In Matthew 15, a confrontation with leaders, a teaching about evil, and an encounter with a woman expose the true evil of abuse and violence.
Proper 15A | Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28
With Jesus’s words Do not be afraid still ringing in their ears,
When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret. After the people of that place recognized him, they sent word throughout the region and brought all who were sick to him, and begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.
Now, through 14 chapters, we’re getting the sense that this Jesus cat is a really big deal. He isn’t just a faith healer. He can control the storms and walk on water. And here, people are healed by touching the clothes he’s wearing!
Here come the scribes and elders.
Then in chapter 15, the scribes and elders come to Jesus. They don’t come to be healed, but to judge. To condemn. And they’ve got a real gotcha opportunity.
The disciples didn’t wash their hands.They’re breaking the purity code which causes the Jewish purity police to crack down on Jesus charging he doesn’t respect tradition. An idea Jesus flips on them.
So Jesus calls over the crowd and says to them:
Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.
Jesus rebukes those scribes and elders. Washing hands is not the problem, it’s the evil we spew that’s the problem he might have said.
But then the disciples try to be super helpful, pointing out how steamed the leaders are:
Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?
It really is a “no duh” kind of moment.
Remember the disciples want to protect Jesus. They worry about the junk, the issues, the stuff that’ll come to Jesus for speaking out. The hatred and bile that we know will come in the end, when they get to Jerusalem, when those leaders will offer him up as the scapegoat for their hate.
For the Christian, we know that’s coming, and so does Jesus, but the disciples still think it’s hypothetical. These people wouldn’t do that. They wouldn’t have Jesus killed. They couldn’t.
But Jesus tells these helpful followers what all that defiling spewing stuff comes out as:
For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.
All these are abusive, violent, demeaning acts from one person onto another. Each of these extorts and defiles the dignity of one of God’s beloved.
Racism and Jesus
This is all tied in with Jesus and the Canaanite woman.
They’ve left the region and moving into the north, into Roman and Gentile territory. This isn’t home turf for Jesus and the disciples, and this woman is shouting at him to get his attention.
There’s clearly a social code being broken here or a sense of security. Her shouting alarms Jesus’s followers so much they want to get rid of her. But Jesus lets her continue.
And here we stop to recognize that she’s a Canaanite.
She isn’t a Samaritan: a people with the same semitic roots as Jesus and the disciples. Canaanites were the original inhabitants of the Holy Land. The ones the Hebrew people killed and drove out after the Exodus.
They were also the people God told them not to marry (and they did anyway). Canaanites aren’t the opponents in a feud. They’re foreigners you’re taught not to mix with.
And there’s an even more meta image for us to deal with. We remember that Matthew is writing to a predominantly Jewish audience. So he’s telling the story of Jesus doing what a good Jew would do and shun this woman, because his ministry is for his tribe. God blessed this people and Jesus is a blessing to his people.
So if we’re reading this like Jews and we hear this challenge from a woman totally outside the tribe, we need to listen. She calls for his help, believes in him, that he can heal her daughter. And she is provoking him to act on behalf of a God of great hope and wonder, that if God is so good, then surely a little grace can flow her way. She hasn’t done anything. Just beg.
Many scholars have come to see Jesus as being racist here, calling the woman a dog and suggesting her place is lower than his, like a semitic supremacist. An image we don’t generally associate with Jesus. He changes his attitude and heals the woman’s daughter instantly. Where ever she is at that moment. {snap!} Done.
Race and the Law
When I think of Jesus this way: that he is caught in discrimination and changes his mind: it humanizes Jesus. I need to see what it’s like to have to deal with my own racist thoughts. To have my own junk go sideways so I can see it for what it is.
And the woman’s persistence helps me forgive those “helpful” voices who expose my racism.
God doesn’t want this kind of protection from reflection. Where we bring the good news only to ourselves. Or we conceal the healing and restorative power of Jesus from people because they don’t look like us, act like us, vote like us, or live in communities like this one.
Like one of my sister’s first memories of our hometown. She was 8, I was 4, and we were at Big Boy. And there were three women in the booth behind us talking about the upcoming school millage. They talked about how their kids were grown, so they didn’t have to support it. Now they could finally vote against it. They talked loud enough for the new family in town to hear. These 30-something parents with their adorable children.
They didn’t offer hospitality or respect. Or support for the community by helping restore all of God’s children to wholeness. It was just them thinking about themselves.
What I see tying these two encounters in our gospel together is that sense of connection to what the dream of God looks like and how we live it out. That it isn’t the adherence to rules which save us or prove our righteousness, but our willingness to generate life and hope and restoration beyond the confines of our tribes and institutions.
Jesus expands the gospel beyond the confines of the Hebrew people, bringing blessing to those who the church had previously decided didn’t deserve it.
Who are these people today?
Who is doing the restorative work today? We’ve seen it in the usual places. Prisons, hospitals, and shelters. And in the unusual. The black man who is getting Nazis to reject white supremacy. The clergy and the elderly who told stories of confronting the fact that violent protestors protected them. Wrestling with their differences as they watch these others take beatings intended for them.
Like Jonathan Myrick Daniels who died 52 years ago today from the bullet he took for Ruby Sales.
None of us wants to see what we’re seeing in our country right now. The bitterness of our divisions and grievances which normally only exist in our ids are being embodied in our streets. And the defiling nature of evil is flowing freely and angrily.
But that’s exactly what it is. All of that pent-up anxiety is coming out as fighting. Our people’s collective unconscious is wrestling with a world where distrust and hate is easy and normal. Where we don’t trust the person in the office or the person with the badge or the person with the diploma or person with the piece of chalk or the person holding an assault weapon or the person protecting a monument or the person in our Facebook feed or the person sitting in the pew right next to us.
When our id runs wild, it creates carnage. But only when we’ve destroyed our trust and refused to recognize that the people next to us are people. That they have hopes and dreams and ambitions, no matter what age they are! That we can’t sit here and talk about we when we spend the rest of our time talking about me.
The Dream
This all may seem like a nightmare. It is! But our minds use dreams to wrestle with the things we can’t quite figure out. It’s how the human brain wrestles with what it doesn’t yet understand. So what we saw in Charlottesville and Durham and Boston and many other places ever since the days of Jim Crow is our trying to figure this out. These are our fever dreams.
Ring those words back into your ears:
“Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
And what I’m seeing in the midst of this are people who don’t rise to the violence, but stand in the name of love. People marching, locked arm in arm with Jesus and one another to make this world better than it was. Looking this country in the face with its systemic racism and its preference to hide its problems from view and say
“Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
Restoring the world takes restoring our relationships. With Christ and one another. Which means we must set aside the junk each of us obsesses about so we can see who we are called to be. And we pray together, confess together, and we get back together. And then we join each other at the table. Not as strangers, individuals, neighbors, but as friends. We are one in Christ.