Sunday sermon: Matthew 15.21-28. The Canaanite woman - and a bit of CS Lewis.

Matthew 15.21-28

 

 

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

 

So, St. Peter is showing a new arrival around the Kingdom of Heaven and all is going well until they arrive at a large wall.

 

“What’s behind here?” enquires the new arrival.

 

“Well,” says St. Peter, “I need you to keep your voice down. This is where the American Fundamentalists are. They believe they’re the only ones here and we don’t like to upset them.”

As Christians we hear a lot about God’s grace and this passage is all about God’s grace: we know that it is through that grace that we are saved and “not through good works lest any man should boast.” as St. Paul writes to the church at Ephesus. What we may be less clear about is whether there are limits to God's grace: a question echoing through time – and through Scripture itself.

It’s very tempting to say that there are no limits, for the word “grace” itself would seem to contradict that. If “grace” is the defining description of how God deals with humanity, then grace would seem to overcome all boundaries.  However, if we aren't careful we find ourselves following a theology which suggests that God saves all, regardless of who they are and regardless of what they’ve done. That doesn’t seem to be what Christianity is teaching.

Difficult isn’t it?

In the Old Testament, with Abraham, the limits of God’s grace began to become clear. His descendants were identified by the tribal ties of blood and by specific ways of living and worship, the boundaries of which Moses drew quite clearly under God’s guidance.

Even so there was always an awareness that God’s grace could reach far beyond such narrow confines. Today’s psalm (67), although we didn’t read it, is clear that God can be identified by the way he relates to “the nations of the earth.” The Psalmist says, “May God be merciful to us and bless us and make his face shine upon us, that your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.” That doesn’t mean that all would embrace Judaism and the prophet speaking in the First Lesson for today insists there will be foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to serve him, to love his name and to worship him. . “. . These I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer…………. for my house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.” This becomes particularly relevant in our Gospel reading this morning as a Gentile woman approaches Jesus for help.

So we turn to Paul’s letter to the Romans: Paul is frustrated because the Jews have failed to recognize the Messiah. In today’s reading he changes course. “Now I am speaking to you Gentiles,” he says. Israel’s rejection of the Gospel, as Paul declares it, has led to the reconciliation of the Gentiles and beyond them to the whole world.

Though Matthew stresses that the primary mission of Jesus was to the “house of Israel,” in today’s Gospel a non-Jewish supplicant draws him to a more inclusive vision. This supplicant is a woman – one who is not to speak to a man in public. Not only does she approach Jesus, though, she nags him, she makes a public scene around him. This story of courageous faith and boundary-crossing should challenge the church today.

The woman is a Canaanite, a foreigner to the kingdom of God, an intrusion into the tidy boundaries with which the disciples were comfortable and within which Jesus focuses his ministry. This woman comes alone to Jesus, crying, “Have pity (“mercy”) on me Lord, Son of David.” a term which would hardly have meant much to anyone other than the Jews. Yet she has such an address on her lips from the beginning suggesting a degree of knowledge and understanding of Jesus that he and the Disciples should have taken more notice of from the outset.

Since illness was thought to arise from demonic attack, she begs release and healing for her daughter. Jesus meets her request with stony silence and this peculiar initial unresponsiveness to her appeal is very strange. There’s no answer to the question “why?” There is only this strange, surprising silence from Jesus. Not so from the disciples who demand, “Get rid of her, for she keeps yelling at us.” Maybe she’d been nagging them before she got to Jesus, and they’d had enough. The woman certainly seems to have got under the skin of the disciples. Still Jesus remains unmoved and again he rebuffs her: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In no other miracle story has a petitioner been treated so harshly. Jesus has a clear goal, an all-consuming passion about where he is to direct his attention and his energies. The woman is not in that vision because she’s a Canaanite.

But the woman’s not having any of it. Now she’s in conversation with him and she won’t let the opportunity pass by. His silence had been upsetting, but now his words open a new door. She’s bold, brave and challenging and she presses her case with force. She’s been reduced to desperation, certainly, but she won’t give up now. She hangs on for all she is worth.

And then something dramatic happens: this woman, disadvantaged, an outsider because she is a Gentile and a woman who’s alone in public, challenges this rebuff by worshiping Jesus (something no disciple does prior to the resurrection). She started with the plea, “Have mercy on me,” but now she kneels before him in worship and supplication: “Lord, help me,” she says. “You are my only hope. You can’t turn me down. You’re the only one I can turn to.” 

Then the most extraordinary thing happens. This merciful One, this man filled with grace, this Prince of Peace, speaks in terms that sound harshly rude, and no matter how we want to put a positive gloss on it, Jesus is speaking as an Israelite spoke of Gentiles. “It is not right to take the food of children (Jews) and give it to dogs” (Gentiles).  They were “dogs,” and there is no way to change that offensive sense. Yet the woman grabs hold of even this rejection and turns it into a response against which Jesus can no longer argue! “Yes, Lord,” she says. “I know. I am not of your house and lineage. Nor am I worthy to approach you as I have. Even so I still make bold to say that even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table and I ask only that you let me have the crumbs that fall from your table.”

You can almost imagine the frisson of shock rippling through the crowd. But after a pause that must have seemed like a lifetime to the crowd, in a startling turn of events, Jesus replies: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And we’re told her daughter was healed at that moment. He who had fed five thousand from Israel only a short time before and who would feed another four thousand only a short time later, grants to this woman the “crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

He who was feeding Israel, to whom he was sent, gave an appetizer, as it were, to a Gentile woman in the “crumbs from the master’s table.”

She comes with no appeal for justice, no claim based on her rights or merit: only a plea for mercy and undeserved help. She’s nothing to bring to barter for her daughter’s wellbeing. She simply brings the faith and confidence that in Jesus alone she finds hope for herself and her daughter. In this way she broke through the barriers that could have hindered her. In this way she signalled the way to the future as Gentiles flooded into the church, being carried on waves of faith that in Jesus salvation had come. 

There are two ways of looking at this event. Firstly, the Canaanite woman is a personification of those nations that would hear the message of the Gospel. The courageous faith of the woman is the second major theme. But neither of these captures the shock and surprise of the exchange between the woman and Jesus. The woman’s brash courage actually seems to convert Jesus and develop his understanding of his mission. In Matthew’s Gospel we’ve so far seen a Jesus who has limited his mission to the sons and daughters of Israel, yet here he crosses this self-imposed boundary to bring merciful healing to a Gentile.

The woman seems to bring to him the full implications of his mission.

This is important because we’ve already seen Jesus feed a Jewish crowd and shortly we’ll see Jesus feeding another crowd, but this time the crowd is a crowd in a Gentile area, not a Jewish area. This woman really seems to have forced Jesus to rethink his mission and that mission changes as the Gospel story unfolds and as Jesus broadens boundaries in ways unimaginable to the disciples around him: it took an immense struggle to expand the thinking about the limits of God’s grace on the part of Jesus’ disciples and those who followed them, but it began here as Jesus reappraised his mission.

Sadly, that struggle has not yet been overcome. Over and over again the people of God have had to recognize how old limits are pushed out by the grace of God to include still others. Sometimes the struggle has been obvious: racial divisions, gender differences, issues of sexuality, national and cultural differences have had to be overcome time after time in order to recognize the far-reaching nature of God’s grace. But we keep wanting to establish limits on that grace and God, in his turn, keeps pushing back on them.

We like neat, cosy, clear-cut boundaries to our lives, and God’s grace challenges them at every turn. Today the deepest meaning of the Gospel is often seen in the courage of the “outsider,” who is driven by loving concern for innocent victims of disease or injustice: Bonheoffer, Luther-King, Mother Theresa, Desmond Tutu and others. Often they’ve been met by stony silence or rude rebuff by Jesus’ followers.

The great faith of this mother who breaks all boundaries out of love is a model and challenge for our time. The Canaanite women would not accept the idea that Jesus was only sent for certain people. Her faith melted that barrier. It calls all of us to receive what Jesus has to offer and to push the limits and boundaries ourselves as we present that same Jesus and what he offers to others. We need to make the church a place to which a modern Canaanite woman, disadvantaged, despised and marginalised within society can come with her plea, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!”  And we need to make that church a place from which the word goes out, as from the Lord himself, “You have great faith. Your request is granted!”

We can’t afford to be triumphalist in relation to God’s grace. I regularly meet Christians who are so certain that they know the mind of God that they are incredibly confident about the fate of others come the final judgement. People they have never met, including a fair few Christians, are all consigned to eternal damnation in their view because those people don’t accept to the letter a particular understanding of Christianity.

I’m a great fan of the writer C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. For those of you who are unfamiliar with them, Lewis writes a series of what appear to be children’s adventure stories, set in the land of Narnia, the most famous of which is “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”. However, Lewis wasn’t simply a children’s writer but a theologian, and the Narnia stories are a Christian allegory: in “The Last Battle”, which is a story dealing with the end times and judgement, there is an exchange between Aslan, the Christian God figure, and Emeth, a follower of the God Tash, who is surprised to find himself on the right side of Aslan’s judgement. In this allegory of the Christian story, Lewis is suggesting that God’s grace is, indeed, extended beyond the limits we might expect, but that is down to God’s grace and not our judgement. God may well choose to act towards others in ways which surprise us and it is not for us to decide who’s in and who’s out.

Emeth says to Aslan: “Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine, but a servant of Tash.” Aslan answered “Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me. If any man swears an oath to Tash and keeps the oath for the oath’s sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he knew it not and it is I who reward him.” Emeth replied “Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days.” “Beloved”, said the Glorious one, “unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek.”

I think many of us would do well to ponder on that idea. Unless we find ourselves behind a big wall in God’s Kingdom, we might just be surprised who else is there.

Amen.