Fourteen Sunday After Pentecost
Year A RCL
August 17, 2008
All Saints’, Bentonville
Gospel:
Jesus left Gennesaret and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 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." 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.
Even today, the action of the Canaanite woman would be viewed as audacious. She appeared alone, at a house full of strange, foreign men, brushes aside the disciples' efforts to keep her away, kneels at Jesus' feet and asks him for help. In the context of the time and culture, for a Gentile woman to come to the home of Jewish men would have been unheard of. It was, perhaps, no wonder that she was so strongly rebuked by Jesus, who in the harshest language, compared her and her people to dogs, dogs undeserving of a place in God's kingdom. Only her clever retort, "even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table" - convinced Jesus to comply with her request that he cast out her daughter's demons.
The visit of the Canaanite woman to the home where Jesus was taking refuge was not an isolated incident. As it appears in the Gospel of Matthew and in Mark, it is an integral part of a sequence of events that constitute an important subplot in the gospel. Jesus had earlier fed 5000 Jews in the desert, walked on water, healed those who came to him, argued with Pharisees about eating food with defiled hands, and taught his disciples that no food is unclean. Then he goes to the Gentile territory of Tyre and Sidon where he encounters this Cannanite woman and heals her daughter. He then, still in Gentile land heals the deaf and tongue tied man. Then Jesus feeds 4000 Gentiles in the desert. The encounter with the Cannanite woman is a pivotal moment in this sequence of events. It is the critical turning point in Jesus' realization that his mission on earth was not solely meant for the Jews. Jesus, at this stage of his ministry, apparently still had a lot to learn. One of the things he had to learn was that he had better start listening to women. The larger lesson, however, concerned how his ministry was going to take shape. You see, Jesus was under the mistaken impression that his message of love and forgiveness and compassion was meant only for his people - people like him. He hadn't yet realized that the healing requested by the Canaanite woman was meant for all humankind – for foreigners, even the Gentiles, even the cursed Canaanites. This bold, shouting woman, in her effort to find healing for her daughter, stepped out of the boundaries of culture and convention, and was able to reveal to Jesus a picture of the shape of things to come. No wonder she wasn't welcome in the midst of the disciples. No wonder they pleaded with Jesus to send this unfamiliar kind of woman away. The future is often unsettling for those comfortable with the status quo. Yet, because she loved her daughter, this woman was willing to violate the boundaries of culture, class, and prejudice.
For about a year and a half, before taking my current post here in Arkansas, I lived and worked in Los Angeles. Most of the time I lived in East LA, in the barrio, and the neighborhood church that welcomed me was La Iglesia de la Epifania, the Church of the Epiphany. One of the oldest churches in the diocese of Los Angeles, Epiphany, is long past its days of prominence as a prosperous parish in an upper middle class white neighborhood. It is also well past its days of glory in the 60's and the 70's when it was a center of Chicano social and political activism - the kind of place where Cesar Chavez spoke regularly and gathered support for the rights of farm workers to make a decent living. The church now ministers to the needs of a neighborhood of the elderly and of recent Latino immigrants. While second and third generation Latinos having escaped the barrio, and moved to safer, quieter, less troubled communities.
On Sundays, Epiphany has an English and a Spanish service, but the communicants attending both services are Hispanic. The pews are relatively full at the Spanish service and almost empty at the later English service. Almost always, I was the lone white face in either worship service. The rector once thanked me for joining their church, noting that I had, "single-handedly brought diversity to the parish."
I met another kind of Canaanite woman there. Maria attended church every Sunday, pushed in her wheelchair, to her usual place on the third row from the front, by her attentive 12 year old son. Her husband was generally with her, although his 6 day a week job as a gardener occasionally required his labor on a seventh as well. I got to know the family well when we marched together one spring morning through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, protesting a bill that was then pending in the U.S. House of Representatives that, if implemented would force her to choose between raising her American born children in the country of their birth, or taking them with her, on a return trip to the future-less village in Mexico where she and her husband were citizens. It was a march that inspired millions of people across the country and, at the same time, provoked the fear and anger of millions more. From the vantage point of her wheelchair she simply pled for the wellbeing of her children.
A couple of weeks later, holy week was upon us - Maundy Thursday to be exact. The practice at Epiphany was for the people to come forward, sit in a chair in front of the altar, and have their feet washed by the priest. I was assisting in this process, providing basins of water and towels. Toward the end of the foot washing procession, Maria, as usual pushed in her wheel chair by her son, approached the kneeling priest and asked if she could wash his feet. It seemed out of order, for this brown-skinned woman, who couldn't even walk, to leave her wheelchair and wash the feet of a white-skinned man, her priest. However, he assented and Maria's son and I lifted her frail body from the chair and onto her spindly knees -and she washed her priest's feet.
The Canaanite women I have known were women who seldom know their place. Women who, while they may be loved within their families, communities - within their social network - are brave enough to step out of the place where they are most comfortable and move into places where they are not wanted. The Canaanite women among us are the catalysts of spiritual illumination - those who recognize early that all God's children deserve a place at the table. If Jesus can listen - and be transformed by these voices, voices that speak from the edges of places we don't really want to hear from - perhaps we too can listen.
And so it is in Northwest Arkansas, where there are mothers who are afraid to shout, mothers who are willing to kneel and mothers whose presence is resented. Women who clean houses and work in kitchens and dismantle chicken parts in order to obtain for their children the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. And if such women can teach Jesus that his mission extends beyond the house of Israel, how can we not listen to their voices?