Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

          Okay, so the Gospel passage we just heard is probably not in any preacher’s top five favorite passages to preach about – probably not even in the top ten or even twenty.  It’s more than a little shocking and confusing.  It’s certainly not what I would have picked for the weekend we are welcoming our students to campus.  And I will admit that my first instinct as a homilist when faced with this reading is to punt – to pick one of the other readings to preach about and pretend that Jesus never said this, that this didn’t happen, and that we didn’t just hear this.  “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”  It just sounds too close to some of the hateful rhetoric that, sadly, we are all too accustomed to hearing in recent days.  What is going on here?  Why would Jesus say this?  While it may be easier to dodge the issue, I think we just have to tackle it head on.

          Some might argue that Jesus says this because He is, after all, a product of His own particular culture and time, and that His statement would simply have been a reflection of the prevalent biases of that culture and time.  And so, some might say, “Who could blame him?  In his humanity, he simply didn’t know any better. He had been raised that way by the culture around him, and he let it slip.  But, more importantly, when rebuked, he changed his mind and changed his tone.”

          I have a couple of problems with this argument.  First of all, on a theological level it is problematic, as it pits Jesus’ humanity against His divinity.  It presents a kind of “schizophrenic” Jesus, which was just the sort of idea so many fought against in the early Church because it didn’t reflect the authentic teaching of the Apostles that had been passed down to them.  Yes, Jesus is fully and truly human, but He is also fully and truly divine.  To suggest that Jesus made a racial slur here (even if partially conditioned to do so by his culture), would be to say that He sinned, that He set His human will against His divine will. And this, frankly, is heresy.  Yes, Jesus was human, in fact He was most authentically human.  But, here’s the thing, while sin is now a part of our human reality (because of our misuse of God’s gift of free will), it is not authentically and originally human to sin.  Sin doesn’t make us more human; it makes us less human.  For this reason, when we see something like the recent attacks in Spain or Finland, we say, “How inhuman?  How could another human being do that?”  We know that is not humanity at its best.   It is not a true reflection of our humanity, which was created in the image and likeness of God.  So, yes, Jesus is human, authentically human, but not just human.  He is also God.  And God cannot be set against Himself.

          The second issue I have with the argument that Jesus simply put His foot in His mouth here, is that in the wider context of Matthew’s Gospel and especially in the wider context of Jesus’ public ministry as reflected in all four Gospels, this just doesn’t fit.  Looking just at Matthew’s Gospel in the chapters preceding this episode, I think we find ample evidence that Jesus wishes no ill will toward those who are not part of the house of Israel.

In Chapter 2, the infant Jesus is visited and paid homage by the “magi from the East,” non-Jews, representing in a sense the wider mission of salvation for which this child has been born.  In Chapter 4 Jesus begins His public ministry in, of all places, Galilee, which was known as “Galilee of the Gentiles,” that is a largely non-Jewish territory.  In Chapter 5, as part of the “Sermon on Mount,” Jesus preaches about love, even of one’s enemies.  In Chapter 8 Jesus cures a Roman (and therefore, pagan) centurion’s son.  In Chapter 9 Jesus heals two men possessed by demons in the country of the Gadarenes, which, like Galilee, was also largely non-Jewish.  In Chapter 12 Jesus cures many people, including many Gentiles, and Matthew makes a special point to connect this to the prophesy of Isaiah about the servant of God who will come and “proclaim justice to the Gentiles,” and in whose name the Gentiles will hope.  Perhaps, most poignantly, in the passages just preceding this episode, earlier in the same chapter, Jesus is having a sparring match with the Pharisees and the scholars of the law, about their slavish obedience to tradition and he calls out their hypocrisy.  More than all of this, I believe (as most scholars do) that Matthew’s Gospel was written for a primarily Jewish audience, not simply to court them, but also to gently, but firmly correct them.  So, given all of that, as I say, it just doesn’t fit for me that Jesus would simply let this slip, much less that he would deliberately make such a hurtful statement to put down this Canaanite woman.

          So, if it’s not that, then why did He say it?  I have a couple of theories.  First, especially given what immediately precedes this passage, it could be that Jesus wanted to call out and reflect back to some in his listening audience their own very real biases.  Perhaps He knew that within ear shot, perhaps even amongst His own disciples, there were some who actually held these attitudes.  And so, in an almost Saturday Night Live, parody-esque way He makes this outlandish statement.  In other words, by putting into words what He knew many around Him were probably thinking He effectively calls out and mirrors back to them the utter ridiculousness of their position.  Now, I would generally not advise using this strategy, as it can (as we have seen) easily be misinterpreted, but I think Jesus might actually pull it off here.

          My second theory as to why Jesus would say such a thing, is that there is much more going on that we can discern from the written word on the page.  For example, Matthew doesn’t clue us in to the facial expressions of Jesus or of the Canaanite woman.  But as I read this I can almost hear the playful repartee of my own family.  I don’t know about your families, but my family enjoys a sarcastic sense of humor and we like to tease each other a little bit.  In my family, it’s actually seen as a form of affection.  But for new family members, for example when someone marries into the family who was not raised with this sense of humor, it can be a little alarming at first.  I especially think of some of the exchanges between my sister, Barb, and brother-in-law, Randy, my sister Anne’s husband.  To the uninitiated, the darts sent flying across the room by them might seem like “fighting words,” but they are said and received with a twinkle in the eye and a smirk on the lips.

          So, who’s to say that in this exchange there wasn’t a playful twinkle in the eye (maybe even a “wink,” if they “winked” back then) as Jesus said, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”  Wittily, she fires back, “Please Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters,” with a similar glint in the eye.  To which Jesus responds with an immediate, joyful, and boisterous, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish” (a pretty abrupt change).  And, “from that hour,” the woman’s daughter was healed.

          And so, yes, I think this passage is less about exposing a perceived character flaw in Jesus and more about Jesus cleverly exposing a known character flaw in his audience, and frankly, in us.

          The events of the past couple of weeks in our nation have once again exposed the harsh reality of racism.  And as far as we have come, we know that this evil still exists, and sadly, is alive and well in some pockets of our society.  I pray that the events of these past weeks, taken together with this Gospel passage, might give us pause to check our own attitudes, and perhaps even hidden prejudices and biases.  Perhaps this can be a time of both a societal and personal “examination of conscience,” not meant simply to shame us, but to lift us from former ways to newness of life in Christ.  To love our neighbor, to welcome the stranger is not on the periphery of our Christian faith, but at the heart of it.  And it is, of course, something we take very seriously here at Saint Ambrose.  To take up the word of the Lord spoken through the prophet Isaiah in our first reading, may this house “be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”