The Canaanite woman’s confrontation with Jesus is an opportunity for us to embrace the context – Jesus feeds everyone.
the beloved community is about food
Proper 15A | Genesis 45:1-15, Matthew 15:10-28
In last week’s reading from Genesis, Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery. And in the years since, Joseph has gone from slave to Pharoah’s second-in-command. What an improbable rise!
The story (and it is a really good story) is not only full of fascinating plot twists, but it maintains a truly extraordinary character in Joseph.
Joseph
His father, Jacob, grandson of Abraham and patriarch of the the line of blessing, was a liar, thief, and full of cunning. Harry Potter fans recognize Jacob as the prototypical Slytherin. He stole the blessing and birthright from his brother, ran away, cheated his father-in-law out of livestock, and ran away again.
Of Jacob’s sons, Joseph is the least like him. He’s kind, honest, and brave. He’s also extraordinarily selfless. His improbable rise in Egypt doesn’t come from favoritism or lineage, but from vision. And his vision will save Egypt and the whole world from a coming famine.
This is when we see this brotherly reunion: during the famine. The brothers come to Pharaoh because they’ve heard he has saved grain. They hope to come home with something.
Of course, when Joseph sees them, he wants to trick them, play with them a little bit. They deserve the worst, but he’s not up for that. He would never do that. But a little fun…make them sweat. That’s OK.
And in the end, Joseph can’t even keep that ruse going. He’s hugging his brothers—the same ones who would kill him years before. Joseph gets to give his own family what he imagines anyone would do for their family: safety, protection.
In the midst of famine, Joseph finds a way to feed them all.
There’s something about food.
We get the story of Joseph in the midst of reading about food in Matthew’s gospel. We just read about the feeding of the multitudes. A story in which Jesus makes a couple fish and some loves of bread feed over five thousand people. And in short order, he will feed a bunch more people by the thousands.
But in between these feedings is a confrontation and a migration.
Pharisees and scribes will come looking for Jesus to question his authority. They ask why he lets his followers break tradition. An idea that Jesus easily throws back at them. This verbal volleying might seem mundane and expected—we’re used to this arrangement. But it also directs the action we just read about.
This is what led Jesus to speak about defilement, purity, and what it is that God honestly hopes for.
The leaders confront Jesus about the disciples neglecting to wash their hands. This is their persistent attack on Jesus’s teaching. He keeps breaking the law. And they are simply trying to confront a leader for his dangerous teaching.
It’s easy to cast the Pharisees and Scribes as the bad guys here. But they think they are protecting the faith from heresy.
A better law
Jesus, on the other hand, points out that they may be following the letter of the law, but they aren’t following its spirit. Think of a child who asks their parents for a cookie. Mom says no. Then the child goes and gets two cookies.
You said I couldn’t have A cookie, so I took two.
Or my favorite, when they take two and give one to their little brother and say I gave him the one you said I couldn’t have.
When we do it like that, we know we’re doing it, right? That is too obvious. But Jesus’s critique is not about semantics. He confronts them for claiming to love tradition so much, and yet they would sell out their own parents.
Jesus names how they break one of the Ten Commandments to be cruel to other people. So he isn’t simply tit-for-tatting some annoying gadflies. He’s naming the poison in the well.
And this is why he launches into that stuff about what defiles is the junk that comes out of us. Food and dietary laws are nothing compared with the abusive and deranged behavior that truly bothers Jesus. For what is common among those evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander? Abuse. The bad things we do to other people.
That’s why Jesus comes down to this: You can’t mess up your purity by eating food. But you can hurt another person by being a jerk.
The Canaanite
Then Jesus leaves Jewish territory, heading for a couple of Greek cities. There he is confronted by a Canaanite woman, begging Jesus to save her daughter. All of the current themes cross and tangle here.
This woman is a Canaanite, which, if we remember from Hebrew Scriptures, makes her the ultimate outsider. She is the woman the children of Abraham are not to marry.
And she is coming to Jesus like all those people who drew such sympathy from Jesus in the last chapter. The ones he looked upon and said that they were like sheep without a shepherd.
And not being Hebrew, she knows nothing of Jewish purity laws, nor has she any tie to them.
But she is a mother, coming to Jesus and begging him to heal her daughter.
The Exchange
The exchange Jesus has with the woman is among his most famously troubling. It sounds a lot like Jesus being a jerk. It starts with the mother shouting for help and the disciples trying to get rid of her. And Jesus’s statement is the most confounding and frustrating part:
“‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
Run through the lens of Christian tradition, we probably hear a retort, a theological statement of Jewish exclusive salvation. Perhaps it should sound cold and condescending. As if he needs to add a perfunctory apology he doesn’t really mean. That’s just how it is. There’s nothing I can do for you.
It also doesn’t sit right as some sort of cold-hearted teaching or as a trick to some unsuspecting victim. Or as an apologetic for the necessary division—like he really wants to help her, but those darn rules again.
Run that statement through every reading and not one of them comes back truly making sense of this moment short of one:
Jesus has a different idea of lost sheep of the house of Israel than we do.
More sheep
This woman asks Jesus for what he has given many people before. And what he will give many more along the Sea of Galilee in the following verses. Healing. Salvation.
And the word Matthew uses to describe her action, kneeling, implies worship in the Greek.
Imagine being one of the disciples, listening to Jesus’s teaching about tradition, purity, and defilement; about matters of faith and being at one with God. And imagine having what you took for tradition collide with Jesus’s teaching throughout this chapter.
Jesus extends the blessing to the people they are to never bless. He heals one who is not to be healed. And Jesus declares with his action, and hers, that she is a lost sheep.
I don’t think we have to imagine too hard. We can think of our own times. Times when our own understanding of tradition has been challenged by the generosity of the Holy Spirit.
As for me, I’m pretty simple. I was moved by the food.
Jesus had pity on a bunch of people he hasn’t personally met and fed them all. Well…he had his followers feed them. All of them.
Then he said that food doesn’t defile us—we defile each other by abusing each other.
And then the foreigner said that even dogs get fed, so why can’t she? Which is a lot like saying “let your all mean all.”
And when he heads back in the direction of home, he will feel compassion again and need to feed a whole bunch of people.
That’s two whole chapters talking an awful lot about food.
Seems pretty obvious to me that Jesus has a soft spot for the hungry. They pray to God give us today our daily bread. And Jesus says Yes. Everyone’s gotta eat. Every day. Let’s feed ‘em all.