Proper 15
After Pentecost • Sermon • Submitted • Presented
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Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
What an easy passage! Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the masters’ table.” “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
There you go. Makes perfect sense, we might as well finish the sermon there and go and watch the football! Easy! Of course not. What on earth is going on?! Well, in the time we’ve got, I’ll try and give us a few bread crumbs to follow.
Matthew begins his Gospel with, I quote, “An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” The first person he then lists in the genealogy is Abraham. Matthew could have started his genealogy elsewhere, perhaps all the way back with Adam and Eve, but he doesn’t. He starts with the person who God picked out to begin his project to restore a broken creation. God picks Abraham out and Abraham’s family not because God is electing a people to save at the expense of everybody else, to pull them out of a burning creation, but God chooses them so that they can be a blessing to the nations. There’s lots more to say about that but the key point is that Matthew begins his Gospel with Abraham, a reminder of God’s promise to bless the nations through a chosen people.
Matthew ends his Gospel with what’s called the great commision, the risen Jesus sends his disciples out to all the nations, to baptise them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Matthew’s Gospel is all about how, through Jesus, God is fulling this Abrahamic promise of his seed blessing all peoples and I think that our passage today is the key moment in the Gospel on which this theme hangs.
The scene with the Canaanite woman comes in the middle of a section which has, I think, an intentional structure. First, there is the feeding of the five thousand. Second, Jesus performs some miracles (he walks on water and heals people). Third, he rebukes the Pharisees for misusing God’s law. Then, number four, he meets the Canaanite woman that we’re thinking about today who confeses Jesus to be the Son of David. A feeding, some miracles, rebuking pharisees, and a recognition of who Jesus is from the woman. This pattern is then repeated again in this section in Matthew’s Gospel. After Jesus leaves the Canaanite woman, he feeds the four thousand, people then ask him to perform miracles, he rebukes the pharisees, and lastly Peter recognises Jesus as the Messiah, the one anointed by God to fulfil God’s desire to bless all nations.
So, again we have a feeding, a scene related to miracles, a condemnation of the pharisees, and a confession of who Jesus is by an individual. A repeated pattern of four. A key difference in the repetition is that the feeding of the five thousand was to Jews and the feeding of the four thousand was to gentiles, non-Jews. It surely is no coincidence that, straight after a scene in which Jesus has declared that he has only been sent to the lost sheep of Israel and that it is not fair to throw the children’s food to the dogs, to which the woman replies, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” it is no coincidence that Jesus then feeds over four thousand gentiles and heals many of their sick.
The conversation with the Canaanite woman seems to be a central axis on which Matthew’s story of Jesus turns. In Matthew’s Gospel, before meeting the Canaanite woman, Jesus had healed one or two non-Jews, the Centurion’s servant and the two demonised men, but these brief encounters were only glimpses of what Jesus was about. Before the meeting with the Canaanite woman, Jesus had dealt mostly with Jews but after that meeting, he heals great crowds of sick and crippled gentiles and miraculously feeds thousands of them. Not only this, but, after his conversation with the woman in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus turns his direction and, for the final time, heads towards Jerusalem to offer himself for the life of the world.
Different people try to give different explanations for why Jesus says what he does to the Canaanite woman. Some say that he is testing her faith, others say that he knows her faith but wants us to see it as an example, others still suggest that, like a good teach, Jesus isn’t giving her the answer but wants her to find it for herself. For me, I can think of at least another two possibilities. Firstly, the call of Abraham is important in Matthew’s Gospel and, I suggest, the Canaanite woman does what Abraham did for Sodom and Gomorrah but failed to do for his son, Isaac. She pleads with Jesus. This of course opens up a whole load of questions which we don’t have time for now but the point is, the woman shows her love for her daughter in pleading, even arguing with Jesus. Another possibility is that Jesus was always going to heal the woman but he is giving his disciples the chance to do what the woman does and plead with Jesus to heal her daughter. A chance for them to learn what Matthew is trying to tells us and what the pharisees have got completely wrong; that God’s laws, God’s election of a people, are all for the purpose of blessing other people. But, it is the woman who sees what the disciples fail to; perhaps this is why Peter’s confession of who Jesus is mirrors the confession of the woman in the four-part structure of this section; because the scene with the woman, and Jesus’s feeding of the gentiles afterwards, teaches Peter who God is and what God’s heart is. I’m sure there are other possible explanations but those are a few for you to chew on.
One thing which I do think affects how we interpret the scene and its meaning is its poetic tension. If this scene is the important axis on which Jesus’s mission to the gentiles turns, as I have tried to argue, then the slowing down of the scene and the building of tension in the back and forth of the dialogue makes sense to me poetically. I’m sure you can think of plenty of songs in which a dramatic tension builds and builds until it meets a resolution and the song then takes on a new character. Phil Collins, In the Air Tonight; Lynyrd Skynyrd, Free bird; Led Zeppelin, Stairway To Heaven; Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody; basically every Pink Floyd song!
Well, the use of tension and resolution is a common tool in story telling and poetry and perhaps that’s what’s going on here. The tension of how God’s plan to bless the nations is going to be fulfiled has built throughout the Old Testament and similarly the tension has built throughout Matthew’s Gospel, which in many ways is written as a retelling of the history of Israel in the Old Testament. Then, we have this moment. Jesus meets a Canaanite. A woman from the nations Joshua was meant to destroy in Israel’s enterring the promised land. She cries out, “Have mercy on me Son of David.” Jesus does not answer and there is silence. How will Jesus, the new Joshua respond? Will he seek to crush her like the conquering hero of Old Testament? When he does speak, it seems that, yes, this is what’s going on, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” She kneels before him, “Lord, have mercy.” “I shall not throw the children’s food to the dogs.” The tension builds further and futher. How will the hope of God’s blessing to the nations be fulfilled if what Jesus is saying is really true? “Just let me eat the crumbs which fall from your table, master.” The final cord of unresolved tension and, “Woman, great is your faith!”, Resolution.
However we explain what’s going on in this scene, an important thing to take from it is how we approach those moments of tension in our lives. It is easy to continually fall into the trap of thinking we have God. That our plan is God’s plan. That we know better. To mistake what feels like common sense with omniscience. We will always have moments like the disciples where we fail to stand with those for whom blessing seems to run against the way we think God should be working.
But equally, like Peter, we can learn from the faith of the woman whose love for her child was the beginning of blessing to the nations and Christ’s journey to the cross.
In our attempt to learn this then, let us, remembering the faith of the woman, come to the table of our merciful Lord, not trusting in our own righteousness, but in God’s manifold and great mercies. Remembering that, we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table. But that, through receiving the flesh and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, we may come to dwell in him and he in us.
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.