Holy Work

 

Text: Matthew 15:21-28

The story of Jesus’s encounter with The Canaanite Woman in Matthew is not my favorite Bible story. The way Jesus calls that desperate woman a dog makes me feel embarrassed and angry. 

Some people say, oh, he’s just talking about pet puppies, but back in Chapter 7, Jesus was clear. Don’t give what is holy to dogs. Do not profane the holy. The word he uses is not pet puppy. So this is not my favorite story. 

But it is a really important story - because in it we see Jesus look at his beliefs in light of a new experience and understanding, and see him change his mind. This is an example and a lesson for us.

Changing one’s mind, turning around one’s traditional beliefs, is hard. And it is sometimes messy and difficult. We worry about being called a waffler, a flip-flopper, inconsistent, fickle. We worry about appearing to dishonor tradition, worry that doing things a new way, or embracing a new point of view, suggests that we are casting aside our parents, our society, our history, and saying that our family, our society, our history, our former belief or action, was bad. A change of mind or opinion might be a threat to the memory of those we mean to honor.

And in terms of religion, Jesus, Emmanuel, God-with-us, changing his mind seems like it might be a threat to the idea that God is immutable. 

But actually, there are several places in the Hebrew Bible where God changes course in light of new information. Usually it is when God has planned destruction but in the face of repentance or vulnerability God decides to hold back. Sometimes Abraham stands before God and says, please don’t do that, you’re not that kind of God. Please change your mind. The king of Nineveh in the book of Jonah tells his people that they should repent and hope that God will change God’s mind about destroying them - and God does do that, to Jonah’s frustration, so God has to remind the angry Jonah that these Ninevites are God’s people too.

And also God sometimes decides to do a new thing that expands the notion of who even are God’s people. In Deuteronomy God declares that certain people are excluded from “the assembly of the Lord.” But the prophet Isaiah reports that God has now declared the Temple to be house of prayer for all people, specifically naming those formerly prohibited in Deuteronomy.

And those formerly named people were all from the outer edge of the category we might called minority or marginalized today - not just the sick or poor or needy, but the damaged and the hated. The Not Like Us people.

So it feels really important to see Jesus change his mind, even if it is hard to watch from the beginning -  to see Jesus allowing himself  to respond with the grace and mercy that is his essential self  to someone who he initially considered beneath his notice and not his problem. It feels really important to see that it is holy work to change one’s mind when it comes to extending grace, love, mercy, respect and dignity.

It also feels really important to see the Canaanite woman persist in the face of Jesus’s dismissal of her, in the face of his rude comment. 

She doesn’t sit meekly and wait but instead insists that her supplication for mercy be heard. She entreats Jesus to look at her and see her as a human being and not just as a woman and a foreigner, a person with no value or agency. She struggles with Jesus, she engages him, and she tells him her truth, because she has nothing to lose by begging for mercy and in light of his experience, when he really hears what she is saying and recognizes the part he has to play in this situation -indeed recognizes THAT he has a part to play in the situation - recognizes that, as one theologian put it, God is not enslaved by any theology, even one announced by God’s son - (because as valuable as theology is, it need not stand in the way of divine compassion) and so Jesus changes his mind and restores the daughter to health.

But I want to emphasize that this is not a story in which we say, look how Jesus got bested by this woman who challenged him on social issues. Rather, it is an invitation for us to be challenged ourselves for our own biases and our own tendencies to be certain about who God does and does not want to receive justice and mercy and how we think that others should behave when they are seeking that justice and mercy.

We are a divided people in many ways. This is not totally new for any society but our divisions right now feel real and urgent. It is very temping to want to compartmentalize social issues and the practice of our faith. But time and again Jesus shows us that faith is how we live based on what we believe, not just a matter what we believe as if that exists in a vacuum.

We people of faith live in the world with all its issues confronting us daily. Further, we are being confronted with people who have been traditionally marginalized wanting us to hear them, to hear their experience and their frustration at the lack of justice and mercy extended to them. We are being asked not meekly but boldly sometimes.

We are also being asked to recognize our privileges and our prejudices in order to engage in the healing of some very deep wounds, in order to respond to these words, spoken or unable to be spoken, “Help me.”

And it is messy. It is difficult. Everyone is not behaving perfectly, and that makes us want to turn away.  But that’s basically what privilege is, isn’t it? being able to turn away without consequence. Jesus could turn away and his mission would go on. But that desperate woman would live forever with her torment.And she is one of God’s people, too.

So I believe this is holy work, struggling with our histories, our biases, and our fears of losing what we have. It is holy work to allow ourselves to be confronted by others’ truths and experiences and to be willing to change our minds, to expand our understanding, to grow.

And it is holy work to recognize in ourselves that we have a part to play in God’s dream for the world. We have the power to stand up for those who are crying out for justice and mercy, to give them our support and lend them our voices if need be, to recognize their dignity and their pain. We have the power to bind up the wounded and bring good news to the desperate. We have the power to change our minds and grow in faith, love and charity with all God’s children as imperfect as they and we all are.

So it has always been and so it shall always be ever since Jesus, our example of Godly life, came to be our savior and our guide.