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.
Jean-Germain Drouais, Christ and the Canaanite Woman (1784).
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.
Some would say that’s fair enough – that somebody who uses racist or otherwise prejudiced language should be excluded from polite society. Words that claim to be a slip of the tongue often reveal deeply hidden but very real prejudices, that people might not voice but do act on in ways that harm others. And let’s be honest, we all feel less than merciful sometimes. I wonder how many of us felt merciful when we read or listened to the stories about Lucy Letby over the weekend.
Now, keep that in mind as we look more closely at the story, remembering that little in the Gospel stories is coincidental, and certainly not in this part of Matthew’s Gospel. This story is part of a continuous run of narrative that fits between two long monologues from Jesus; between the parables on the Kingdom of Heaven, in Matthew 13 and the long speech about the Church in Chapter 18. At the start of this series of stories, Jesus is teaching and healing in Galilee as He has been all along, but during it Jesus announces He’ll be going to Jerusalem. That tells us Matthew sees these stories as significant in explaining why Jesus is more than just a teacher and healer.
In that light, there are two things that could easily pass us by but are in fact significant.
Firstly, when Jesus says he was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel, the Canaanite woman kneels before Him; she behaves like she is worshipping Him. Shortly after this story, Peter will become the first of the disciples to work out that Jesus is the Son of God, but this outsider instinctively realises almost immediately that Jesus is someone worthy of worship, something more than just a holy man. In fact, worse than any old outsider, this Canaanite, and worse still, Canaanite woman, works out Jesus’ nature quicker than His closest followers. This is a big signal that God no longer has just one chosen people. Instead, in Christ, God’s chosen race is the entire human race; and not just the wise or the rich or the strong—or (interestingly given the football match later this morning) just the men—but the whole human race. Who counts as important, who is thought of as being close to God, has been upended by Christ.
The second thing that jumps out is that Jesus doesn’t respond to the woman’s pleas for mercy. Time and again in the Gospels we see Jesus trying to escape into the hills or out on to the lake for a bit of peace, but being pursued by huge crowds seeking healing, and relenting and healing them when He hears their pleading for mercy. Remember, St Paul writes in this morning’s Epistle that God seeks to be merciful to all – but not, in the person of Jesus Christ, to this Canaanite woman, at least at first. We all have limits to our capacity to feel mercy.
When she gets down and kneels before Him, Jesus at least gives her a straight answer – but it’s still a ‘no’, and despite what he says, Jesus’ problem can’t just be that she isn’t one of the “lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Jesus, remember, has already healed the sick daughter of a gentile by this stage in Matthew’s Gospel – in Matthew 8, Jesus healed the daughter of the Centurion, one of the hated foreign occupiers.
It is – and this strikes me as very significant – the clever, honest, and indeed rather sharp reply the woman gives to Jesus that at last convinces Him to heal her daughter. What does that say about how we should approach God in our prayer lives? Yes, to get down on bended knee and worship Him, that goes without saying. At the same, time we should come to God as ourselves, because God knows who we are anyway. We shouldn’t be afraid to be honest with God about our feelings about Him and our feelings about the way the world He made works. God knows our feelings about Him, although we often try to hide them even to ourselves. God knows how we sometimes feel about this world of His, where tiny babies are done to death in a place they should be cared in. God isn’t going to punish us for being honest with Him about who we are and what we feel. He loves us as we are.
I wish I could give you a neat explanation for Jesus’ initial unpleasantness to the Canaanite woman. I take seriously both the divine inspiration of Scripture and that Jesus is God in human form. This story leaves me very uncomfortable; but here are a few lessons I’d draw from it.
Firstly, don’t put God in a box; if God is what the Church claims, then in His fullness He is beyond our comprehension. We must expect to be surprised by Him, for good and for ill, and even sometimes shocked by Him.
Secondly, God is for the whole human race made in His image, and doesn’t play favourites; and neither should we.
Finally, don’t be afraid to tell God what you really think; He knows your thoughts better than you know them yourself, and you might be pleasantly surprised by how He responds if you’re honest with Him.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.
