Sermon, August 17, 2008 --Matthew 15:10-28

“Dog Tales” (Matthew 15:10-28)
Rick Olson, August 17, 2008

There’s an old saying—probably by some scurvy prophet or something—that says “I’ve come to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted,” and that surely applies to scripture as well. There’s nothing more afflicting to our comfortable notions about life and our place in it than scripture. If you read it and pay attention, that is . . . a lot of folks—and I know none of us here are like that—but a lot of folks just read the parts they like and kind of skip over the rest. Or if something bothers them they gloss over it or try to explain it away, assuming “Jesus wouldn’t do that,” or “He really means this.” But one of the keys to a deeper understanding of scriptures is to first acknowledge what it says, period. Not what it means, or what you think it means to us, but what it says, the plain sense of the words on the paper. Once you do that, you can apply what us text critics call “interpretive lenses” or “critical methods” to trying to figure out what it means. But first, you have to acknowledge what it says.

And what this passage says, no getting around it, is that Jesus basically calls the woman and her child dogs. When she begs for him to cast the demon out of her daughter, he says “It’s not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.” No getting around it, he’s called her kid a dog. And the moment I first read it, I thought “Oy vey! That’s not the Jesus I know, that’s just mean, calling her sick, demon-possessed child a dog.”

Ok. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s try to see what it all means. We could take it at face value, you know, but that’s almost as bad . . . it seems as if Jesus—who we Christians confess is God’s own self—it seems as if Jesus changes his mind. At first he’s not going to heal her child—it would be throwing food to the dogs, after all—but then when she says something he likes, he decides to do it after all. Note that here in our passage, Matthew makes it about faith, and do you all remember last week? When Peter didn’t have enough faith to walk on the water? In Matthew it’s about faith a lot, but over in Mark’s version, it’s not about faith at all, it’s about what she says. Over there, he says “for saying that, for saying ‘yes but even dogs get the crumbs off the master’s table’, “your daughter has been healed,” but over here, Matthew makes it about faith, and somehow her response reveals, or maybe confirms her faith, but that brings up another problem: if Jesus is God, if he’s omniscient, why didn’t he know it from the outset? Why put a distraught woman through the ringer if you knew what you were gonna do in the first place? Kind of cruel, don’t you think?

Of course, another possibility is that he actually learns something here, that the Canaanite woman—it’s a Syrophoenician woman over in Mark—that she actually teaches Jesus something. When she says even the dogs eat the crumbs, maybe Jesus is saying “Huh. I never thought of it that way before . . . great is your faith!” But to us on the other side of the Trinity divide that’s not such a great solution, either, and for the same reason: if he were omniscient, how could she teach him anything?

Well. By now you probably get that it all this goes fascinating, age-old debate about what it means for Jesus to be fully human and fully divine, which all the creeds and orthodox Christianity affirm. One of the prime characteristics of being a human is that humans learn, and if Jesus is fully human, wouldn’t we expect him to learn as well? But on the other side of the coin, if he’s fully God, then how could he learn if he knew everything in the first place? He’d be like a seer who saw in advance that something bad was going to happen if he went somewhere, but did it anyway. “If you knew it, then why’d you do it?”

In the theology biz, we call this kind of a thing “a tension” and we make our hands go like this when we come up upon two things that seem to be mutually exclusive, and yet seem indubitably true nevertheless. And it’s important to recognize that this whole thing is far from academic . . . Jesus isn’t fully human, how can we identify with him or, equally important, how can he identify with us? The incarnation—the idea that somehow God became one of us and walked this earth, and experienced everything we do—is an incredibly powerful one that sets Christianity apart from other faiths. It goes to our basic understanding of the Christ: how can he tell us anything about life if he hasn’t experienced it for himself? And just how comforting is some distant parent, way up in the ether somewhere, whose power and knowledge and presence are far beyond even our wildest imagination?

To understand this passage, I think we have to remember the that this was written long before it became a common belief in the Christian community that Christ and God are one and the same . . . as we saw last week, Matthew called him Son of God and he probably meant it, in some literal fashion. As we also saw last week, as he stomped around all over the waters of Galilee’s sea, he could do some of the same stuff—namely make order out of chaos—that God could. But so could Peter, and it’s possible that Matthew believed Jesus was human in the fullest sense, a person with full connection to his maker, one that we as his disciples could participate in as well. And remember that Matthew was a Jew, and although the old canard that his gospel is the most Jewish is an oversimplification, it is true that the fact shows up in some interesting ways, and in the Hebrew Scriptures—that we call the Old Testament—God behaves in a number of ways we can’t square with our conception of God, things like crisping God’s enemies turning folks into pillars of salt.

In fact, another one of Matthew’s salient features, seen in other places in his gospel, is his conviction that Jesus’ mission comes to the Jews first, and only after his crucifixion and resurrection is the field thrown open to the Gentiles, in the “lo, I am with you always” speech. And in Matthew he says as much after his disciples—disgruntled that a lowly Gentile woman is bugging them—try to get rid of her. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he says, and it’s telling about Matthew’s theology that he doesn’t say it over in Mark. But she’s persistent, and comes and kneels at his feet so he can’t ignore her and says “Lord, help me.” And that’s when he gives out the dog comment, using an unfortunate term for gentiles that was making the rounds in Jewish circles in that day.

But she shoots right back at him, doubtless giving ol’ Peter in the process, she shoots right back and says: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” And it’s more than just a witty riposte, more than simply a clever rejoinder: it signals surrender, it signals submission, as in ok, you got me, I know my place . . . we’re dogs, but even dogs get the crumbs. She’s focused like a laser beam on her daughter’s health and well-being, if she has to grovel—as she has by falling to her knees—to save her.

And even this isn’t a particularly savory reading of the story, especially to modern ears conditioned by feminist thought . . . I can hear the grumbling now: why should a woman have to grovel at a man’s feet to get anything, some would say, and they’d be right, of course, but note what shines through even Matthew’s highly Jewish, highly male-centric gloss of this story. In spite of all that, in spite of all the “I came first to the children of Israel” stuff, Jesus still listens to her. And not only does he listen to her, but he reverses his position and dispenses some of God’s saving grace to this marginal person, this person from outside of God’s chosen children.

And look what he says when he does it: “Woman, great is your faith!” And this had to be a slap in the face to the other disciples, especially Peter, who’d been accused of having very little on several previous occasions, such as in last weeks episode. “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And Matthew, perhaps the most Jewish of gospel writers, tells us that her daughter was healed instantly.

Last week, we talked about the nature of miracles, or a signs as I prefer to call them, and we said that to interpret a sign, we first start by figuring out what it points to. Here, the miracle, the healing, comes at the very end, and it’s a powerful pointer, to be sure . . . Jesus heals the Canaanite woman’s daughter, a powerful and potent sign that in the kingdom here and yet to come, even the most marginalized outsiders are welcome, are “deserving” of God’s grace. But there’s something more to this story . . . in a sense, it’s all a sign, the whole shootin’ match, maybe not a pointer to the kingdom per se, but instead to how we should connect with those to whom we minister. Jesus engages with her, he is changed by her, and in a sense, it’s just as much a ministry to him as it is to the Canaanite woman.

I might have told you this story before, but when I was going to seminary, I volunteered at a homeless shelter at First Presbyterian in downtown Atlanta . . . and the way we did it we would sit the men—the shelter was only for men—we’d sit the men down at these big, round tables and bring their food—boiled eggs, ham, and the best grits you ever had. And I felt all warm and tingly and righteous inside until the shelter director pointed out that standing and serving them was such an hierarchical way of doing things, that it was very clear by the distance between them that that we were in charge, that indeed we were slumming, and they were supplicants, not equals. And the director urged us to sit down at the tables and talk with the mainstreamed psychotics, the main-lining addicts and the other denizens of Atlanta’s mean streets, and let me tell you, it terrified me, they were so different from me, it was so hard to do, so that I did it only a couple of times.

And it’s really easy for us middle-class Christians to just make out a check, or drop some cans off at the food bank, and we do it all the time, I do it all the time. And don’t get me wrong: money and food is absolutely necessary for good agencies, both secular and faith-based, doing vital work. But this passage calls us to a different way, a more intense way. It calls us to interact with those to whom we minister, to treat them not as numbers, but as humans, face to face, peer to peer. It’s not easy, it never is when you’re interacting with folks who are different from you are. But Jesus did it, and look where it got him: it changed him, it opened him to new possibilities, and it will us as well. The few times I sat and talked with the folks at the mission, I was blessed four-fold.

Through this story, we are called to engage with those to whom we minister, to interact with them, to let them be a ministry to us, just as we are to them. As we evaluate our mission programs over the coming months with the eye toward the renewal of our congregation, I hope we will keep this in mind. Amen.