“It pays to be stubborn”

“It pays to be stubborn”

(St. Luke: Sunday, August 20, 2017; Matthew 15.21-28)

     Good news?  At first glance, today’s gospel might not seem very much like “good news”.  A woman, desperate to find a way to bring an end to her daughter’s suffering, comes to Jesus for help, and he first ignores her, and then calls her a dog!  What’s going on here?  Is this a case of someone catching Jesus in a bad mood?  Perhaps Jesus was racist?  What’s this episode all about?  As is always the case with episodes from the life of Jesus, it’s important to know the backstory in order to understand why things play out the way they do.

     Healing, easy or hard?  Jesus’ reputation as a healer was the worst-kept secret of first-century Palestine.  Word got around that Jesus of Nazareth had power to rescue people from all sorts of illnesses, many thought to be caused by demonic powers.  It’s interesting to note that both before and after the episode with the Canaanite woman, there are stories of Jesus, in Jewish territory, performing healings on a mass scale as well as feeding large crowds of people with only a few loaves of bread and some fish.  In both of these feeding-healing sessions, people bring those who are ill to Jesus, and Jesus simply heals them – no questions asked!  At the end of chapter 14 of St. Matthew’s Gospel, people were healed simply by touching the fringe of Jesus’ cloak!  When he is among his own people, Jesus seems to be generous to a fault and turns no one away.  But then this Canaanite woman comes along…

     Israel & “the nations”.  As the woman is calling out to him, Jesus makes a telling statement to the disciples: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”; in other words, I was sent on a mission whose goal is to benefit Yahweh’s chosen people, the Jews.  This statement takes us all the way back to the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis.  God chose Abraham to be the “father” of a new nation, a people chosen by God to belong to him in a special way.  As one rabbi put it as he commented on the book of Genesis: “if Adam messes things up, Abraham will set everything right”.  However, being singled out by the creator as his special people was only half of the meaning of being the “chosen people”.  The other half was what God next said to Abraham: “through your descendants all the nations of the world will be blessed” (cf. Gn. 12.1-3).  There it is – Israel was not chosen simply to be God’s “favourite”; rather, the nation of Israel was chosen by Yahweh to be his representatives to the other nations of the earth, to be his agents of salvation.  Israel was to be the bearer of the solution to the world’s rebellion against its creator.  However and whenever the solution would come, it would be through Israel – as Jesus said to the Samaritan woman at the well in John’s Gospel: “salvation is from the Jews” (Jn. 4.22).  So far, so good. 

     Privilege or mission?  However, the Old Testament demonstrates that time and time again, Israel mistook her chosen-by-God status as simply a question of privilege, and forgot that being chosen by God meant being sent on a mission to the rest of the world for the benefit of all nations.  Non-Jews, pagans, Gentiles – whatever you want to call them – were often looked down upon as being sub-human.  In certain Old Testament texts, the nation of Israel is represented by human beings, while the pagan nations are symbolized by monstrous beasts.  Of course, when pagan empires are attacking you, burning your Temple, slaughtering your citizens and exiling your populace, it’s easy to stick the label of “monster” onto your enemy… 

     Part of the problem.  Besides sometimes mistaking responsibility for privilege, and perhaps predictably, Israel also rebels against Yahweh, worshipping other gods and refusing to listen to the call of the prophets to return to God’s law, to be faithful to the covenant that Yahweh established between himself and his people.  The people of the solution had also become part of the problem.  It’s like if an ambulance on the way to the scene of an accident is itself involved in an accident.  Now the ambulance and its crew, who were supposed to rescue the victims of the original accident, are themselves in need of rescue.  Israel had been chosen by God to be the agent of salvation, of rescue for the whole world, but now Israel herself needs to be rescued so that God’s salvation can extend, through Israel, to “the ends of the earth”, to all peoples.  At the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, the resurrected Jesus sends the apostles – themselves Jewish – on a mission to make disciples of Jesus out of all nations (cf. Mt. 28.18-21).  It’s telling that Jonathan Sacks, the former chief Rabbi of the UK, said that the Christian Church, through its worldwide missionary activity, had actually done what Israel had been called to do – to take the message of the Creator God of the Bible to all the nations of the earth.

     The shepherd-king.  So Jesus comes as the promised Messiah – the king of Israel, the Son of David, the Good Shepherd – who would gather God’s scattered flock and renew the covenant between Israel and her God so that God’s plan to bring salvation to the whole world could go forward.  Jesus calls 12 apostles, which calls to mind the number of tribes of the Israelite confederation at the time of Moses.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  And yet, in the Gospel stories, pagans often demonstrate great faith in Jesus’ authority to heal (cf. Mt. 8.5-13).  In the case of a Roman army officer who came to Jesus to request healing for his sick servant, Jesus said that, among his own people, he hadn’t found faith to compare with that of this pagan soldier.  In today’s second reading, St. Paul even talks about the Jews becoming jealous of the pagans who were accepting the gospel of Jesus, who is the Messiah of Israel, and by consequence, of the whole world.  As king (Son of David), Jesus represents the nation of Israel, who in turn represents all the nations of the world.  That’s how it works.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”; the original flock must first be gathered before the “other sheep” – the pagans – can be integrated into the one family so that there will be “one flock, and one shepherd” (cf. Jn. 10.16).

     Not to be denied.  We don’t know how much theological knowledge this Canaanite woman had, but a few things about her are clear – she acknowledges that Jesus is the true king of Israel; she addresses him as the “Son of David”.  She also has faith in his power to heal her daughter.  As J.R.R. Tolkien said of his character Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings (book), “the hands of the king are the hands of a healer”.  Jesus has been announcing that the kingdom of God is becoming a reality, and the dominant signs of the kingdom’s presence are healings – individuals are being rescued on a personal level from all the dark forces that had been enslaving them.  This woman is not only desperate to find help for her daughter; she is stubborn.  This pagan woman actually exhibits the kind of faith that we find in several biblical characters.  Think of Abraham negotiating with God in an attempt to prevent the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from being destroyed, or Jacob wrestling all night with “the angel of the Lord” until he received a blessing, as well as a dislocated hip.  This stubborn faith is faith that presumes a previously-existing relationship.  It is the trust that can be found between people who have entered into a mutual agreement of love and support.  For a member of Yahweh’s chosen people to demonstrate such trust in God can be easily understood; but the fact that this woman – this stranger to God’s people and God’s promises – is bold enough to act as if she has a claim on God’s mercy – through God’s anointed king – is extraordinary!  This woman is unstoppable – she will not be put off, not by Jesus’ initial silence, not by the disciples’ desire that Jesus get rid of her, not by Jesus’ apparent insult that would seem to call her very humanity into question – no!  She will not be turned away.  She has perceived in Jesus the One who has the power of Israel’s God to heal her daughter and she will not leave him alone until her request has been granted.

     No wasted mercy.  Perhaps there is a link between the fact that after the two miraculous feedings of the crowds, Jesus’ disciples gather up the broken fragments of bread that people had left uneaten (cf. Mt. 14.20; 15.37).  None of the benefits of God’s power are wasted.  The crowds are nourished, and then the crumbs are gathered up for future use.  Perhaps we are meant to understand by this that God’s mercy has no limit, that there is always more mercy to go around.  Even after all the healings that Jesus had performed before and after having fed the crowd of 5,000 people in the previous chapter, he still has compassion and power left to cure this woman’s daughter.

     Why?  And yet, perhaps the question is still nagging us: why?  Why does Jesus delay before healing this woman’s daughter?  Jesus seems to be testing her faith, another thing that the biblical God has a tendency of doing.  Has she really understood who Jesus is?  Perhaps she has simply taken him for a wandering magician.  Does she really believe that Jesus speaks and acts with the voice and power of the creator God?  This woman’s stubborn, persevering struggle reveals to her – and to Jesus – the strength of her trust in God.  Her persistence prepares her to receive the great gift that Jesus would eventually grant her.  Let us not be shy in prayer.  Prayer is a dialogue of trust between us and our creator.  Over and above the outcome to our requests, God desires to have that conversation with us.  What a dignified position – conversation partners with God!  Let us take courage from this woman’s story and trust that, as we stubbornly continue to pray for ourselves and our loved ones, that God’s will will be done in our lives as in heaven.  Amen.