Sermon on Matthew 15:10-28

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

Our Gospel reading today is tough, particularly the second half about Jesus’ encounter with a Canaanite woman.

Jesus doesn’t sound like himself. To my modern sensibilities, Jesus sounds inconsiderate, rude, and even prejudiced.

I miss the Jesus portrayed in the chapter before this: the generous Jesus in the feeding of the 5,000, the encouraging Jesus who invites Peter to walk on water, and the merciful Jesus who heals a bunch of people in Gennesaret.

But what we get in these two stories in chapter 15 is a Jesus who seems to be done with everyone’s nonsense. He lashes out at the grumbling Pharisees and then ignores the woman calling out to him on the road.

Scholars don’t agree on what to make of the story of the Canaanite woman. Plot twist: scholars agree on very little of pretty much anything.

But it’s worth unpacking some ideas, because they influence how we see Jesus here.

The Church early on came to the conclusion that Jesus is fully human and fully divine. Both at the same time – not 50-50 or any other breakdown, but 100-100. The mathematicians in the room can take any complaints up with the early church fathers.

But we don’t necessarily agree on what fully human and fully divine looks like to us.

We can lean more heavily on the divine side. For the nerdy folks among us, that’s called having a “high Christology.”

Someone with a high Christology might read this story and imagine that Jesus knew what the woman was going to say. He knew her heart and knew that if he said, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,”

she wouldmake the very witty comeback: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

And then Jesus would reward her cleverness and faithfulness by granting her request.

It also may be that Jesus was just responding the way a rabbi was expected to. He had his band of disciples and wouldn’t have been expected to talk to a woman, let alone a Canaanite—the age-old enemies of the Israelites.

But he did stop and talk with her. As much as his dialogue sounds demeaning to my ears, it’s not fair for me to impose my modern-day culture on the first century. Jesus could have let his disciples send her away, but he didn’t. He stopped and talked with her the way a rabbi would with a disciple. And she stepped into the role of a disciple and gave a wise response.

Maybe Jesus knew his disciples’ hearts and was using this as a teachable moment to show them some of their own prejudices before rewarding this marginalized mother. Perhaps he was illustrating his own lesson from the previous story that it’s what comes out of a person, like prejudice and lack of mercy, that defile and not eating with unwashed hands.

Whereas, someone who emphasizes Jesus’ humanity (called a “low Christology”), might look at what came before and see Jesus as burned-out.

Jesus at this point hadn’t had any time to grieve the death of John the Baptist. After hearing about John’s violent death, Jesus tried to go into the wilderness by himself, but a crowd of over 5,000 people followed him. After he fed them all, walked on water, healed a bunch of people, and got chewed out by the religious authorities because his disciples didn’t wash their hands, Jesus had had enough.

So, he left town with his disciples, and wouldn’t you know it? This random woman started shouting at him.

Jesus was exhausted, grieving, and didn’t have time or energy to deal with one more thing, however much it might have normally pulled on his heartstrings.

Someone who emphasizes Jesus’ humanity might read Jesus as coming to understand his mission in the world gradually versus someone who emphasizes Jesus’ divinity who might read Jesus as knowing that his mission was to bring about the Reign of God for all people and that he would die on a cross and rise again.

Someone who pictures a more human version of Jesus might read Jesus’ words to his disciples, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” as the way Jesus understood his mission at that point. He was focused on his priority, which was spreading the good news of the Reign of God to God’s chosen people. This woman may have helped him understand that his mission was actually to the whole world.

These are both valid readings of this story, and I’m not going to tell you that one is right and the other is wrong. And if you understand it differently from either of these, you are probably in good company among the scholars who don’t agree on how to read this story. It’s a difficult story, and there are pros and cons to every understanding.

But whether it was Jesus or the disciples or the readers of the Gospel of Matthew who understood Jesus’ mission differently by the end of this story, this is a turning point in Jesus’ ministry. In the Gospel of Matthew (and also the Gospel of Mark, because it has an almost identical version of this story), Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman marks for the reader the point where Jesus’ mission became far greater than it looked like up until this point. Jesus’ ministry was not just for his hometown and surrounding villages, it was for the whole world.However you picture Jesus, at least the reader now understands Jesus’ global mission.

And it will be Jesus’ followers who will carry that mission to the rest of the world. The Gospel of Matthew closes with Jesus’ Great Commission, where Jesus commands his followers to continue his mission in his physical (though certainly not spiritual) absence: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

And then, the book of Acts describes Jesus’ followers bringing the good news into the world around them.

And that mission isn’t over yet.

Jesus entrusted his followers with the continuation of his mission, and that task has been passed down over two millennia and has gotten to us.

But it’s hard not to fall into the burned-out, compassion fatigue that we can read into Jesus’ behavior in these stories.

It’s easy to get snippy when someone grumbles behind your back, the way the religious authorities did to Jesus.

It’s easy to focus hard on one’s own priorities and ignore someone else’s request for help.

It’s easy to let bias and prejudice affect the way we treat others, no matter how well-intentioned we are.

It’s easy to slip into “us versus them” thinking instead of remembering our common humanity.

It’s easy to focus on our sense of propriety about things like handwashing and inadvertently let out uglier behaviors like racism, homophobia, or classism.

But our Gospel reading reminds us that Jesus’ mission, and therefore our mission, is to show God’s love to the whole world.

And our reading from Isaiah reminds us that that has always been God’s mission: “for my house shall be called a house of prayerfor all peoples.”

And that requires a lot more than simply tolerance or blanket statements of “all are welcome.”

It requires solidarity.

It requires people with privilege to stand aside and follow the lead of people with less privilege.

It requires people with resources to share them with people who have fewer.

It requires people to advocate for people with different experiences than they have.

It requires sacrifice. It requires getting your heart broken over stuff you could choose to ignore. It requires changing your mind and your lifestyle and your heart.

Because God’s vision for us is far bigger than we can imagine.

Because no one deserves just the leftover crumbs.

Because every person is a child of God.