Matthew 15.21-28

Why does Jesus ignore the pleas of the Canaanite woman? There are many explanations; some try to diminish the harshness by claiming that when Jesus calls the woman a dog he simply being playful!

What sort of a God teases a woman who is tormented by her daughter’s torment? That Is not my God, but it may be the god of the disciples. Maybe Jesus is trying to open the disciples’ mind because, as usual, they still don’t get what Jesus is trying to tell them about his God of abundant mercy, grace and compassion.

Let’s look at the disciples. They see a gentile, a non-Jew, a foreigner, and a woman! She is shouting after them. Annoying them. Surely the woman can just keep silent. Keep to her place. They want their peace!  If she has a problem can’t she go through the proper channels like a civilized male?

Except, of course, as is the case for any marginalized group in a nation, there are no channels for her to go through. How many women go to doctors with pain to be dismissed as hysterical because their symptoms do not match male symptoms? Where do refugees go to when there are no visa avenues in their camps and countries? How much silencing of opposition voices is going on now by those in power around the world? You are annoying me! Go away! And how many times have I closed my ears to someone’s pain?

How does Jesus respond? At first he is silent. He gives space to the disciples to respond – and they reject her. He tells them, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

Curious. It would certainly confirm what the disciples are thinking – she is not one of their own, she is a foreigner and therefore a nuisance.  And certainly the Church has spent centuries building, and is still building, walls around itself to ward off those it deems heretics, those who want to ordain women, those who are different from the white male leadership model.  We will look only after ourselves. We are the House of Israel, the pure ones, the ones chosen by God.

But perhaps Jesus is starting to help the disciples reimagine what the house of Israel may actually be in God’s eyes. Maybe it is not a House built by human hands, human blood lines, and human rules of who is in and who is out.

Maybe the House of Israel, which God has called from the days of Abraham and is still calling, is a heavenly state, made up of all sorts of people, all humans, but of no particular race, sexuality, ethnicity or culture. Maybe it is a group of humans, sharing in the humanity of Jesus who is God, made in the image of God, reflecting that image and sharing then, in the Spirit.

Maybe the House of Israel which Jesus is talking about is not geographical or denominational, but the Body of Christ, gradually growing and deepening through time as person by person glimpses the truth of God, and calls on that truth to live their lives in new ways: in compassionate love of one another.

Like the Canaanite woman. She was distressed by the suffering of her daughter who, as the Greek says, was ‘being demonised’. Jesus was tormented in Gethsemane by the cruelty and evil infecting humans as he struggled to bring them into his father’s love.

So Jesus and the woman share something- horror at the suffering of humanity, and the burning desire to do something about it. And both Jesus and the woman know that they, in their humanity, can do nothing about it. The woman comes to Jesus because nothing else has worked, but she sees in him something that is of utter goodness, grace, new life. She senses that he is indeed the embodiment of mercy. The source of being.

 And so he is the Master, and even the crumbs that fall from his table are more than enough to heal her daughter.  Jesus gazes with love and delight at her: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish

Woman – the word for Eve, the word which actually means ‘life’. Jesus recognises someone who recognises the real nature of God. And so that is why he says: Woman! Great is your faith! That is why her heart’s desire is fulfilled, because her heart is actually in the heart of God.

Does he call her ‘woman’ to draw attention to her as opposed to the male disciples?

The disciples have declared their allegiance to a group and think they are saved.  But they have not yet entered into the great faith of God, because their reliance, their trust, their ‘faith’ is in the group they belong to, and not to God himself.

And that is the tricky bit for all of us as Christians. Do we put our trust in our baptism, our belonging, to save us, and not put in the effort and the prayer to discern God’s will for us in the ever-changing world we live in? Do we trust that the belonging itself will work the magic and we don’t actually have to do the heavy lifting of godly love for those we do not like, approve of, or are different from us.

John the Baptist criticised those Jews who thought they were saved because they were sons of Abraham (Matthew 3.9). Jesus also makes criticisms of those who put their faith in the religion into which they were born (John 8.37-40).

 Jesus has not come to get rid of Judaism, or Christianity, but to call us to really see where and what our faith is. Faith here is a personal discovery by the individual of the utter and almighty goodness and grace of God which invites us to participate in this goodness. Christians can slide through life, offering up a quick prayer to God to bless everyone, but living essentially according to their own wishes and wants, fitting in with the culture around them which says look after yourself first, buy more things, ignore the poor, let the power structures stay in place.

But Jesus came to disturb our complacency, as he punctures the disciples’ racism and misogyny.

Woman, great is your faith!

Last week Jesus sighed as he commented on the lack of faith of Peter who plummeted into the water.  Peter put his faith in God making him able to walk on water- which is personal power. Jesus did uphold Peter. He reached out his hand and drew him into the only real power there is – the strength and love of God himself.

 This woman knew, too, that the almighty creative life force of God was pulsing through the universe, was centred powerfully in this man Jesus. And she reaches out her hand, kneeling in humility in her own weakness, to this life force of utter goodness. She will brave derision, insult and accusations of stupidity to stand firmly for what Jesus himself stands for: utter goodness and new life, compassion and grace.

When the bombs are falling around one, when your child has been ripped from your arms, it takes great faith to still believe in the utter goodness of life. It takes great faith to live with that knowledge: to continue to walk with compassion for everyone else who is suffering as oneself is, to try to bring some of the goodness and grace to others, to be a little of the light in the darkness, to stand up against the entrenched power regimes.

This great faith knows that all will be redeemed by the God of goodness in the next phase of life. And that helps, but in the meantime there is war, and hurt, and pain.

But, and this is a huge but, the more we walk in this faith, the more we actually walk with Christ, and he with us. And there is a new walk, because this life of God enters, through faith, into our hearts to make our hearts bigger. Big enough to let other people into the embrace of God. Big enough to have the presence of God dwelling quietly there, whatever is happening.

May you know this week, in the challenges of your life, the true faith of God. Amen.