This week’s lectionary text is actually just the last part of what I read, the story of the Canaanite woman. But this is one week in which I disagree with the way the lectionary selected the passage, as I think the story of the Canaanite woman is best understood when paired with what happens in verses 1-20. Jesus’ encounter with the Pharisees and Scribes, as well as his encounter with the Canaanite woman, are stories full of expectations not met.
Let’s set this story up first. We begin with Jesus and the disciples in Gennesaret, on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee. You may remember that this was the disciples destination when Jesus came walking to them on the water. They’re ministering here in Gennesaret, and at this point they are pretty far from Jerusalem, about 80 miles north. Jesus’ ministry is stirring up some problems among the religious leaders of the day, who find Jesus here and begin on another smear campaign against him. According to the New Interpreter’s Study Bible, the Pharisees and Scribes were typically more interested in discrediting opponents than fairly representing their own views. So here come the big, bad, religious leaders, all the way up from Jerusalem to set this renegade group straight. These so called “disciples” of this so called “Messiah” are not following temple law of washing their hands before they eat. They are not going through purification rituals that the church has set up. They’re really not happy with Jesus claiming to be the Messiah, because the Messiah predicted in Hebrew Scripture would surely be a strict adherent to religious law. The Messiah that these religious leaders were expecting was not one who would ignore such important purification rituals. Surely, the Messiah would be the most concerned about ritual purification, because, well, he’s the Messiah, the most pure of them all! So this Jesus guy must not be the Messiah, because he’s not at all what they expect.
But Jesus is the Messiah, regardless of whether he meets the expectations of the religious leaders. And when we turn the camera around and see Jesus’ side of this encounter, we find he is also expecting something different from these religious leaders. He expects the Pharisees and Scribes, as religious leaders, to have their hearts turned toward God. It’s really not that unrealistic of an expectation, one might think. He is God incarnate, walking around the world only to discover that the people who are supposedly the “closest to God”, i.e. the religious leaders, are merely paying lip service to the one who sent him. They follow the religious traditions and laws, but Jesus clearly sees that they are not as pure as he expects. They do not have their hearts turned toward God, and they do not truly worship God, because they are more concerned with tradition than they are with worshiping God. In fact, Jesus argues that they take God’s word and twist it around to meet their agendas. This is not what Jesus expects from religious leaders. This is not what he expects from those who are within the walls of the religious community, those who are the insiders.
Clearly, he expects the insiders to truly have their hearts turned toward God rather than merely paying lip service to God. He doesn’t expect them to be hypocrites. But sadly, he’s encountered too many people who don’t practice what they preach. And I think Jesus as we see him in this passage is a Jesus getting close to the boiling point. He’s obviously getting frustrated at people speaking as insiders but not backing it up with their actions.
And at this point, he leaves and heads even further from Jerusalem, where there’s little chance of finding another hypocritical insider. He’s in Tyre and Sidon, another 30 miles or so further from Jerusalem than where he was, and he’s in a primarily Gentile area. And it must be noted that at this point, Jesus is further from Jerusalem than in any other point in his ministry. For whatever reason, he has come to the most remote place in his ministry from the center of Judaism. He is among the outsiders, the far outsiders, here in Tyre and Sidon.
So then we have an outsider, a Canaanite woman, approaching him. And get this – she’s using insider language! She addresses him as “Lord, Son of David”! New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson notes that in Matthew’s gospel, such an address would be found only on the lips of insiders – disciples, particularly. In fact, “Lord” is never found on the lips of Judas, the betrayer. For Matthew, it’s a clear way to distinguish who are insiders and who are outsiders.
So Jesus hears an outsider, a way-outsider, speaking as an insider. And this immediately follows frustration with hypocritical religious leaders who speak as insiders but act as outsiders. So naturally, Jesus is suspicious of this woman. She has come to plead for the healing of her daughter, but does this outsider truly believe that Jesus has the power to do so? Does she truly have faith that he can perform a miracle of healing? Jesus is obviously a bit skeptical of her faith, and his frustration with hypocrites comes to a head as he ignores her, then compares her to a dog. Essentially, he says, “I was sent to the children of Israel, and you are merely a dog trying to steal food from these children. How dare you try to manipulate me,” he seems to be saying. He is very frustrated, and very skeptical that this woman has any interest in him beyond what she can get out of him. Honestly, how much would someone all the way up here know about Jesus anyway? How could this outsider, in this place, have faith in him?
But unexpectedly, she fights back against Jesus with a great response. She doesn’t deny she’s a dog, but shows that even dogs deserve the children’s scraps. She proves that whether an outsider or insider, all are worthy of God’s love. Some say she even outwits Jesus here. I wouldn’t call it that, necessarily, but she is definitely proving her faith to Jesus. She’s proving that she has her heart turned toward God, and that has to mean something.
Jesus did not expect this outsider to have such faith. Heck, even the disciples, the most inside of all insiders, had just disappointed Jesus by not having faith in him when he was walking on the Sea of Galilee. He expressed to Peter, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” And here, he finds that the Canaanite woman has great faith. Great faith! Unlike the religious leaders, she does not merely pay lip service to God, but has her heart turned toward God. Unlike the disciples, she has great faith. And this is not what Jesus expected from her. He did not expect an outsider to have more faith than an insider.
And I can’t say that the Canaanite woman expected the Messiah to ignore her and then insult her. Just as the Pharisees and Scribes had their own expectations of the Messiah, one who would follow their traditions, the Canaanite woman expected the Messiah to be a warm and fuzzy Jesus, the Jesus that we prefer. Look around at the most popular images of Jesus in our churches today. Are we really all that different from her? We all love the images of Jesus smiling, the images of Jesus playing with children, the images of Jesus hugging everyone. Yes, we love us some soft, cuddly Jesus. And sometimes he’s like that. But other times he’s turning over tables in the temple or calling people dogs. And it’s these images of Jesus, the non-warm, non-fuzzy Jesus, that are not often depicted in art.
But as unappealing as this image of Jesus is, the Canaanite woman does not back down. She does not walk away from him just because Jesus is not exactly as she expected him to be. She persists in pleading for her daughter to be healed, and in this persistence shows her faith. Her faith acts as a foil to the Pharisees’ lack of faith. Because Jesus was not as the Pharisees expected, they did not believe he was the Messiah. But Jesus was also not as the Canaanite woman expected, and she reacted the opposite way: she continued to believe. And Jesus takes notice.
Some of you may be familiar with the movie Good Will Hunting. In the movie, the main character Will Hunting is a janitor at MIT who rides the subway into work from South Boston every morning. His lifestyle, his clothing, and his manner of speech are completely opposite of what is typically found among the students whose halls he cleans. These are intelligent, wealthy, successful students – the brightest scientific minds. At the beginning of the movie, an acclaimed MIT professor, one of the greatest mathematicians in the world, puts a practically unsolvable equation on the chalkboard outside his classroom. He expects that perhaps one student will be bright enough to figure it out by the end of the semester. Yet Will, the janitor, solves it in one night, and when the professor sees it the next day, he can muster no response except “This is brilliant.”
He immediately suspects it is a student, and when he discovers that the one who met his mathematical challenge is an uneducated janitor, he spends the rest of the movie struggling to come to grips with it. He and his colleagues become frustrated that someone without their academic training could actually be more intelligent than them. In short, Will Hunting is not what they expect to find as the one who solved the problem, and a brilliant mind is not what they expect to find in the head of a rough, foul mouthed janitor.
How often do we find people to be the opposite of what we expect them to be? These two stories in Matthew chapter 15 call us to question our expectations of other people, as well as our expectations of Jesus. In Matthew, there are “insiders” and “outsiders.” Nowadays, we call these two groups the “churched” and the “un-churched.” And what we typically expect is that the “churched” are the ones with great faith in Jesus Christ. The “un-churched” don’t really believe anything, we think, because if they did, they’d be hanging out with the “churched.” But just as Jesus encountered hypocrites in the church, we too find people in the midst of the group called the “churched” who really possess little to no faith. They are like Peter, who disappoints Jesus because of “little faith” and “doubting.” We don’t expect people within our own community of faith to have very little faith. We expect that anyone involved in a church has great faith in Christ.
Similarly, we rarely expect to find people with great faith among the un-churched. But they are there, and they are plentiful. I have encountered many people who have great faith in Christ, but refuse to go to church for a number of reasons. One such reason is – not coincidentally – the hypocrisy of churchgoers. But there are other reasons as well: they don’t know what being part of a church can do for them, they’ve never been invited, they were turned off by the atmosphere, they haven’t found a church they like, and so on. Regardless, what we must recognize is that churched and un-churched are not synonyms of faithful and lacking faith, respectively. The faith or lack of faith in people is very often not what we expect based on their level of involvement in a religious community. We must examine our expectations of others and really think about whether they are fair expectations. And we must not let the unexpected get in the way of our ministry. Jesus found the Canaanite woman to be not what he expected, yet he still performed the miracle of healing her daughter, still ministered to the woman of great faith. Jesus did not let the unexpected get in the way of his ministry, and neither can we.
We also find that the Canaanite woman met a Jesus that she was not expecting. She expected the warm and fuzzy, soft and cuddly Jesus, and what she met was the frustrated and angry, disappointed and skeptical, ignoring and insulting Jesus. By reading this text, we too meet this Jesus, and it is not what we expect from the Messiah either. We squirm in our seats as we hear our loving Savior ignoring people and then calling them dogs, questioning whether they really have faith. It’s just plain uncomfortable to hear. My first reaction when looking at this text was, “How am I going to preach on this? This is not my Father’s Jesus!”
We often have expectations of Jesus Christ that turn out to be misguided. But just as the Canaanite woman persevered and refused to let a hostile, skeptical Jesus deter her from believing in his power, we too must persevere and refuse to let unexpected images of Jesus deter us from having faith in whatever manifestation of God we encounter. No expectations are to get in the way of our ministry, or in the way of our faith in God the Creator, Christ the Redeemer, the Holy Spirit the Sustainer. It is only by the power of this Trinity that this truth is brought before us on this day. Amen.
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