Proper 15A 2020

Matthew 14:22-33

The Rev. Dr. Kathy Kelly

In today’s Gospel reading we have two stories. Jesus is trying to teach the disciples that when they are leading others to the Kingdom of God, to discern through their hearts more than just blindly follow rigid laws about things like what not to eat. He wants them to learn to listen and understand and to be intentional about the words they choose as much as they were about their dietary customs. And then they have a strange encounter with a woman from the other side of the tracks, a Canaanite woman, and they all seem to turn a blind eye to her.

The most important lesson in this Gospel reading is this phrase: “listen and understand.” So hold on to that as we dig through this.

In the middle of all that’s going on here, we have that oft quoted saying, “the blind leading the blind.”  I’ve heard this phrase thrown around a lot, especially lately and always, it seems, in reference to political leaders, or people we don’t like who are in power. The blind leading the blind into a ditch is a metaphor for bad leadership. Jesus says this of the Pharisees but we’ve used it repeatedly to point fingers ever since he said it.

I’ve told you the story before of a friend I made years ago when I was running a mental health facility in Georgia when I had the great fortune to hire and work with a man named Tim Mullins. Tim was blind from birth and had become a counselor so that he could give back. He had gone to The Georgia School for the Blind which was across the street from my house when I live in Macon. Ray Charles went to school there. Tim was working toward his goal of becoming a Rehab Counselor so that he could help other visually impaired people.

I learned a lot from Tim about the experience of blindness. He explained that he can see some light and shadows and that he learned like me, through his development as a child, to understand objects, their names and function and all the other things we learn in school. He understood politics and science and math and poetry as much as I do. I began to realize that I had an ignorant bias against the visually impaired. I began to realize that I was treating Tim with kid gloves when he didn’t need me to and he would have been insulted by my demeaning attitude if he weren’t such a patient guy.

Tim taught me a lot. He taught me to lead him when we walked across the campus where we worked. He would place his hand on my elbow and follow just behind me across the sidewalks to the admin building or the parking lot. Sometimes we would all pile in my car and have a staff lunch out.

One day I was leading Tim like this and I cut a corner too sharp and Tim stepped off the edge of the sidewalk, lost his balance and fell into some landscaping. I was mortified. He laughed with good humor about it and immediately forgave me. He got himself back up, brushed himself off and waved me away when I offered to get first aid for the scratches on his arms and face.

Tim has good-natured-ly teased me about that mistake ever since. “He had one over on me,” he said.

I learned from Tim not only about forgiveness but about being open to friendships with people who are different. By listening to and respecting Tim, I realized he and I were not very different at all. He did finally, after our friendship developed, tell me one difference between us. Having been born blind, he had trouble understanding color.  The difference between blue sky and green grass was beyond him. I felt sad about this. He did not feel sad about it. It is just part of who he is.

Tim opened my eyes. And one of the realizations he gave to me was that the blind often have more in-sight than the sighted.

In this strange story from the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus uses this metaphor of the blind leading the blind as a description of bad leadership. And then Jesus changes his mind in this story about the Canaanite woman who followed and pestered Jesus to heal her daughter.

That Jesus refused to help the Canaanite woman at first is unfathomable to us. We, who have pretty much every thing we need and get more than what we want during our privileged lives, we can’t fathom Jesus or God saying no to anyone, especially a poor woman begging for her daughter to be saved. We would save that girl ourselves if at all possible and Jesus could obviously heal her so why did he ignore her and make her beg all the more?

And then he essentially calls her a dog! This is really confusing.

This woman would have been a sort of “nobody” in that culture. Jesus and his followers were traveling through the region of Tyre and Sidon. The Greeks called this Phoenicia. Jesus and his disciples were among gentiles, not in their own Israelite territory when they were accosted by this woman. So, Jesus’ initial response to ignore her would have been expected, at that time in that culture.

This woman breaks through every traditional barrier that should prevent her from approaching Jesus. By cultural standards, she is considered to be impure, one who lives outside of the land of Israel and outside of the law of Moses, a descendant of the ancient enemies of Israel. She is also a woman, unaccompanied by a husband or male relative, who initiates a conversation with a strange man -- another taboo transgressed.

On top of all of this, her daughter is possessed by a demon. Although we are not told exactly how the demon affected her daughter, we can probably guess from other stories about demon-possessed people that it made her act in bizarre and anti-social ways. This woman and her daughter were not the kind of family most people would be likely to invite over for dinner.

Any way you look at it, this woman is an outsider. And what’s more, Jesus actually has the nerve to say as much to her face. When the woman falls at his feet and begs him to heal her daughter, Jesus says, It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." The “children” in this statement are the children of Israel, the “little dogs” are understood to be all other people. So, he essentially calls her a dog because she’s not a Jew.

Wow! And we fuss about tribalism in our time and culture!

We have a really hard time understanding Jesus’ behavior here. And it seems like we’re making excuses when we try to explain it.

One scholar explains it though by saying that Jesus was tired, he wanted to get away for a few days for some quiet and rest so he headed to the coast, into Gentile country - away from the Jews, away from the Pharisees and Sadducees and away from, it seems, his own followers and he found a little Air BnB on the beach and he tried to take a mini-vacation on the shores of Tyre and Sidon. We love this. We can relate to this. We want him to have a nice weekend on the coast. But, alas, his fame catches up with him and people start bugging him again.

This woman is easy to hate - she is about as different as she could be from the first century Christians who were the audience of this story. She’s sort of villain like when she shows up making demands on our tired messiah. We want to yell at her to leave him alone! And at that point in the story, from the vantage of hating her, we don’t mind if he’s a bit snarky. 

Then later, when we’ve had our laugh at him calling her a dog, later, maybe on the way home from the show, we wonder for a moment that pestering question, “How can the fully divine God-man be snarky?” It doesn’t make sense for perfect, peaceful, loving Jesus to be mean even to an annoying, single-mother-nobody.

We love the Jesus who wants to take a mini-vacation on the Phoenician coast. We love the Jesus who hits up some folks for the use of their house as a hide out. We love this Jesus who ends up changing his mind, at first saying “go away” to this woman from the ghetto and then granting her wish anyway. We love this Jesus who is snarky to someone from across the tracks. We love this because it is so human and a fully human Jesus is easier to relate with.

But then, we don’t love that he was snarky.  And we want our fully divine Jesus back, the one who knows all, loves all, is all powerful and never snarky or mean.

The problem in all this is how easy it is for us to fall into defining God.  It is so easy for us to decide who and what God is and how God thinks and what God will do for us. We like to emphasize the humanity of Jesus so that we can get our agenda in the mix. We don’t mean to do this. It’s just human nature. But we do it all the time.

So once again we stand divided because we take sides in the argument. Some take the side that Jesus is perfect, Jesus is God, we can only worship and adore the Bread of Heaven, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And some of those folks mix into all that praise their own quest for power.

Others choose the side of Jesus who is one of us and that’s why we can enjoy the love he bestows on us because since he’s human he gets us and loves us in spite of our sinfulness. These folks have an agenda too - of getting all the love they want. Bonhoeffer calls this cheap grace.

So my friends, here we are again mired in the frustration of division, when all we really need to do is lay down the armament of our agendas and listen and understand. Listen for that thing in the story that maybe we were missing before. Listen and understand.

Whether Jesus knew or planned on this interchange with this woman in order to use it as a teaching moment, or if he stumbled into a teaching moment in which he was the one who actually learned something, it doesn’t really matter.

What matters is that we remember to follow him instead of trying to control him.

What matters is our effort to ever increase our abilities to listen and understand, of seeing the Canaanite woman in the eyes of the marginalized people we know in our lives and in the lives of the strangers we encounter every day.

What matters is noticing her.

What matters is letting go of control enough to receive the healing that Jesus offers either in wide open social spaces or in private, around the corner spaces.

What matters is to listen and understand. Then we will receive the healing of becoming freed from demons, then our words will speak his agenda not ours. Then we will becoming speakers of truth. Then will use our gifts for the building up of the Kingdom. God’s Kingdom. Not ours. Not the kingdom of our agendas. The Kingdom of Love.

Here is a quote from another scholar. She digs a little deeper into this error we humans make when we try to judge God incarnate. As we struggle with Jesus seeming mean to this poor woman, as we see Jesus seem to contradict his own teachings, if we listen and try to understand, there is much to learn about our own need for growth.

But as I read this quote, I ask you to live into the toe stepping. Can you handle some heat? Or will you think this scholar describes some other group of human failures? Listen and understand. She says:

We know very well the tendency to define and fear an "other" on the basis of skin color, nationality, class, or creed, deeply ingrained stereotypes that go back generations or even centuries. We resent being bothered by the concerns of those people. We have our own children to care for. When they persist, insisting on equal treatment and justice for their children, we resort to racial slurs and insults. And we are very good at justifying our actions rather than admitting the prejudice that persists. This story is about Jesus, and in Jesus we see the very best of human potential in relationships with others, even those we avoid and fear. We see in Jesus the possibility of perceiving common humanity where we could see only difference. And when we encounter the "other" as one who shares our humanity, we can never see them as "other" again.

The Canaanite woman has the best lines in this story, she’s a bit snarky too. But Jesus has the last word: "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." Not "Canaanite woman" but simply "woman." She will never be defined by national or racial or religious prejudice again. She is now a mother like any other who desperately seeks help for her child. And for this mother's sake, Jesus heals her daughter. And Jesus heals us, too, from the temptation to hang on to old stereotypes, from turning a blind eye to those in need, and from habits that prevent us from embracing our common humanity.[1]

The most important lesson in this part of the Gospel is “listen and understand.”

Let’s work on that.

Amen.


[1] Marilyn Salmon, https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=125