josephholubsermons
August 14, 2011 -
Pent 9
Matthew 15:21-28
(you can copy and paste this into a word document - remember to change the font to black)
The Offense of Compassion and Grace
"...it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Matthew 15:26
Holy cow! What do we do with
that passage?
A desperate Canaanite woman
comes to Jesus seeking help.
But initially, instead of
receiving help she runs into a
brick wall of what appears to be flat out
bigotry.
She was a Gentile, and the Jews and Canaanites were ancient and
bitter enemies. She was
perceived by the religious insiders as an outsider.
But even so, this woman dared
seek Jesus out and pursued him. In
Mark’s version of this story, she pursued Jesus into the very house into
which he had retreated in order to get a break from the crowds.
She
intruded into Jesus’
space, and in the process she violated numerous sacred religious and
cultural conventions including addressing a man directly in public.
She had apparently heard that
Jesus was a healer, and she needed a healer for her daughter.
Motivated by her love for her daughter she was persistent to the
point of being intrusive.
And make no mistake about it, Jesus calls this woman and her daughter
"dogs."
"Dogs"
in that time and culture was a ethnic-religious
slur. People of Jesus’
religion often called the Gentiles
"dogs." It was a
prejudice that was deeply
embedded and passed on from generation to generation.
The Jesus with whom we
are most familiar is the Jesus of compassion and mercy, the Jesus
from whose lips came teachings like,
"Love your neighbor as
yourself."
"If you do it to the least of
these... you do it to me" or “Let the children come to me.”
So, when
this woman makes her desperate plea, we
expect an
immediate response of
compassion and mercy. But instead Jesus is
abrasive and abrupt.
This is clearly not the Jesus
we thought we knew.
Not to be deterred by anything, even ethnic prejudice, she deftly
responds, "Sir, even the dogs
eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." Responding to her
unyielding determination Jesus then agrees to help her daughter, and
immediately the daughter is healed and Jesus affirms the woman saying,
"Woman, great is your faith!"
So what do we do
with this rather confusing story?
The key
to unlocking the meaning of this story, and any of the gospel stories
for that matter, is to read it in
context; read it as a
member of Matthew’s faith community might have
read it, received it and
interpreted it. If we
do not do at least that we will miss the powerful and poignant point the
story makes. If we read it
out of context we can, as some have done, even use it to rationalize
prejudice and bigotry. So we
plunge into the context.
It almost goes without saying that at first glance this story is
offensive. But I think
that is the
key to understanding the whole story
– the offense. Maybe that's Matthew’s point by including
it and telling it the way he does. Perhaps the key to the story lies in
the offense of
the story. But in case you didn’t
notice, the story contains
more than one offense.
The first offense is obvious,
and we have already named it.
Our polite and
respectable sensibilities are offended by Jesus’ abrasive designation
“dogs” and his initial indifference to the woman’s needs.
But, if you were a first
century Israelite, (and this is part of the point) you would not have
been offended at all by Jesus' words. He
simply mirrored and parroted what was culturally and religiously
acceptable at that time. The
story initially shows Jesus acting, doing, and speaking as many
Israelites would have
expected him to act,
do and speak. His racial slur would not have been noticed as a
slur, but as an accepted designation - what they considered to be normalcy.
For example, in the neighborhood in which I grew up, which was
exclusively white and mostly Scandinavian, I remember hearing numerous
pejorative labels frequently used by adults in the normal course
of conversation in reference to others who were different from us in
some way. Those designations
were accepted as normalcy.
However, what would have offended and appalled the first century Israelite
would have been if Jesus
did show mercy
to this Gentile woman, did
heal her daughter, and did
affirm her for her great faith, for the religious insiders felt she had
no legitimate claim whatsoever upon Jesus.
“I was sent only to the
lost sheep of the house of Israel”, said Jesus, again parroting
conventional attitudes.
To show a depth of compassion
and affirmation to an undeserving outsider would have been supremely
offensive! And that's
exactly what Jesus did. In the end he
offended the religious in-crowd by ultimately affirming someone
on the outside. Those who are
offended the most by
this story are the religious
insiders of Jesus’ day.
Therein lies the greatest offense in this story and the poignant point of the story, but we
only begin to see it when we climb into the context. We must enter
Matthew’s faith community and read it as a member of his community would
have read it in the first century.
At this point we can begin to appreciate that this is a dangerous and
subversive story. The stakes
are very high! This
pleading woman was asking Jesus for a great deal by their
definitions! She was asking for
far more than merely
the healing of her daughter. She
was asking Jesus to bestow upon her gifts that were, according to their
religion and culture, not by
right hers to have or claim. If
Jesus were to grant the request
of this one Gentile woman and respond to her out of compassion and a
sense of mutual humanity, the implications of his
action would forever
change the meaning of their religion; the direction their religion was
leading them; the destinations their religion would ultimately take
them; and challenge all
of the boundaries their religion had drawn between the insiders and
outsiders!
It is right here
with compassion shown to this outsider that the
real offense lies.
I believe this story was
remembered and recorded by Matthew
first for the insiders of his community - the insiders of the
house of Israel - and the insiders of today -
you and me!
This is a very clever story.
It is skillfully presented by Matthew in a typical Hebrew
teaching style that uses copious amounts of
hyperbole and irony.
The story portrays Jesus
beginning this encounter in a
place that was acceptable to the insiders, mirroring the
religious and cultural conventions that partitioned off and dehumanized
others . But then, in one brief
moment, he turned the whole thing around and offended those same
insiders who just moments before were cheering him on!
What irony it is!
What an incredible story! We
might call it “The Offense of Compassion/Grace.”
And with the offense of compassion/grace comes a monumental
challenge and the possibility of moving new directions and adopting new
attitudes - even for us.
Jesus turns the tables on the insiders with the offense of
compassion and grace. He shocks the living daylights out of us by
demonstrating that the Divine is active and present in and with
outsiders too - not just us. It
is perhaps a tough pill to swallow.
Who are the outsiders to you? to
me? to us?
Muslims?
Undocumented workers? Those who
come to the church door in need? Someone
who's a little different in some way? The
teenager with pink hair and a nose ring?
Those dying of malnutrition and AIDS.
Those who live in this land working two jobs at minimum wage and
still cannot make ends meet and fully provide for their families?
The unemployed. The
aged just squeaking by. How
about the starving millions in the horn of Africa trapped in the worst
drought in 60 years? The
homeless on our streets? The alcoholic? The
disabled? Who are the
outsiders? Who are those that
are, somehow and someway, outside of the lines we draw; objects of our
prejudice or perhaps invisible because of our apathy?
Robert Capon, contemporary pastor, theologian and author
knocks us over with this quote which I paraphrase:
"What
happened
to radical Christianity--the brand of Christianity that turned the world
upside down? What happened to the
category smashing, life threatening, anti-institutional gospel that
spread through the first century like wildfire and was considered by the
powerful elites to be dangerous? What
happened to the kind of Christians whose hearts were on fire with
radical and inclusive grace... who made the power structures of the
world uncomfortable and squirm; who were willing to follow Jesus
wherever and to whomever he went? What
happened to the kind of Christians who were filled with passion and whom
every single day were unable to get over the grace and compassion of God
and lavishly spread it around? What
happened? I'm ready for a
Christianity that challenges my life, captures my heart and makes me
uncomfortable. I want to be filled with astonishment which is so
captivating that I am considered wild and unpredictable and dangerous!
Yes, I want to be 'dangerous' to a dull, boring, exclusive and
judgmental, status quo religion. I
want a faith that is considered risky by our predictable and partitioned
culture. What happened?"
What happened is...
it’s easier to
domesticate Jesus and make him look more like us than we like
him, especially when Jesus asks too much or challenges us to change our
insider-exclusive attitudes.
What happened is…
it is easier to delude ourselves and mistake the gospel life for a life
of narrow personal piety rather than a wider-spectrum
social morality that embraces others with the
passionate compassion of God and
is concerned about issues of justice!
What happened is…
it’s easier to become pre-occupied with our own self-righteousness and
the faults of others rather than be astonished by Divine grace.
What happened is…
it’s easier to be blinded by our insulating walls than to see God at
work outside of our walls.
What happened is…
we forget that compassion/grace is offensive to a world that bears the
open wounds of prejudice.
There is no better word that describes the nature of Jesus’ life
and ministry than compassion.
One way
I think of my life is a series of
concentric circles
(like I showed the children).
I live most of the time
intentionally in the tiny center circle – focusing my attention
and energy on self concerns and the people I love and like the most: my
family, my friends, the people most like me with whom I have the most in
common.
But the compassion and grace of Jesus moves me beyond my tiny center
circle. If I open my life to him and
bring him into my center circle, I find and experience that he is a kind
of powerful energy, a centrifugal force that will not let me stay in
my safe and secure center and get too comfortable, but he pushes me
outward into the outer rings of life where the needs of others are
great; the suffering of others can be intense; where I am uncomfortable
but challenged to live with the compassion and grace of Jesus Christ.
We see this very thing in our epistle for today. Paul, challenges the
Roman congregation to live with
“genuine love”
beginning in the inner circle calling upon the people of the
congregation to love each other with zeal and mutual affection. But it doesn’t end
there; it only begins there.
The centrifugal force of compassion pushes them outward toward strangers
to whom they are show “hospitality” and finally into those outer rings
toward their adversaries and enemies showing expressions of love even to
them. The compassion of
Jesus Christ is like centrifugal force set loose in the center of our
lives. It’s “offensive” in
that does not let us get too
comfortable and too
content and too self-satisfied but always pushes us past the boundaries we
draw and the limits that we set. It is the offense of compassion and
grace.