Sermon 8-16-26
12th Sunday after Pentecost Mt. 15:10-28
I don't know about you folks but, I love competition. Anything competitive. Baseball, basketball, football, soccer, boxing, trivia contests, checkers, debating, anything like that. I've been a spectator, participant and coach. The one common factor I've noticed over the years is that the best team or individual, in the end, needs to have at least one or two losses. A loss is a learning tool.
Throughout all the Gospels Jesus was a champion debater, unparalleled or equaled in competition. He had two loses. One to a Canaanite woman and one to His mother.
Our Gospel reading from Matthew today is in two parts, it gives us an example of a rebuttal of one of His wins and a play by play of one of His losses.
It starts on the Plain of Gennesaret, just after the walking on water episode. Chapter fifteen begins with the sentence, “Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem”. We might believe they were waiting for Him when He got out of the boat. They immediately jump on Him and want to know why His disciples do not wash their hands before eating.
Jesus does not answer their question. Instead He counters their attack with a retaliation of His own. He asks them why they allow what was known as the Corban loophole to stand as oral law. That was a way to circumvent the 5th Commandment, “Honor your father and mother”. They were verbally and intellectually beaten to the ground. Our reading today begins here and He answers the Pharisees question to the group of people who were gathered there.
The people were the ones who needed an explanation. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles”.
The Pharisees were obsessed with the oral traditions. They taught that oral traditions were just as binding as the written law. They called them “oral law”, and felt oral rituals were religion. At that time and place they were still “oral”, memorized and repeated. The interpretations and traditions were not written down for another two hundred years into what is now called the Mishnah.
Jesus defined religion as the state of a person's heart and felt these regulations had nothing to do with religion.
This may have been for the devout Jew the most startling thing Jesus could ever say. He is not only refuting most oral traditions, but also large parts of the Book of Leviticus which means Law of the Priests. This saying by Jesus cancels most, if not all, of the food laws of the Old Testament.
These few sentences were enough to have Him committed to a death sentence. No wonder the disciples said, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?”
Hand washing was not required by the Old Testament written law for anyone but the Priest before a service. You have all watched me pour water on a Priest's hands during The Holy Communion for the past twenty-five or so years. It's called the “Lavabo Ceremony”. That hand washing is a carry over from Jewish tradition. It is not required and not mentioned in the Book of Common Prayer, but it is practiced in many parishes. I've seen it done in Episcopal churches from coast to coast.
While I am pouring the water, the Priest recites verse six of the 26th Psalm: “I will wash my hands in innocence, O Lord, that I may go in procession round your altar”.
Jesus explains to the people: Out of the heart come evil intentions. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile. Then Jesus packs up, nods to the disciples and heads northwest to the district of Tyre and Sidon.
Those are two towns on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, Gentile country. They were about 40 or so miles from the Plain of Gesennerate, two long days of walking. Scholars conjecture Jesus needed to get away from the large crowds to do some serious private teaching to the disciples. This was the first and only time Jesus left Jewish territory. No Jew would be likely to follow Him into Gentile country.
But, even in foreign territory Jesus was not free from His reputation.
“Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting”.
Canaanites were scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean region, mostly in what is modern day Israel. They were descendants of Canaan, the grandson of Noah. The name serves as an ethnic catch-all term. They worshiped a number of different gods including Baal. The Jewish people put them on par with the Samaritans or maybe even lower. The Jews called them dogs, right to their faces.
This Canaanite woman is shouting at Jesus. She wants everyone in the area to hear her while she plays the “mercy” card. Everything, I mean everything, in the Middle East is on public display. There is always a crowd in the street, ready to watch, judge and decide whether to grant honor or shame to anything that happens there.
Mercy is a sense of responsibility to God and other human beings. Asking for mercy means you are owed something. Showing mercy means acknowledging the debt and paying it. This woman knows how to play the game in spades, and does.
First she makes the request for mercy, then calls Jesus by an honorable title: Lord, Son of David, and states her request, meaning He owes her something. She has just placed Jesus between a rock and a hard place.
Jesus is not obliged to answer her challenge. She is a pagan Gentile, He is an Israelite. The honor/shame game can only be played by social equals. He ignores her. She only continues her request and probably increases the volume knob. The disciples urge Him to send her away. Jesus' answer to them may mean they want Him to heal her daughter, maybe, maybe not.
Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. That space between the rock and the hard place just got smaller.
These are the same disciples, standing in a circle around Jesus, who were sent by Him, just a few chapters earlier, with the distinct instructions not to go among the Gentiles, enter no town of the Samaritans and go only to the lost sheep of Israel. Look where we are now.
The pagan woman kneels on the ground at Jesus' feet and says, “Lord, help me”.
Jesus' response to that request is super hard to interpret. I sat at my desk, scratching my bald head, with fifteen books propped open in a circle around me, trying to figure out the response and I still do not know what to think. Was it an insult to the woman? Absolutely, without a doubt. Was that insult delivered with a twinkle in Jesus' eye? Maybe, maybe not.
“It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs”.
“Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table”.
One thing is for sure, Jesus knew her answer bested Him in the debate. He paid the debt she felt she was owed. Her daughter was healed instantly. Jesus' double header in this reading ended one and one.
Amen.
