Not Too Big to Learn

Not Too Big to Learn
Matthew 15:10-28; Genesis 45:1-15; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32

There are lots of passages in scripture that offend readers. Today’s gospel reading has one of most offensive passages. In the first part of the reading we cheer for Jesus. We like it when the bad guys, in this case the Pharisees, get put in their place by Jesus’ actions or words. But the second half of the reading always jars us. We find Jesus’ attitude and language shocking. Nice Jesus doesn’t talk to people in that way. It goes against the grain of nearly every story about Jesus. It is just so uncharacteristic of Jesus.

Yet the story is an appropriate one for Jesus and for us. Matthew has carefully crafted his narrative to bring several points to his readers through the combining of these two readings. The first part of the reading is about people who are socially accepted who emphasize external differences and miss matters of the heart. In the second incident a woman who is not socially accepted breaks through external differences to claim God’s mercy. In the first situation Jesus has all the right words to teach his hearers about God’s grace, but in the second, it is the woman who has the right words which alter the way Jesus responds to her need.

Every time this reading comes around in the lectionary cycle there are discussions in Internet sermon groups about whether or not Jesus is insensitive or even demeaning towards this woman. After all, on other occasions he is quite gracious to both men and women who are not Jewish. He recognizes the dignity of the woman at the well, the faith of Roman military officer, the thankfulness of the Gentile leper who returns after his healing, and the responsiveness of Zacchaeus. But in this scene he comes across as abusive.

In another aspect, Jesus seems to be keeping on task. When he sent the disciples out earlier he told them not to go to the Gentiles. He reaffirms that task as he initially rebuffs the woman’s persistent request, “I’ve been sent only to the lost sheep, the people of Israel.”  This is not a story that sets up a mission campaign to the Gentiles, like some Billy Graham crusade. It is a story about a Gentile woman taking the initiative to encounter Jesus, much like the woman with the hemorrhage who seeks to touch his coattails.

If Jesus isn’t being snotty with the woman, then he comes off as inept or wrong, something which is equally contrary to our usual picture of Jesus.

Jesus is the consummate teacher. The situation doesn’t matter. He is always in teaching mode. These two incidents, the reaction of the Pharisees and the request of the Gentile woman, are no different.

“Don’t you know that everything that goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” The sewer carries away all the things that we put into our bodies that may not be very good for them. Or in the case of the highly observant Jews of Jesus’s day, any foods that are thought to be ritually unclean. Or, heaven forbid, failing to wash your hands before eating. You and I know what happens that when we eat things that disagree with us. Just forward our mail to the necessary room. In time everything gets flushed and we get back to being normal.

Unfortunately what comes out of our mouths doesn’t have the same result. Our careless words, our spiteful and hate-filled words, our lies, our abusive behavior of other human beings, our evil are harmful and do not pass away.

A popular children’s moment about this topic has the leader emptying a tube of toothpaste and asking the children if they can get the paste back in the tube. Another even messier demonstration is to empty a feather pillow outdoors in a breeze and have them try to get all the feathers back. It’s not going to happen.

Jesus uses the encounter with the Gentile woman as a teachable moment. He does so not by lecturing but by giving us an example of learning, a laboratory experience of growing in faith. His encounters with the religious establishment frequently ended with the spiritual know-it-alls reprimanding Jesus for attempting to tell them about God. As Jesus encounters the Gentile woman seeking mercy and healing for her daughter, Jesus models the grace of learning, the grace of experiencing that God’s way and will is always bigger than we want to allow.

The woman shouted, “Show me mercy!” In our English that appears to be a noun. But in Matthew’s Greek it is a verb, the same verb that describes the mercy that the merciful receive in the Beatitudes. She seeks to benefit from the breadth of God’s ruling activity. Added to that, when she pleads, “Help me,” she is echoing Peter’s plea when he was sinking in his attempt to walk on water. Both the woman and Peter want to experience the reality of God’s ruling activity in Jesus’ actions.

As the woman beseeches Jesus she uses what we would assume are key words about him, “Lord,” which could simply be “sir,” and “Son of David,” a title for Jesus favored by Matthew. But Jesus doesn’t respond to either title.

The woman violates every sense of the boundaries that were expected in those days – her ethnicity, her gender, her heritage, her religion, and even the concept of demon possession. In the grand scheme of Matthew’s approach to telling the good news of Jesus Christ, the woman believes that she and her daughter are people who should benefit from the in-breaking of God’s kingdom, God’s ruling activity announced in and through the personal presence of Jesus. So she is willing to ignore social protocol. In doing so, she dramatically reveals the depth of her faith. Thus she is very much like the Roman military officer who sees faith in terms of chain of command.

The woman believes that she and her daughter should receive mercy from the active engagement of God with creation. This is what Jesus calls faith. This is what Jesus elicits from her in the same way that a well-trained teacher enables a student to think out the problem-solving steps and arrive at the solution. Jesus models good faith formation practice as he encourages the woman to speak her faith. Matthew’s Jesus is big enough not to appear to be ashamed to learn.

Learning is a struggle. And it gets harder all the time. We are sometimes hampered by declining eyesight and hearing. Sometimes it just that the thought processes don’t react as fast as they once did. And sometimes, like some of the Pharisees that Jesus encountered, we don’t want to have opinions challenged by facts or by new information. Yet Jesus models for us the reality that we must always be ready to enlarge our vision of God’s activity. Any time we think that God can’t or won’t do something, we set ourselves up for an awakening that won’t be comfortable.

We are used to operating on our own. In the world of computing, engineers have discovered that there are limits to what single super-computer can do. But to their surprise, they have found that hundreds and thousands of small computers working in parallel networks can solve tremendous mathematical problems which would bog down a single large computer.

In the matter of faith, it takes the sum of all of our spiritual capacity as a community of faith to even begin to consider the breadth and depth of God’s activity. And more than likely, God’s activity won’t be in the mundane and everyday. It will be in the oddball, off-the-wall activity of people who are at the margins of life, who live beyond the pale of what so many of us think as acceptable. This is because God is always trying to teach us that God’s grace knows no bounds and is God’s business, not ours.

Jesus invites us to be faithfully big enough to be constantly learning beyond the edges of our faith.

Let us pray.

Teacher par excellence, model for us ways in which we may learn more readily your ways and means of grace. Show us that redemption is not a matter of rote memorization. Instill in us an irrepressible native curiosity for kingdom living and an effervescent sharing of the gospel. Hear our prayer, Jesus, our teacher and master. Amen.

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2014 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.