Sermon

Great Is Her Faith

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

A year ago this time, the Women’s Bible Study group finished our study of Jeremiah. And we commented at that time how remarkable it was that such an offensive text was preserved. The book is a scathing critique of the Monarchy and the Temple leadership in the days leading up to the Babylonian Exile, and given the dirty laundry that it airs, you’d have thought that some scribe at some point would have conveniently destroyed the evidence. That it remained, and remains, within the canon of Hebrew Scripture – to me – is one of the clearer pieces of evidence that Scripture is, indeed, endowed by the Holy Spirit. If it were left up to humans alone, such an inconvenient book would surely have disappeared into the dust of history.

By contrast, Christian Scripture does not seem to be nearly as self-critical as the prophetic Hebrew texts. Except for today’s Gospel passage, that is. This is the 3rd of a three-part section. Jesus has fed the 5000 in the wilderness. It is a miracle of astonishing abundance provided to the people of God without particular thought given to observing the laws of ritual purity. The Pharisees call out Jesus on that omission, and in the 2nd part of the section, Jesus settles their hash – teaching that the Law is supposed to reveal God’s grace, not put limitations on it. The third panel of this narrative triptych now has Jesus and the disciples in Gentile country. There, a woman whom Matthew identifies as Canaanite approaches them, shouting Kyrie Eleison. Lord, have mercy.

Well, we’ve heard impassioned cries for healing before from the mouths of Gentiles. And up until this point, Jesus has routinely healed them. But this isn’t any old Gentile. Matthew purposely identifies her heritage as that of Israel’s ancient enemy. The Canaanites, after all, were the ones whom God, centuries earlier, had prohibited Joshua from showing any mercy to when he led the Israelites into the Promised Land.

And it’s a setup, though a different kind of setup than Matthew would likely have intended for his original audience of Jewish converts to Christianity. They would more likely have nodded sagely at Jesus calling her as a dog, where we are more inclined to suck air at his rude words. Not appropriate to take the bread from the children’s hands and give it to dogs? Really? The same man who mopped the floor with the Pharisees because they put limitations on God’s grace now seems to be doing pretty much the same thing himself. What is up with that?

And that’s when the trap springs shut on us. The Canaanite woman is of great faith, great faith in the manner of the great heroes of Jewish sacred history. Like Abraham, for example, who dared to remind God of God’s mercy when God threatened to destroy all of the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah; great faith in the manner of Moses who dared to remind God of God’s mercy when God threatened to destroy the Israelites in the wilderness because they worshiped the Golden Calf. This unnamed unclean nobody dares to fling Jesus’s cruel metaphor back at him. And we – whom Matthew intends to overhear the whole exchange – should also hear the echoes of the feeding of the multitude in the Galilean wilderness. There, the children of God miraculously ate and were satisfied, and 12 baskets full of leftover crumbs were gathered up. Seems that when it comes to the mercy of God, there really is plenty for all.  “One crumb, my Lord,” she says, in essence. “Surely you, merciful Lord, Son of David, can spare one crumb from those 12 basketsful to heal my baby girl.”

This story should take our breath away, not only because of what we are privileged to overhear, but because of the breadth of God’s abundant mercy that is revealed to us. Centuries earlier, a man named Joshua, Yeshua, swept mercilessly through the land of Canaan in fulfillment of God’s command. And here we have another Yeshua – that is Jesus’s name in Hebrew, by the way – being called upon to engage a very different kind of conquest -- one that lays waste to human misery, not to human beings. One in which God is revealed to be Lord of all creation whose abundant mercy is meant for all.

This pattern is revealed time and time again. We live in such a commodity-based world, where the better part of our attention, our energy and our resources go to amassing, increasing, and protecting what we have. And yet we worship a God whose regard for creation far exceeds the narrow confines of our self-interests. So long as we persist in living in a manner which suggests that things of value must necessarily be limited in quantity, we’re going to miss the point. So long as we reflexively try to hoard as private treasure the gifts that God so freely gives, we will continue to miss the mark.

Matthew intends us latter-day disciples to be scandalized, offended, and ultimately transformed by the gutsy faith of this unnamed Canaanite woman, a woman whose faith puts her in the company of Patriarchs like Abraham and Moses who likewise dared to speak to the Truth to God in order that we might overhear. So let’s take that risk. Let’s see in her the face of every inconvenient, different, alien OTHER whom we reflexively demonize. Let’s relax our privatized grip on our privileged insider status. Let us together be children of God.  

© Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral