My family is from the southern United States. Fried cat fish dinners were often a part of our family celebrations. But there was one particular dish served that no one could resist. It was essentially a corn meal dough with spices and onions that was formed into round shapes about the size of a donut hole and deep fried until golden brown. Add fried potatoes to the meal and you had a triple whammy guaranteed to raise your cholesterol level into the heart-attack zone.
Now the name of the corn meal side dish is very interesting. The story goes that in early American history trappers and travelers would cook up a batch of the delicious dish along the trail. Usually accompanied by their dogs that would start to howl and bark at the smell of the hot food cooking, begging for a bite, the weary traveler would toss one or more in the direction of an unruly dog and say, “Hush, puppy!” So the delicious morsels came to be known as ‘Hushpuppies.” I guess that was better than calling them, “Shut up, dogs.”
In today’s scripture passage Jesus has traveled away from the typical Jewish territory and entered an area where Gentiles predominated: SyroPhonecia. It is interesting to note that in the passages just before this story he has fed the 5,000 in the wilderness. He has instructed them on what it means to be clean and unclean, telling them that it isn’t what they put into their mouths that makes then unclean, but what comes out of their mouth in terms of speech that makes them clean or unclean. Now the author of Matthew will give us a practical lesson in what it means to be clean and unclean.
Here in Tyre and Sidon Jesus and the disciples are in the midst of what some would have called an unclean community filled with non-Jewish person, strangers, foreigners, Greeks and Romans. The differences were not just cultural and religious, but economic as well. The more affluent residents of Tyre and Sidon would have had the economic power to buy up the wheat harvest and literally take the bread out of the mouths of Jewish citizens.
A woman appears, which scripture has identified variously as a Cannanite woman or a Syro-Phonecian woman. Saying she was a Cannanite was an ancient way of identifying the people that surrounded the people of Israel as foreign, as different, as unacceptable, as unclean. It was a derogatory term, not unlike the N word in our own culture. However, calling someone a Cannanite would also be like calling someone from New York a New Amsterdamer instead of a New Yorker. We know that New York was once called New Amsterdam but we don’t use that name any longer. In short, to call someone a Cannanite was to demean them, to call them unacceptable and not a part of your tribe. The woman was probably an educated woman, maybe even a merchant herself, not the typical woman that Jesus and his disciples would have encountered in their own home territory.
Many think that Jesus has gone to this region to escape his popularity and rest and relax. But even here his reputation precedes him having even been broadcast even those who do not share his religion or beliefs. But hope is based on something more than religion, belief, and culture.
The woman filled with hope that Jesus could cure her daughter’s affliction comes and asks for him to heal the child. She cries out, Kyrie Elison, Lord have mercy! We sing those words in worship and say them before communion ourselves. Her cry is the same cry we speak when we are desparate and desire God’s help and guidance, “God have mercy!”
But Jesus ignores her. Not all that unusual when you remember that a man in Jesus’ own community didn’t speak to a woman he might encounter on the street. But even Jesus has broken taboo’s and spoke to women in public before. However, the taboo is double in this situation because this is a foreign woman, not someone from his own community. Isn’t it interesting to note, however, that Jesus who has been the first one to see, really see, the man born blind and others in obvious need that he and the disciples encounter on their journeys, to see and respond to the need of the person he points out to the disciples, instead on this occasion ignores the woman. Here need is obvious for she is crying out for him to heal her daughter. What’s going on here that Jesus turns a deaf ear upon the real cry of a needy person. It doesn’t make sense. Jesus ignoring a need in a person who is calling out for help?
The woman persists and the disciples come to Jesus, basically saying, “Make her shut up and go away. She’s bothering us.” Leave it to the disciples to be the bouncers at the Jesus Club, the ones who check everyone’s ID’s and keep out the riff-raff.
In Jesus’ response to the disciples I hear a human weariness. He has been under enormous stress trying to get people to understand his mission and his meaning. Maybe in his misery he has turned off his listening ear and tried to isolate himself from the demands of the world around him. I’ve been there, so have you. Sometimes we just want to cry out, “Leave me alone. Let me be. I don’t have anything left to give to you. I’m exhausted. I’m tired. I can’t give anymore than I’ve already given.” Sometimes we forget that Jesus was completely human, and just like you and me Jesus could get tired and worn out and even forget what he was suppose to know and do. Does that bother you? Does it make Jesus any less than who he was? For me, it makes him even more than what he was suppose to be. To me it means that Jesus went beyond his humanness to seek and find the divine that was within him. When we are stuck or tired or find it hard to move forward, let us remember that we have the divine spark of Jesus within us to carry us forward when we don’t think we have enough to even take one more step into our future.
Jesus responds, “I was sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” Jesus has seen his mission as one that concentrated on the so-called People of God, the descendants of Abraham, the Children of Israel. He was focused on his mission as he understood it. Within that context he has tried to help others see that it included even those on the edges of their community: widows, tax collectors, the ill and the handicapped, the lepers and the blind, all those who had been treated as unacceptable. You would think that Jesus of all people who have responded immediately to this woman’s pleas. But he doesn’t.
So Jesus snaps back at the woman’s pleas, “I wasn’t sent to take care of your kind. I was only sent to my kind of people.” Who is it that we define as our kind of people, as belonging to our own community? Who doesn’t belong to our community? Who can we legitimately ignore and leave out of our mission and ministry?
I’ve told this story before: family in Abingdon.
“They don’t belong here. Why don’t they find a church where they would feel more at home?”
Do we do that to people when they come to us?
Do we make people feel like they don’t belong in our community of faith? Have you ever felt rejected because of your own difference from a community of people? How did that make you feel?
But this woman is a desperate mother who loves her child and sees in Jesus the only chance for healing her daughter has. She comes and kneels on the ground in front of him and respectfully begs: “Jesus, help me.”
If you don’t think that Jesus was completely human then you haven’t really looked at how he responds to this woman. He responds with a common folk saying of the time, “It’s not right to take food out of the children’s mouths and throw it to the dogs.” Personally I can’t imagine a more derogatory thing for Jesus to say to this woman. He has called her a dog, an extremely negative name that Jesus’ community reserved for Gentiles and those who were not Jewish, for people who didn’t belong to their community. It has all kinds of implications.
We know how powerfully dismissive such a term is for we use a similar term today. The term used here is diminutive, feminine; some would say it is the word puppies. I would say that it is the word, “Bitch.” No do you begin to see how horrible and derogatory this was for Jesus to say to this woman?
Think about it for a moment: This woman is rejected by the one person that should have been willing to see her, to accept her, to help her, but he refuses. Yet this woman won’t give up even in the face of such a derogatory term and response. She says to Jesus, “Even the puppies under the table eat the scraps that are left.” This echoes Jesus’ own ministry that just preceded this episode in the book of Matthew. Jesus fed the 5,000 and when everyone had had their fill, there were 12 baskets of leftover food collected. There had been plenty for everyone.
Out of the midst of his weariness, Jesus is brought to full attention and sees the woman and her faith.
“Oh, woman, your faith is something else. What you want is what you get!” This woman is singled out as having great faith. This woman is the only person in all of scripture to ever best Jesus in a debate. Her daughter is healed. But maybe more importantly, and I know this will be hard for some of you to hear, so too was Jesus healed of his limited vision of what the meaning of his own mission was: He was called to all the Children of God, and not just the Children of Israel. No wonder he said that this woman’s faith was so great. She demonstrated enough faith to move him to enlarge his vision far beyond what even he had considered it to be before this chance encounter. Even Jesus could learn a lesson in faith from such a woman.
As we move forward in faith, celebrating our 39th anniversary as a church next week, let’s take the example of the Syro-Phonecian woman and let her inspire us. She wasn’t content to remain in her assigned place in society as a woman, even as a Syro-Phonecian citizen. She crossed the boundaries of sexuality and citizenship and demanded her right to all that God could provide for her, including the healing of her daughter. By claiming her dignity and her faith this woman, perhaps, changed the entire focus of Jesus’ ministry and mission.
We next find him in the Gentile cities of Decapolis, literally ‘the ten cities,’ where he feed 4,000 Gentiles. The miracle of food in the wilderness is carried beyond a blessing for the Children of Israel to the Children of the World. Even Jesus declares in Mark 13:10, “The good news must first be proclaimed to all the nations.” Jesus begins crossing all the boundaries teaching all people for all times that there is indeed nothing that separates anyone from the love of God.
In a chaplaincy training class one student shared a thought with his other minister classmates: Imagine a choir where every note and voice is perfect, but still there is something missing. It is an octave that if it were present would change the performance from good to spectacular, from ordinary into extraordinary. Imagine a choir where every voice is heard, including the voice that is missing, but very much needed. Imagine that we are that choir. What voice is missing? What octave would we have to include in order to transform our congregation and it’s ministry from just good to spectacular, from just ordinary to extraordinary?
Who is missing from our congregation that we need to include? How are we going to find them and include them? What boundaries of religion and society, race and gender, nationality and culture are we going to boldly cross to bring the Good News about Jesus to everyone? How are we, like Jesus, going to change our vision of our mission and ministry so that we see that in crossing the boundaries we can extend our faith to build community and communion with others who are different from us?
