Tenth Sunday After Trinity

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

 ‘No blacks. No dogs. No Irish.’ Not so very long ago these were pretty common signs, hung in pubs or hotels or guesthouses in this country, signs showing a racism that was happy and confident enough to advertise itself, its language and its attitude dehumanizing, divisive, and sinful. It drew sharp lines between those who counted as ‘us’ and those who were considered ‘them’ – and it policed them. If you fell on the wrong side of the line because of the colour of your skin or your ethnicity, you were other, less-than, unwelcome. We don’t have to look very far to see how this sort of language and division has mutated in contemporary discourse and politics. Listen to Trump, or read some of the headlines from British tabloids this past week.

 ‘Dog’ was an insult in classical Greece, too, and here, in today’s Gospel reading, we’re made uncomfortable by hearing it on the lips of Jesus. ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’, he says, to the Canaanite woman who pleads with him to heal her daughter.

 And despite the rather desperate efforts of some biblical scholars to soften the language, as though Jesus was referring to a beloved pet spaniel rather than using a derogatory term too often levelled at Gentiles by Jews, this is a racial slur. Matthew makes it particularly clear: in Mark’s account of the same story, the woman is referred to as Syro-Phoenician, the common and current name for those from that region at the time. Matthew calls her a Canaanite, and by that designation brings into view the long history between the people of Israel and the people of Canaan.

 In Israel’s history, Canaanites are not just any old Gentiles. They are the enemy: the people God had promised to drive out from the Promised Land before Israel settled there; those whose idolatry was a constant threat to Israel’s identity and religious purity. From the beginning of their history as a nation, Israel has defined itself against Canaan. Tyre and Sidon, the cities mentioned in the Gospel reading, are condemned again and again in the prophets as places deserving judgement, and as enemies of Israel. It is into this territory, this place of the other, the enemy, the Gentile, that Jesus is travelling when the Canaanite woman accosts him. Tyre and Sidon, by the way, are port cities in what is now Lebanon. In the aftermath of the explosion in Beirut, I think it’s important we keep that geography in mind as we explore this reading.

 Jesus is already moving into Gentile territory when this encounter happens. This is not his first trip beyond the confines of Israel, nor, in Matthew’s Gospel, is his act of healing a Gentile and his affirmation of the woman’s faith a new departure. This is not a story about the woman teaching Jesus something he doesn’t know. Matthew has already recounted Jesus’ visit to the Decapolis to heal the man possessed by a legion of demons. In chapter 8, Jesus heals the servant of the Roman centurion – and commends the centurion’s faith as being greater than any he has found in Israel. And even in the very first chapter of the gospel, in the genealogy of Jesus, Matthew deliberately includes the names of women who were not only Gentiles but Canaanites. It was unconventional to mention women in your genealogy at all in those days, much less draw attention to the rather more problematic ancestors. If Matthew had been interested in religious and ethnic purity he would not have mentioned Tamar or Rahab or Ruth. That he does is because he’s telling Israel’s story in a particular way: not Israel against the nations, but Israel as a light for the nations. This is the story that has been there all along, from God’s promise to Abraham to make him the father of many nations, to Isaiah’s vision, as we heard today, of God’s house being a house of prayer for all peoples. 

 Given the history between Israel and Canaan, the disciples’ reaction is perhaps not surprising. They speak for the populist view: ‘Send her away’. She’s a Gentile, and a Canaanite at that, and she’s a woman. Impure twice over. And Jesus, it seems, does nothing to challenge this, his words serving rather to confirm the disciples’ rejection of the woman. ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she persists, kneeling before him, begging. And still: ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’

 And here the woman, speaking from faith, from desperation, from love of her daughter, argues back. In the version we heard, she says ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ There is no yet, no but, in the Greek. When Jesus says, ‘it’s not fair to do this’, she says, ‘yes it is.’ Yes, there is bread enough, nourishment enough, healing enough, not just for Jews but for Gentiles too.

 And Jesus, who has just called Peter, the rock on whom he will build the church, ‘you of little faith’, says to her, ‘Woman, great is your faith.’ The disciples had confidence in Jesus as a healer – when they say to him ‘send her away’, what’s implied from the way the story is told is ‘heal her daughter and get rid of her’. But they had not recognised what the woman saw. She addresses Jesus as ‘Lord, Son of David’, seeing him as Israel’s Messiah, the promised one who would be a light to lighten the Gentiles. Jesus has seen her faith, and through his interaction with her lets her challenge and expand the narrowness of Israel’s self-understanding. In the verses immediately before this encounter, Jesus overturns the purity laws about food and cleanliness. Now, in his meeting with this woman, that is put into effect as  grace spills over hitherto solid boundaries, bringing good news for all those who’d always found themselves on the wrong side of them.

 And this is where the woman and Jesus are still teaching us. The context we are in matters so much when we read the bible, determining the sorts of questions we ask of it, the ways in which we do or don’t let it challenge us, revealing where we situate ourselves in relation to the stories it tells. And in this story, for all I rejoice in the ways in which it breaks down barriers, I recognise that I tend to identify with those already on the inside. My class and upbringing and education and skin colour and sexuality all contribute to that. I don’t have much experience of what it’s like to be in the woman’s position, pleading for crumbs. Though I know too many who do.  

 And that’s one reason why the woman’s story is so important: not just because her faith and tenacity are the occasion for Jesus showing more of the universal scope of the gospel, and the gift of God’s grace for all people, but because in different bodies, different guises, she goes on asking, goes on refusing the boundaries that try to narrow and police God’s love and reminding us that there is grace enough for us all. But she also stands as a reproach to people like me who need reminding that there are no insiders and outsiders in God’s kingdom. That it is utter presumption to believe that the bread she begs for or the table from which it is blessed and given were ever ours to start with. As Paul reminds us in the reading from Romans, the God and Father of Jesus Christ is the God of Israel. Gentiles are grafted into the vine that is Israel. Once we were no people but now we are God’s people – not of our own deserving or making, but because God in his infinite love and mercy reconciles us to himself through his Son. The Canaanite woman teaches us to pray, we who were outsiders to God’s covenant but in the body and blood of Christ are made fellow citizens with the saints and of the household of God. What she asked for we have all received. And we have taken her prayer, and made it our own. ‘We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercy. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord, whose nature is always to have mercy…’

 She teaches us that the table is Christ’s, that there is room for us all if we will budge up for one another, that we are welcome not because we deserve it but because we are loved, and the same goes for everyone else gathered around it. So if we really learn from her, from her prayer, her persistence, and her faith, perhaps those signs we hang in churches that say ‘all welcome’ will actually be true.