Matthew 15:21-28

Are there stories or sayings in the Bible that make you uncomfortable?  This story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman has really bothered me for a long time, mostly because at first reading Jesus come off as a bit of a jerk.   

But here’s the thing:  I think this story is supposed to be disturbing.  It’s supposed to bother us.  This story is begging us to do our homework, because we won’t even begin to understand what Jesus is up to here unless we dig into some history and social context.  I’m pretty sure that Jesus was aiming for a particular reaction from his disciples and I think he wants that same reaction from us.  But for us to get to the “aha moment” here, we really need to go back.  Way back.  All the way back to Noah.

But before we set the Wayback Machine for Noah, let’s go back to what happened just before Jesus encountered this bothersome and determined Canaanite woman. 

At the end of the previous chapter, after a stormy night on the lake where Jesus walked on water and Peter tried to, they landed at the little town of Gennesaret.  As always, a crowd gathered and Jesus started teaching.  But before he got very far some Pharisees and scribes started to give him a bad time because his disciples didn’t wash their hands before eating.  So Jesus tells the crowd to gather round then says, “Listen and understand:  it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person.  It’s what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”  This offended the Pharisees.  And it probably offended them even more when Jesus called them blind guides of the blind.  

But Peter wanted to hear more about what goes into the mouth versus what comes out.  I really like how Eugene Peterson rendered this bit of dialogue in The Message:

“Peter said, ‘I don’t get it. Put it in plain language.’

“Jesus replied, “You too? Are you being willfully stupid?  Don’t you know that anything that is swallowed works its way through the intestines and is finally defecated?  But what comes out of the mouth gets its start in the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, and cussing.  That’s what pollutes. Eating or not eating certain foods, washing or not washing your hands—that’s neither here nor there.’”

So keep all that in mind—those things that come out of the heart by way of the mouth to pollute life—keep all that in the back of your mind because suddenly the story shifts and in one brief sentence Jesus walks about fifty miles to the region of Tyre and Sidon.

Why?  Why Tyre and Sidon?  Did he just want to put some distance between himself and the Pharisees and scribes?  Why does he suddenly head off for Gentile territory?  Why, of all places, Sidon?

Well to answer that, we go all the way back to Noah.  

After Noah left the ark he planted a vineyard.  He grew some grapes and made some wine.  And then he got drunk and fell asleep naked in his tent.  Like you do.  Noah’s son, Ham, wandered by, noticed that his father was naked, and covered him up which actually seems like a pretty decent thing to do.  But when Noah woke up things got weird. He was furious that Ham saw him in such a state, so he cursed Ham with a curse that would apply to all of his descendants.  

They took cursing very seriously in those days, especially being cursed by your father.  Being cursed was devastating.  It was the opposite pole of blessing.  A blessing could give you a bright vision of your future and a big dose of optimism to help make it come true.  A curse would make your life a living nightmare. It would haunt you and hang over you like a shadow.  

So Ham was cursed.  And so was his son, Canaan.  And so was Canaan’s son, Sidon.  And on down the line.

Sidon, Noah’s grandson, inheritor of the curse, ended up having a lot of sons and grandsons and great-grandsons and so on until Sidon became a great nation.  And because Sidon’s territory butted right up against Israel, and because  the two nations were somewhat less than friendly, the nation of Sidon shows up fairly often in the history and scriptures of Israel.  

In the Book of Judges, the Sidonians conquer and oppress the Israelites.  King Solomon married several Sidonian women who then induced him to worship their goddess, Ashtoreth.  King Ahab married a Sidonian Princess.  You’ve probably heard of her.  Her name was Jezebel and she caused all kinds of trouble, especially when she kept trying to kill the prophet Elijah.  Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah all predicted judgment and doom for Sidon because of their idolatry.  When the Assyrians and later the Babylonians conquered Israel, they launched their ships from Tyre and their armies from Sidon.  

For devout and even slightly patriotic Jews, the region of Tyre and Sidon was not a friendly place.  In their eyes, the people there were cursed.

So why did Jesus go there?  

Jesus went there to put some distance between himself and the Pharisees and scribes.  Physical distance, cultural distance, and historical distance.  And also to make a point about God’s love and grace.  But we’ll get to that.

They had no sooner arrived than a woman ran up and started screaming at them. The NRSV and other translation say she shouted, which sounds slightly nicer, but the Greek word Matthew uses is ekrazen which has a sense of both screaming and crying.  It’s a very emotional word.  

So this Canaanite woman—Mark specifies that she was Syrophoenician—comes rushing up to them and with tears and wailing pleads with Jesus to free her daughter from a demon that is  tormenting her.  “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon!”  Kyrie eleison. 

And Jesus . . . ignores her.  

So she starts to plead with the disciples and pesters them to do something.  And no matter how they try to put her off, she won’t give up.  Because she’s a Mom.  A good Mom.  So finally they come to Jesus and beg him to intervene. “Send her away!” they said.  “She’s driving us crazy!”  

And this is where Jesus says the first thing that makes him sound like a jerk.  Jesus turns to this desperate woman who is frantic with fear for her demon-assaulted daughter and says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

What!!???  Jesus! What the…???

But she comes and kneels down in front of him and begs him.  “Lord, help me.”  

And this is where Jesus doubles down and says something truly ugly, something that makes him sound like a complete bigot.  “It’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

He calls her a dog.  

And there is no way to translate that that takes away any of the sting and insult.

How does this make any sense at all?  Did Jesus, the same Jesus who was criticized for hanging out with tax collectors and “sinners,” the same Jesus who crossed all kinds of boundaries to embrace all kinds of outcasts, the same Jesus who touched lepers! did this Jesus trek all the way to the heart of Sidon just to insult this poor woman with a racial slur?

Yes.  Yes he did. Jesus schlepped all the way to Sidon to create a teaching moment that his disciple and all his followers forever after would not forget.

In this moment with this desperate woman, Jesus is saying aloud what his disciples are thinking.  He wants them to hear the ugliness of their attitudes out loud.  He has led them to the neighborhood of “those people,” the ones who they think are inferior, the one who they think are cursed.  The ones who, in their understanding, God doesn’t much care for. 

I am not for one moment suggesting that the disciples in particular or Jews in general were xenophobic.  I’m suggesting that almost all of us are to one degree or another.   We humans have a bad tendency to “other” each other.

Jesus wants us to hear what our othering attitudes sound like to someone on the receiving end.  He wants us to hear the ugliness of even our most benign bigotries expressed out loud in the presence of someone who is “not one of us,” not our clan, not our race, not of our culture or religion or denomination or neighborhood. Someone who doesn’t speak our language.  He wants us to hear what overt othering sounds like to someone we are prepared to dislike or disregard or even hate for no reason at all except for a long-nurtured history of othering and mistrust handed down through the generations.  He wants us to hear just how brutal inherited ill will can really be.  He wants us to understand that it has consequences.

It’s not what goes into the mouth that pollutes, it’s what comes out of the mouth. What comes out of the mouth comes from the heart. It’s from the heart that we vomit up evil arguments, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, lies, blasphemies, bigotries, othering and racism.  That’s what pollutes us.  That’s what poisons us generation after generation.  

“It’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” said Jesus.  “Yes Lord, she said, but even the dogs get to eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.” “Woman, great is your faith!” said Jesus. “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

Such faith.  Such amazing faith to let herself be ignored then insulted and degraded all in the hope of some kind of help for her daughter, all for a scrap from the table of God’s healing love and grace.  All for a lesson that far too many of us still seem all to reluctant to learn.