From discerning purity and defilement
Proper 15A | Genesis 45:1-15, Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28
Here’s what happens today. Preachers all over the place have to confront their own hermeneutic about the nature of Jesus. And some will point out the vile thing Jesus says in the gospel. Some will defend it under the pretense that Jesus can’t possibly say something bad. And some will avoid the whole thing to talk about Joseph and his brothers.
What happens in Matthew 15 creates an existential crisis for those who demand pure divinity and a strong tradition. Which is probably most of us!
Part 1: The Confrontation
The chapter begins with a confrontation. Some religious leaders charge Jesus with flouting tradition. And he’s guilty. But he takes the opportunity to highlight that these people say the right things out loud. And practice the wrong things inside.
We remember that Jesus’s challenge to the tradition isn’t just about practicing what we preach. It’s about our proximity to God. So if we’re being nice to our neighbor and hating them on the inside, we may seem to be following tradition, but we’re breaking the first commandment.
Part 2: The Teaching
Jesus turns and speaks to his disciples to show another way traditionalists get tradition wrong. They focus on sin as what goes into our mouths rather than what comes out. Which, Jesus suggests, means we get it backward.
Tradition, as something we follow, something we consume or adhere to is itself not reflective of God’s command to us. Because we use it to do terrible things.
The most infamous example of this is Southern Hospitality. I’m not picking on the south. Southern Hospitality is just more blatant than Midwest Nice. The joke is that you can say anything you want behind someone’s back, but if you say “bless her heart,” it’s OK. We have a version of this here, too. We teach each other: You can think whatever you want, just make sure what you say is nice.
This view of tradition is reactive, meaning it doesn’t go out to do nice things. It’s focused on judging whether or not we’ve been jerks. That difference in mindset is like night and day.
Jesus is trying to help us flip our own mindsets around. The point isn’t that we are corrupted by something and therefore must war against it to prevent the corrupting effect. It is that we corrupt by saying awful, hurtful things.
In short, the devil didn’t make you do it. You’re someone’s devil.
Part 3: The Reversal
When Jesus is confronted again, it is in a completely different context. He isn’t being frustrated by religious leaders but by a stranger in the borderlands. This is the big space between Jewish and Greek territory where anybody can be. But the people who live there are people who can’t go home. People who are treated by tradition like corrupting instruments of the devil.
And the woman, a Canaanite woman, one of the people Hebrews were taught for thousands of years to not consort with, shouts to Jesus for help. And he says no. She pleads and he still says no.
The reason why…is tradition. Tradition says—no Canaanites. Right.
And what tradition says about the Messiah is that he comes to the Hebrew people to win their victory. And Jesus has taught his followers to care for their people. That this is their mission.
This isn’t national or religious identity exactly. It’s about who participates in the splendor of the Kin-dom. And up until now, he’s been confident that doesn’t include the Canaanites.
But out here, in the borderlands, where people are in need because of what others say about them…
This woman is able to change his mind on that.
Now what does that mean?
People fixated on purity can’t accept that Jesus can make a mistake. That he can grow, change his mind, or even do what he does in this scene: insult her. She exposes Jesus’s racism.
What it also reveals is that Jesus realizes he has just done what he told his followers not to do. This woman and her daughter are not defiled. The words that came out of him were what defile.
In Jesus’s view of the Kin-dom, he was killing her, not some devil. And, like the man with the withered hand, he is there to save her life.
This is a remarkable moment, isn’t it? To see Jesus change his mind. That the Son of Humanity would realize the greater scope of that mission.
And it serves as a wonderful example for us and our ability to change our minds, change our voices. That we aren’t to be running from the devil or chasing the devil we see in each other, but that we can stop being a devil.
Part 4: Joseph Weeps
Jumping to our story in Genesis we can see an example of this holy way of being.
The lectionary has us jump over huge parts of the story. But remembering last week, that Joseph is one of the youngest of 12 brothers. But he’s the eldest of their father’s favorite wife, so he’s Jacob’s favorite son. So Jacob doesn’t win any Father of the Year awards.
The jealous brothers conspire to kill Joseph but settle on selling him into slavery. And from there, Joseph is taken to Egypt where his miraculous precognitive dreams tell the king’s future. And the king comes to put Joseph in charge of literally saving the world from a famine.
Joseph’s brothers, including Judah who has atoned in the eyes of God (we’ll talk about that one after church), come to Egypt to save their people from starving. They don’t recognize Joseph. And so Joseph tries to trick them—to get them back for attempted murder and selling him to slavers.
But he can’t keep it up. He loves them. He breaks and weeps. Loudly.
In the reading, this reveals the truth of our own revenge fantasies. Our love of comeuppance and retributive violence. If we’d have been reading earlier in the story, we would’ve wanted to ride along with these same brothers as they burned a city for a few men’s actions. Now we want to see those same brothers burn. Our lust.
We want the trick and Joseph offers tears.
We want revenge and Joseph offers reconciliation.
Joseph gets to bring them into his new home and Jacob gets to die of old age with a king’s escort.
Joseph weeps.
He doesn’t defile with anger and he can’t sustain the trickery. He cries. Forgives. Holds his brothers tightly.
Part 5: The Tradition
We receive Jesus’s confrontation with tradition as our tradition. Which makes the whole thing really kind of weird. His tradition is our tradition. And also he is our tradition. It’s a kind of both/and that feels weird because we’re never completely sure how we’re supposed to feel about the very concept of tradition.
Are we supposed to like it and follow it completely? Yes!
Are we supposed to challenge it when it conflicts with the character of God? Yes!
Oh, that’s comforting!
At the heart of all of this is not what or who or even how. It is God. The nature, character, and love of God. God is love. And we are to be God’s instruments of love.
And all of our traditions teach us. But they can also confront us. Helping us see when we’re being devilish rather than divine.
This week I’ve been worried about our kids. And how we see tradition. Rebellion. Confrontation. The Law. And how we have all of these excuses for compelling speech from our children in school. To police what comes out of their mouths. To tattle.
Not that we’re walking with our kids or empowering our kids. We’re expecting them to be adults.
Afraid our children will be defiled, we ignore the defiling from pulpits and the legislature. The sidelining of parents and teachers who are already helping their kids navigate gender and sexual identity at the weirdest time of their lives. For tradition.
Joseph was the one who was different.
And he wept for his family. He grieved his family. A family, who, because they couldn’t change him, wanted him dead.
The one who changed was Judah. The founder of the line of David. Tradition itself. He was the one who changed. And when Joseph showed him who he really is, he wept. They, and everything that happened and everything they came to represent, was healed.
Jesus called a woman a dog. And then he changed tradition to make her one of them.
This is our tradition. Learning about how things really are. And changing because of it. When we’re Judah, we change. And when we’re Joseph, we love. As when we’re Jesus, we change. And when we’re the Canaanite woman saving her daughter’s life, we love.
That is our tradition. Because that is the Kin-dom of God here. For everyone. In love, health, wholeness, justice, and peace. That is the sacrificial generosity at the heart of our tradition. At the heart of our faith. The heart of our hope. Otherworldly love.