Reflections
on Matthew 15:10-28
Sunday,
August 20, 2017
When
my maternal grandmother died five years ago, my aunt made certain that I
received the family bible. It had been
my great-great-grandfather’s initially and was printed in Boston, MA in the
early 1890s. It contains very little by
way of genealogy. On the inside of the
back cover is the name and birthdate of my great-great-grandfather and the
name, birth, and death dates of my great-grandmother. Tucked between pages at various points are a
few pressed flowers – once pink carnations, now a brittle brown-tinged chiffon.
Within
the bible itself are a few interesting pages that betray its age: a fill-in-the-blank style marriage record for
nuptials which took place “in the year of our Lord, 18__”; a “Temperance”
pledge with signatures lines for all members of the household who solemnly
promise to abstain from the use of “intoxicating drinks as a beverage.” With good humor, I pointed these things out
to my partner, David. It was with
similar good humor that I began leafing through the pages, looking at the
artwork in the bible – painting after painting after painting illustrating
scenes from the text. With a bit of wry
humor, I remarked on just how white the Israelites were, back in the day.
Today,
the truth of the whitewashing of our faith heritage is more cutting than
humorous. Today, the truth of how white
American Christianity has become angers and aggrieves me. Today, with mounting frustration and rage, I
am disgusted by the ways those in power have co-opted the Gospel message for
their own sick purposes, grabbing power and destroying lives in the
process. And without a careful reading
of a text that is 2000 years removed from us in both language and culture, it’s
not hard to see how these gross and grotesque distortions come about.
In
our Gospel reading for today, Jesus makes one thing really abundantly
clear: nothing we take into our body has
the power to defile our soul. In an
anatomy and physiology lesson, Jesus tells us that anything that we eat moves
through our digestive system and is removed by the sewer system. Rather, it is what comes out of our mouths
that defiles us, Jesus says – for what comes out of our mouths proceeds from
our hearts. Defilement looks like
this: evil intentions, murder, adultery,
fornication, theft, false witness, slander.[1]
The
Canaanites were a people group living in the same geographic region as the
Israelites in the time of Jesus. From
early in Jewish history, there was discord between the Israelites and the
Canaanites. The Canaanites were seen as
culturally inferior, socially inferior, morally inferior, genetically inferior,
spiritually inferior. The Canaanites
were listed in the book of Joshua as a people group the ancient Israelites were
to exterminate.
In
a world split into the “haves” and the “have nots,” in a world marked by the
belief in scarcity rather than abundance, in a world where might made right,
the Israelites decided that there wasn’t enough to go around, that they needed
to lay claim to the goods (taking them forcibly if necessary), and that their ability to do so gave the right to do. All of this was packaged up in the form of religious
mandate and tied together with a bow of cultural and spiritual superiority.
The
not-at-all-subtle message of the oppressed turned oppressor became, “God is on
our side. We are trying to preserve what
we have. We want to preserve a future
for our children and for our culture.”
And all the while, they seem to have forgotten both that a Canaanite is
“one who comes from the land of Canaan” and that the Israelites, as a people
group, were born in the land of Canaan.
And
so, after telling his disciples that eating with unwashed hands does not defile
a person (rather that it is the evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication,
theft, false witness, and slander coming from the heart and spewing forth from
the mouth which defile a person) Jesus and his disciples leave Jerusalem. They head down from the literal, physical
lofty heights of their mountain of metaphorical cultural and spiritual
superiority. They leave Israel behind and
head north. They walk into the land of
Canaan and settle themselves in the region between the towns of Tyre and Sidon.
The
ideology of settlers who created a grand new thing in Israel and the cultural
investment in the notions of superiority and exceptionalism follow Jesus and
his disciples back to the land of Canaan.
For in the land of Canaan Jesus and his disciples are met by a Canaanite
woman. This unnamed woman who has heard
that Jesus entered her town calls to him:
“Have mercy on me, Lord,
son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But Jesus did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying,
“Send her away, for she keeps shouting at us.”[2]
Object
lesson number 1 in our text today: Jesus’s
acclaim as a healer is growing in the regions around Jerusalem. As he travels about, this woman pleads with
him to heal her daughter. And from the
mouths of his disciples come their unjust pleas to send her away – despite the
fact that they are the ones who have
settled into her town for the day. Settler mentality – we can go where we want,
do what we want, say what we want, and there should be no consequences for our
actions.
[Jesus] answered, “I was
sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”[3]
Object
lesson number 2 in our text today:
Jesus, having seen the sickness in the hearts of his own disciples,
amplified their voices. Jesus chooses to
capitalize on the theology of scarcity.
“Sorry,” he tells her. “Sure, I’m
God. You know that. You’ve called me ‘Lord.’ Sure, we are cousins, hailing from common
ancestors. But, there just isn’t enough
to go around. I’m here for the house of
Israel, not other Canaanite peoples.”
But she came and knelt
before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He
answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the
dogs.”[4]
Object
lesson number 3 in our text today: The
assumed cultural superiority of those in positions of power. This is the root of the evil intentions that
come from the heart. All those who are
disadvantaged by systemic oppression are considered “less than,” “inferior,” “a
threat to” those who directly benefit from systems of oppression. “We are the ‘haves,’” Jesus tells this woman,
“and it would be unfair to give our resources to the ‘have nots’ who are
clearly inferior to us.” We begin to
slander those we see as competing for our
resources – unclean, vile, dogs, worthy of ridicule, deserving ostracism.
She said, “Yes, Lord, yet
even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is
your faith! Let it be done for you as
you wish.” And her daughter was healed
instantly.[5]
I
imagine Jesus sat there waiting for his disciples to figure this thing
out. I read this text and I can feel his
mounting frustration as his disciples miss object lesson after object lesson,
forgetting that what makes people unclean isn’t what or how they eat (one of the
biggest markers of who was a Gentile and who was a Jew), but the stuff that
comes out of their hearts. This
Canaanite woman demonstrated a heart of humility, pleading persistently for
what she knew was right.
And
his disciples, having given up their hope that Jesus would rebuke her and send
her on her way, sat silently by and watched him challenge her right to exist
and compare her to a dog. They stop
their open insistence that Jesus send her away.
And they continue to be silent about the injustice of the conversation
unfolding before their eyes. Not one of
them is willing to use their voice to speak truth to power.
There
is much in today’s Gospel lesson that is being echoed in our world today. Just over a week ago, white nationalists
marched on Charlottesville, Virginia with shouts of, “You will not replace us”
and “White lives matter.” A second march
took place the next day, organized the by the same people, in Seattle,
Washington. These were followed by
marches in New York City, Boston, Massachusetts, and Durham, North Carolina.
One
protester from Virginia is quoted as saying, “As white nationalist[s] …. We …
deserve a future for our children and our culture … we just want to preserve
what we have.” And another, “The goal is
to ethnically cleanse White nations of non-Whites and establish an
authoritarian government.”
These
are not the sentiments of “fringe” members of our society. These same people and their ideologies are
supported by doctors, nurses, social workers, police officers, lawyers,
journalists, judges. They come from all
walks of life and they are maintaining the unjust system of oppression we call
the United States of America. And
millions of well-intentioned people continue to sit silently by and watch it
play out, saying nothing as the events taking place are far removed from their
comfortable lives in other areas of the country.
How
did we get here? A Yale university
social psychologist, Jennifer Richeson, says, “In some ways, it’s super
simple. People learn to be whatever
their society and culture teaches them.
We often assume that it takes parents actively teaching their kids, for
them to be racist. The truth is that
unless parents actively teach their kids not to be racists, they will be…. It comes from the environment, the air all
around us…. Everything we’re exposed to
gives us messages about who is good and bad….
The rhetoric for racism is still in place. The environment for racism is still there.” [6]
The
environment of racism is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the very
fabric of the society in which we live.
It’s in the history of pastors and theologians who used biblical texts
to justify slavery. It’s in the founding
of the Ku Klux Klan which claims to uphold Christian ideals. It is in the representation of biblical
figures such as Moses, the Hebrew people, Abraham, David, Solomon, Job, Sts.
Peter, John, Matthew, Nathanael Bartholomew, and the women at the tomb as
white. It is in the fact that one
version or another of Warner Sallman’s lily-white, blonde-haired, blue-eyed
Jesus hangs in nearly every church in America – a nation that equates
Christianity with whiteness and whiteness with superiority, rightness, and
righteousness.
The
only way to rid the world of the evils of racism is to dismantle the structures
that support it. And this means getting
clear about how we benefit from its continued existence. It means educating ourselves about how it
functions in our society. It means
enhancing our awareness of how it exists in every segment of our society – it’s
in the air we breathe; it’s in the water we drink.
And
when we start getting woke to these things, we have a choice. Like Jesus’s disciples, we can sit idly by
and let others engage in the hard work of dialogue; of confronting prejudice;
of dismantling institutions and ideologies; of intentionally choosing to live
integrated rather than segregated lives in our homes, our neighborhoods, our
workplaces. Or, we can start to speak up
and speak out. We can start to do our
own work to rid our hearts of the things that defile us: evil intentions, murder, adultery,
fornication, theft, false witness, and slander.
Jesus
tells his disciples at another point, “Whoever believes in me will do the works
I have been doing, and they will do greater things than these.”[7] It is well past time we, as a church and as a
culture, do what Jesus did in his object lesson to his disciples – acknowledging
the sin of racism and its effects. It is
well past time we, as a church and as a culture, stop thinking it is sufficient
only to feed table scraps to those we deem beneath us.
It
is well past time we welcome all peoples to the table as full human
beings. And if the table we have
constructed is too small for everyone to fit, it is well past time we tear it
down and build a new one.
