As we have followed the story of Jesus in recent weeks through Matthew’s gospel, we have listened to episodes of his teaching alternating with readings where we have seen him in action. This week we have a bit of both.
Much of the teaching has been hard to listen to, and still is if we can allow ourselves to hear it with fresh ears. Remember: ‘I have not come to bring peace but a sword’; remember ‘whoever loves a son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me?’; remember ‘take up your cross’? These are shocking phrases, if only we can hear them as his original audience would have done.
And so too is today’s line that it doesn’t matter what you eat. Saying that to a first century Jew must have been about as shocking as telling Bible-belt Christians that reading the scriptures is a waste of time, or announcing to Evangelicals that it doesn’t matter what they believe, or telling Catholics they can dispense with mass. For a first century Jew, food rules, knowing and eating only what it is permissible to eat, is what distinguished the People of God from the gentiles, the righteous from the unrighteous. Yet in one fell swoop Jesus cancels or radically revises large tracts of Hebrew Scripture – all the kosher laws to be found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.
Imagine if I were to stand here and tell you that being a Christian has nothing to do with going to church. Of course, in one sense I’d be right: God isn’t going to look at our church attendance when we are weighed on the scales. Our religious practices are neither here nor there. But any preacher who stands up and says such things is bound to sound both offensive and divisive. ‘How dare he!’ some will say; ‘Ah yes, but what he really means…’ others will begin.
So what did Jesus really mean? Exactly what he goes on to say: it’s our words that matter; what comes out of our mouths is what breaks or makes a right relationship with our neighbour, and consequently with God. Indeed, in much of life, words are our main deeds: just ask any married couple – they’ll be able to confirm of that!
Words are a major pollutant in social life: never has this been as obvious as now, when social media allow anyone and everyone to spew out their knee-jerk reactions and uncensored opinions instantaneously; the stories my university students used to tell me about the cyber-bullying that went on in their school years are hair-curling, both for their cruelty and for their ubiquitousness. But the real problem is not that words can offend people: nothing is less true than the school-ground chant ‘sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me’. Words can be the deadliest of weapons. Advocates of political correctness run around in the middle of a battle-field handing out sticking plasters. However, for Jesus, the danger of words was a different one: words are a major pollutant because they reveal and broadcast what is swirling around inside our hearts and in our heads. And Jesus takes a dim, but realistic view of what that is likely to be.
Having said all this, as we pass on to the second part of our gospel, from our Lord’s teaching to his action, to Jesus’s conversation with the Canaanite woman, the problem seems to be of the order we have just been considering: Jesus’s initial rejection of the woman, merely on the grounds that she is not a Jew, his insinuation that her kind are nothing but dogs, strikes our ears as blatant racism. This is one of the most difficult stories in the New Testament canon.
‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ And this to a woman who comes to Jesus in desperation over her daughter’s torment. Perhaps one can excuse this remark as the product from the culture from which he came, an example of Jewish disdain for the Gentile world. Or one might claim that it is difficult to hear the tone of voice, or to catch nuances of an exchange that took place two thousand years ago and has been translated from Aramaic to Greek to English. But honestly, such excuses don’t wash.
However, what we do see in this passage is Jesus undergoing a change of heart: it teaches us as much about the struggle of Jesus to find the will of God as it does about the struggle of the woman to get Jesus to help her. We can read it as a sort of Gentile Gethsemane: right before our eyes we see him break away from the provincialism of his natural Jewish tradition, and open himself up for mission to the whole world.
Let us try to get over our shock over those words about throwing the children’s food to dogs by looking at some of the other lines in the dialogue. There’s the Canaanite woman’s tact and deference: ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David’; there’s the disciples self-centred impatience: ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us’. And then, initially, there is Jesus silence: ‘He did not answer her at all’. Why not? Where were his thoughts in that moment? And when he does speak we are not told to whom: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel’. Is this a non-committal reply to the woman, an aside to the disciples, or is he communing with himself, struggling to redefine his calling? And yes, that line about the dogs might just have been said with a twinkle in his eye, delivered with tenderness and humour – we’ll never know.
Ultimately, everyone here gets what they want: the girl is healed, the mother has obtained healing from Jesus on her behalf, and Jesus himself has learned something about himself and his mission.
And what can we take away from this incident? One lesson might be to re-examine our prejudices: where is God challenging us to look again at long-held views of the world? One area that comes to mind is how our generation has been asked to reconsider the rights and status of the LGBQ community; another, is how the various denominations of Christian church view and relate to each other; how we view people of other faiths, or immigrants, are further candidates to consider as we read the story of our Lord’s U-turn when confronted by the Canaanite woman.
Another, sadder lesson derives from the disciples’ behaviour: just as their attitude was selfish and devoid of compassion, still today there are plenty of discouraging disciples to be found in our churches.
But finally, and above all, is the need to guard our speech and to weigh our words. As Jesus’s brother James wrote: ‘the tongue is a fire, a world of iniquity… it is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison’. True religion, so Jesus taught, lies in so transforming our hearts that our tongues our tamed.