Sermon for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, August 20, 2023

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8+Psalm 67+Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32+Matthew 15:10-28

It's a good thing that Jesus was not on Twitter. I mean, can you imagine:

Itinerant preacher who says love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you
was overheard calling a woman a dog. What a hypocrite!

I can guarantee that the trolls would have been all over that. What about you? Does this story make you uncomfortable? Does it make you wonder if Jesus was having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day?

Me, too.

That this story is in not one but two gospel accounts (the other is Mark) should tell you something. It probably happened. Why on earth would Matthew and Mark include such an awful sounding story otherwise? I mean, if I was trying to convince people that Jesus is the savior of the world who proclaims a message of peace and love, this would not be the strategy I would choose. Scholars who study these things believe that the less favorable stories are likely true for just that reason. Why not just leave out the unsavory parts if you're trying to build a case?

Good question.         

Jesus is on the road, out of his home territory. After the death of his cousin John, he tried to get away with his disciples, but the crowds followed, so he fed all 5,000 of them. Then he walked across the sea to his friends who were struggling against the storm, and then he spent some time sparring with the religious leaders. He's tired, and maybe he wants to go where nobody knows his name.

Mark says that he went to the district of Tyre and encountered a Syrophoenician woman (Mark 7:24-30). Matthew says that the woman is a Canaanite. That distinction might not seem so important, but it situates Jesus is the long history of Israel. The Canaanites worshipped other gods and were the enemies of the Israelites. Matthew doesn't want us to miss that Jesus is carrying on a very Jewish tradition, and to go the land of the Canaanites would be to go to foreign territory where the people would have been beneath consideration. It's the way many people view immigrants coming from Central and South America or the way those who moved west in the 19th century viewed Native Americans. There was no love lost between Israel and Canaan, not in the time of the Patriarchs and not in the time of Jesus.

But why does Jesus have to be so rude?

I wonder if one of the reasons this story might appear in these two gospels is to show us the full humanity of Jesus. From the early days of the Church, we have proclaimed the full divinity and full humanity of Christ, so if that is true, baby Jesus did not have a halo or behave in otherworldly ways. He did and felt the same things any human does, including, perhaps, impatience and frustration. But he didn't stay there. He was open to being persuaded to give this foreign woman her due as a mother pleading on behalf of her child.

At the end of Matthew's gospel, Jesus gives the Great Commission:

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19-20a

There is an arc to this story. In the 10th chapter of Matthew as he is sending out the disciples two by two, he instructs them to  ‘Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel" (10:5-6), and we heard that same phrase this morning as Jesus says to the woman, " ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel'" (15:24). Jesus shunned, at least initially, the Canaanite woman but then softened and healed her child. And by the end of the gospel, after the resurrection, he is telling the disciples to go into all the world, not just your own community, not just Israel, but everywhere.

Maybe Matthew left this story in here as a sign and signal to us, that it was a foreshadowing of the great reconciliation of all people to come in God's reign. His view through the lens of death and resurrection made that narrative arc of Jesus's life clearer. The purpose of that life and death and resurrection was to break down those walls between Jew and Gentile and bring salvation to all people, and this encounter with the Canaanite woman, and maybe even the healing of a Roman Centurion's servant back in chapter 8, were signposts along the way to what would be revealed on the other side of the tomb.

Our lives have a similar narrative arc as we grow in the knowledge and love of God. Depending on where we live or who we encounter as we go about our days, we all carry implicit bias toward those who appear to be "not like us." I have known an awful lot of people who are almost never around anyone who doesn't look or sound or follow the same social norms as they do, and their bias is not implicit at all. It is very explicit. They are suspicious of anyone outside of their own category. The greater variety of people we meet and interact with in our lives, the more likely the idea that we are somehow "separate" begins to fade. Our walls of division begin to crumble, and we recognize that harm to others harms us, too. That there can be no peace and joy for me unless there is peace and joy for everyone else.

Maybe that won't excite the trolls on Twitter, but it might just help us begin to realize the Beloved Community in our midst.