart based on ethnicity and skin color that was, weirdly enough, undone by the mere word of this particular woman. That’s the power of women amirite?

In every way, not to cast any shade on the other progressive life verse —Galatians 3:28—this little portion of Scripture is the preferred text of this lost and dying generation. It allows the alleged seeker to construct the deep magic of the Self. The spiritual and exegetical logic of that magic goes likes this:

a. Jesus was a really great guy and someone we should all listen to because he loved so much.

b. mumble mumble Incarnation mumble mumble Embodiment

c. The best thing about Jesus was his humility which is what you—person who says she reads the Bible—should concentrate on the most and not presume to know any doctrinal or biblically unbreakable truths.

d. This humility was evinced by Jesus when he saw his own prejudice in the clever way the woman played along with his racism.

e. The lesson of this story—which is the only one we are certain did happen from all the gospel accounts—is that everyone, even Jesus, is a little bit racist which is the worst thing ever, but also not that big of a deal. The way out of your racism is to listen to minority female voices and do what they say.

f. Ultimately, the most important thing is that God will learn from me in some special way. That’s what this is really about—that other people and God will be content with whatever imperfect crumbs I let fall out of my Great Spiritual Bounty.

I don’t mean to be at all unkind in my characterization of the Lessons Learned from the Syrophoenician/Canaanite woman. I’ve been listening to them patiently and obediently from I my youth and I have come to loath them chiefly because they are not true, but secondarily, and by increasing measures, because they are ugly, and finally, because they are contrary to my lived experience of the Jesus who is there on the page.

Which means we must hie ourselves over to the text, which does, on the face of it, seem complicated and offensive. I readily acknowledge that anything someone like me says about it will be disregarded as “explaining it away.” But that is not what I’m doing. What I’m doing is setting it inside the context not only of the passages around it, but the whole scripture, which is something that ought to be done. Doing that means that I come to it with some assumptions. Mine, unlike those espoused by the charlatans above, come from a theological coherent reading derived not from myself, but from the Bible itself. My assumptions are these:

a. No one, because of sin, deserves the attention, healing, protection, and care of the Lord Jesus who is fully God and fully Man.

b. The Lord Jesus is without sin. He has never been corrected, not even by a woman, not even by his own Mother, not even at the Wedding at Cana.

c. Being very God of very God, Light from Light, True God of One Being with the Father, the Lord Jesus does not change his mind to do something other than his original and perfect will.

d. It was always God’s plan to include the Gentiles in his perfect Salvation. He came to the Jews first not because they were special in and of themselves, but because they were least among the nations of the world. In this, he displayed his power and grace. He intended for them to be a Light to draw the Gentiles to himself. His house, according the Old Testament text appointed for this morning, would be a house of prayer for all peoples. When Israel failed in her task, the Lord Jesus came, died in her stead, rose again, and ascended into heaven. Though, according to the epistle appointed for today, Israel is for some time a broken branch, no one who has been grafted in should look down on her.

e. The astonishing thing about this text is not the faith of the Canaanite woman but the mercy of God.

f. What the woman says to Jesus forms the ground, the very bedrock of faith itself. It is how every believer approaches Christ.

With all that out of the way, let me read out this astonishing little vignette:

And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered, “It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.” Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

One would have to be exceedingly short of memory to forget that just last week Jesus displayed his power and great glory first by miraculously feeding thousands of people in the wilderness, and then by walking on the water and calming the storm. It would be irrational to come to this text thinking that Jesus is a mere man. And having exercised the muscle of memory, one should then cultivate powers of observation. Tyre and Sidon are not places where nice Jewish people would go back in the first century. Jesus has drug his disciples out of the boundaries of externally observant Israel to a place of mixed moral and spiritual assumptions. He’s not hiding because he’s afraid. He has withdrawn because he wants to spread the news about himself and his own mission on his own terms. He does not want to be co-opted by anyone else’s agenda. This desire, of course, is thwarted immediately. The people of Galilea and the whole region are desperate, like sheep without a shepherd.

Many of the people you might stumble over online try to say that Jesus never healed anyone who wasn’t Jewish except this single woman. Of course that’s not true. Read the whole of all four Gospels for heaven’s sake. Every gospel writer shows Jesus astonished by the faith of those one wouldn’t have expected to know him. There is the Roman Centurion, the Gerasene Demoniac, the Samaritan leper jumbled in with the nine Jewish ones, and here, the Syrophoenician, who calls him “the Son of David.” He came to his own, and his own did not recognize him. The thrust of the unbelief of humanity as a whole is cast in sharp relief by a Christ rejected by his own people.

She comes to him as a beggar. She knows who he is. She does not come to teach him anything, but to fling herself at his feet, to assume the lowest place. And Jesus does indeed play off the unbelieving assumptions of his own disciples whom he has brought with him. Even though they have been with him all this time and seen his power and majesty in the storm, they still don’t know who he is or why he has come. And so he says something that is uncomfortably and sickeningly obvious: he came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. This is an ironic and insulting thing to say. The house of Israel doesn’t believe itself to be a pasture full of lost sheep. They are the keepers and followers of the Law. They are righteous. They haven’t needed the teaching and balm of this Shepherd—except for when they rushed out into the wilderness to receive his healing. If you go over to John, you will see that the great crowds of his own people rejected him utterly when they discovered that he was offering them himself and not more earthly bread. No wonder he “withdrew.” And yet here is one woman who recognizes him.

The reason he commends her faith is because it drives her to say the words many of us kneel to mutter every Sunday before we put our hands out to receive the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus:

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us.

And on that note, I must rush. I have got a lot of stuff to do at church before anyone else arrives. Hope to see you there because you should definitely go!