Except when they don't. Antagonism and hatred between neighbors is rising from the depths of our society like deadly toadstools on a foggy morning. David Brooks just wrote an interesting article in The Atlantic called, “How America Got Mean.” Indeed. Such hatred and division certainly isn’t new for humanity, though. In the Middle East, the Holy Land of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, neighbors have been fighting and hating for as long as we have historical documentation. In Europe, I once visited a museum exhibit about the role of caricature during the sixteenth-century Reformation. The media of the day used the new printing presses to spread caricatures of opposing religious groups. Each side gleefully portrayed the other as roasting in hell and sprouting demon horns. Governments used the religious differences to jockey violently for secular power.
In this fractious world, how on earth will God bring about the love and unity that God desires for human beings? How will God turn our hatred and division into the smooth and healing balm of love? Today's Gospel lesson gives us a glimpse of an answer, although it sure doesn’t look like it at first. Jesus, you see, is caught in the same painful web of broken relationships in which we live. Here he is, traveling outside of his comfort zone in Gentile territory, up to his eyeballs in disputes with the leaders of his own nation. And in waltzes an outsider—and a woman, at that—shouting and causing a ruckus. She’s one of the desperate ones, one of those on the margins. She has no healthcare, no hope, no standing in the community.
According to Matthew, she’s a Canaanite, born of the peoples that Israel had defeated long ago and whose land Israel took as their own. As a woman in this place and time, she should have been at home caring for her family, not parading around the town calling attention to herself. But she’s also a tiger-mom with a sick daughter. She won’t be silenced. She’s loud, and annoying, and no longer mindful of risk or decorum. She’s like the undocumented migrant worker in the emergency room, clasping her dehydrated baby to her breast, demanding medical care from a system that rejects her. She’s someone whose pain we would rather not see or hear.
Even Jesus.
"Maybe if I just ignore her," thinks Jesus, "she’ll go away." We all know how it goes … you can't be expected to do something about a situation that you don't see, right? It's easy to ignore an injustice on the other side of town, to bury our faces in our own lives, our own problems.
While Jesus tries politely to ignore the woman's shouting, the disciples decide that she needs to go.
"Israel first," they chant.
"Gentiles will not replace us!" they cry.
"Salvation belongs to us! There might not be enough to go around," they grumble.
Jesus nods his head. Jesus is fully divine, yes, but he’s also fully human, a product of the attitudes of his place and time. He agrees with a sigh, “I have enough to do taking care of my own people. There’s nothing left over for Gentile dogs like you. My people are ‘children.’ Your people are animals. My people are in. Yours are out. I can’t help you," he tells the woman.
Wow! That all sounds familiar, doesn't it? “Dogs!” he names the foreign woman and her daughter, as he bluntly refuses to help them. In Jesus' world, dogs aren’t the cute, tame pets that we enjoy today. They roam and scavenge around back alleyways. They’re dangerous and unclean. While Gentiles might let their dogs in to clean up under the table during meals, good Jews keep their dogs outside. There’s no way around it: Jesus is using shocking name-calling language in this text.
Some scholars insist that our compassionate Jesus must not have meant his insulting words, that he was merely nudging the Canaanite woman forward in her faith, or that he was teaching the disciples some kind of lesson. I believe, however, that it’s the Canaanite woman who teaches Jesus—and us—a lesson in this text. It’s this Gentile woman, not Jesus, who first brings grace to this situation, who allows God's healing love to flow between two opposing peoples. Because of her faith, Jesus himself learns and grows.
The question is, what exactly is it in the woman’s petition that’s able to breach the boundaries that Jesus sets on his own mission? What is it in her that so effectively pierces the barriers that we human beings set up between us and those who are different? There are all kinds of possibilities:
Is it the woman’s persistence that wins the day? Her determination not to give up despite the disciples’ rejection and Jesus’ ugly words?
Or is it that she honestly admits her need before the Lord, kneeling down and humbly pleading, “Lord have mercy?”
Or is it that she recognizes that Jesus is the divine Messiah and believes that he can heal her daughter?
Or is it that she’s clever with her words and able to turn Jesus’ insult to win her argument?[1]
The Canaanite woman’s faith is probably made up of all of these things, to some extent, but one thing stands out to me: her courage in the face of fear.
In last week’s Gospel lesson, we just heard Jesus upbraid Peter for his “little faith.” Remember? Peter’s fear gets the better of him as he attempts to cross the waves to come to Jesus. It was the blowing winds, those turbulent winds of the world, that unnerved Peter, and he stumbled and sank. The Canaanite woman in today’s story is somehow able to push beyond her fear, though. She must have been afraid. Afraid that her daughter would soon die. Crossing the no-man’s-land between unfriendly cultures and separate religions, she must have felt shaky and battered by the hostility around her. And yet, intently clinging to Jesus as the only hope for her daughter, she pushes onward until Jesus understands.
Whenever I think about the faith of people like today’s Canaanite woman, or about the faith of those who defied the Nazi’s in World War II, or about those who risked their lives for Civil Rights, I tend to hold my own faith up in limp comparison. “I’d be afraid to do that,” I shrug sadly, letting myself off the hook.
I tend to forget that courage is not lack of fear. Courage is acting in spite of fear. The point of today’s lesson isn’t to start us picking at our own “little faith.” It’s to get us thinking about what we would do if we were not afraid—and then to do it.
How do we move past our fear? It takes practice, one step at a time.
That’s why I invite you to join me in reading Bishop Mariann Budde’s new book this fall, How We Learn to Be Brave: Decisive Moments in Life and Faith. We’ll be discussing it each Sunday in October during Adult Formation hour. Budde is bishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC. She’s the clergywoman who spoke out to the nation on CNN when President Trump appeared on the steps of St. John’s Church with that upside-down bible in his hands while police beat peaceful protestors. To encourage us, Bishop Budde writes, “Some of our decisive moments require action; others, acceptance. Some are dramatic .... others are internal .... Heroic possibilities lie within each of us ... We matter in the realization of all that is good and noble and true. We can learn to be brave.”[2]
After all, if God’s Son can change and grow in love, so can we.
O how good and pleasant it is, when siblings live together in unity.
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