Battling for Blessing (Aug 16)

Readings, Isaiah 56:1-8 and Matthew 15:10-28
 Image, Michael Cook, “Crumbs of Love” 

There are a lot of overlapping themes and tensions across our last few readings from Matthew. Today, I want to lay them out to see how they might shape our approach to some of the prickly parts of today’s reading.
 
But it is helpful to attend to our reading from Isaiah, which sets a helpful backdrop to all we are going to encounter. I’ve been teaching a class on the church at United Theological College this semester, and early on in the course we do a week on the doctrine of election. The aim of the course is to explore what makes the church the church, and that particular class introduces the idea that part of what makes the church the church is the action of God to choose and call a people to witness to the way of Christ. Of course, this idea of God’s electing activity is around long before the church. The story of Exodus is organised around the famous words I will be your God, and you will be my people. God chooses Israel and delivers them from Egypt, so they can witness to the reign of God in the world.
 
Now, thinking about election leads to a number of tensions and issues – many more than we can do justice to today (I’m not sure I got through them all in a two-hour class), but one is the issue of universality vs particularity. Scripture attests that God is the God of all, the God of all the earth, the God of all creation, the Sovereign, Universal Singular. Yet, Scripture is also emphasising the particularity of God vis a vis Israel, or vis a vis Israel and the Church. Naturally, this can, and has, lead to superiority complexes of various kinds – with attendant justification of violence and dispossession not only in scripture but across history.
 
Now, Scripture also has threads which undermine or trouble the particularity. God, for instance, makes a promise to Hagar to make a great nation from Ishmael (just as God had promised Abraham to make a great nation from Isaac). In the Book of Numbers, God speaks through the non-Israelite prophet Balaam. The Book of Ruth celebrates the determined faith of the foreigner, who becomes part of the Davidic line. And, in what we heard today, the prophet Isaiah reminds the people of the word of the Lord: the foreigner and the eunuch should not be kept separate, but those who love God and keeps the sabbath shall be brought to God’s holy mountain and made joyful in the house of prayer, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord God,
   who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
   besides those already gathered.
Of course, this passage alone does not solve the tension of universality and particularity – importantly, the vision in Isaiah is still that of a situation where those on the outside are brought in to a kind of stable centre. But it does critique the hardlines we might want to draw between who are or aren’t the chosen, who or who don’t warrant the care of God. God is the one who will gather those besides those already gathered, God’s house shall be a house of prayer for all people. There is an expansive trajectory we might say, that the particular is not the be all and end all, but rather it is through the particular calling of Israel and the Church that God will bring about the universal salvation of the world. The chosen elect are thus those who are called to witness to what, someday, many more will know.
 
Which, in my mind, makes all the more strange and troubling the rebuke of Jesus to the Canaanite woman, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Is not the promised Messiah the one who will gather others? Who will bring about the messianic age where all shall come to the holy mountain and pay homage to God’s glory? Why is Jesus insisting on such strident particularity? Why is he so determined to cast those of Israel as children, and the Canaanites as dogs?

This is made stranger still, given the preceding stories we explored the last two weeks. When the disciples urged Jesus to send away the crowds, Jesus filled with compassion, rebuked the disciples and made sure the crowd was fed. Far from settling for crumbs, Jesus ensured there were leftovers! When Peter wavered in his faith and doubted the command of the Lord, no great, persisting, unwavering faith was needed to change Jesus’ mind. Jesus immediately reached out and caught him. In his exchange with the Pharisees Jesus combats their critique about right food practice with the now famous words: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles – it is what comes out of the mouth that reveals the ways of the heart… and yet, what comes out of Jesus’ mouth in his words to the Canaanite woman seem to reveal something less than imitable. The strong dichotomy between these readings, all orbiting questions of feeding, faith, and compassion, seem to suggest Jesus is operating with a very particular outlook, privileging his people over the outsider.   
 
People often go one of two ways when approaching this passage. The first, which is probably a more recent strain of interpretation, is to argue that this passage reveals Jesus’ human bias, that Jesus has imbibed a certain ethno-centrism which is corrected in this passage. The Canaanite woman rightly challenges and in turn corrects Jesus, whose view of his mission is properly expanded to include more than just the household of Israel.  
 
The second reading positions Jesus as probing or testing the Canaanite woman, not to make her earn her daughter’s release, but to teach his disciples (and through its recording in the gospel the later readers). Jesus does not really think he is only called to Israel, nor that Canaanites are dogs, rather he is aware of the prevalence of this opinion by his compatriots and so allows it to be challenged and overcome by this woman’s great faith.  
 
The first of those readings raises some questions. What does it mean to say Jesus is without sin if he is capable of such deplorable attitudes and behaviours? What does it mean to imply Jesus needed correction in order to properly understand the task given him by God? But the second reading also raises questions. The Canaanite woman does not consent to be a teaching tool. She comes to Jesus in real desperation and what has she done to be put through the ringer to teach his disciples? Why does she need to prove her faith, when all Peter had to do was say “Lord save me”? Jesus didn’t make him wade through rhetorical riddles, so why must this woman who only wants her daughter to be well? I don’t know if either reading is entirely inappropriate, or cannot serve a helpful function, but I don’t know if either really gets us out of the various binds we have found ourselves in.
 
To do that, I want to compare this Canaanite woman to two different people in scripture. I don’t know if this will entirely solve the question of particularity vs universality, nor what to make of Jesus’ words in this story, but they may open some fresh avenues.
 
The first is Jesus’ mother. What might it look like to compare what the Canaanite woman does in this story, to what Jesus’ mother does at the wedding at Cana? There, we may recall, Jesus’ mother approaches Jesus to let him know the wine has run out. Jesus responds, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’  Following this, Jesus performs the sign of turning water to wine effectively beginning his ministry. There is something of a similar cadence in this story as with today’s reading. Jesus is asked to do something, he resists, initially, and links his reason to his messianic task: my hour has not yet come // I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Then, in both stories, the women push past this initial rebuff and, in turn, Jesus responds by granting the request.
 
While the language to the Canaanite woman is harsher, the basic pattern remains the same. She, like Jesus’ mother, generates the scene by which Jesus’ messianic mission begins or expands. Their role then, in this great drama of God, is not to be diminished, it is perhaps all the greater for the fact that it seemingly moves Jesus to begin something he had felt it was not yet time to begin. Be that the first signs of his glory, or his ministry to the Gentiles.  
 
The other figure is that of Jacob. And this is a helpful as it was just two weeks ago we read about his incredible feat of wrestling with God. What we recall, importantly, from that text is that (a) Jacob had to wrestle until dawn and had his hip put out of joint, and (b) that his tenacity not only earnt him a blessing but also his new name, “Israel” – for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed. Here this woman, from beyond Israel, performs the same act: she strives and wrestles with the one fully God and human, and prevails. Like Jacob, she is relentless, and will not let go until she secures her blessing.
 
What might it mean, for someone outside Israel to exemplify what Israel is named for and called to exemplify? The conversation is her wrestling match, it is by this she gains her blessing. This conversation thus places the woman into the lineage of those who have wrestled with God and prevailed, who have secured deliverance through a tenacious faith. Focusing on this woman as a Jacob type, moves the story away from one of charity, where Jesus deigns the bless the outsider, to one of faith and belonging. The supposed outsider enters into the same sacred space of wrestling with God as those named after such a task. This perhaps, is what it means for God’s house to be a house for all people. Not that those outside have to sneak in quietly and accept crumbs, nor be treated with meek and mild paternalism, but are those who stand firm on holy ground and grab hold of what is also theirs by rights. They too get to come and grab hold of God and cling and cling and cling to secure a new future. Jesus’ harsh words, then, might signal something new. After all, in the same passage Jesus bemoans once again that his followers are so dull they have to ask what his parable means – Jesus is rarely short of harsh or blunt words for those close to him. Jesus thus treats her as someone ready and able to wrestle with God, ready and able to stand firm in their faith and expectation of who Jesus is, ready and able to exemplify what it means to be a covenantal people.
 
And this is good news for us Gentiles. Our lineage in the story of God finds its roots in this woman’s wrestling. If she were to gain a new name, like Jacob, it might well be Christian, for she has struggled with the one God and human and prevailed. This contest foreshadows who the church will become. That in Christ’s reconciling act the divisions of particular and universal will be broken down, and we will be one in Christ as we are, in our irreducible diversity. The work of Christ is one that opens fully the house of prayer to all people, not through an act of first becoming like another, but in having who we are swept up in the spirit of adoption. So take up the mantle: like Jacob before her this woman signals a core aspect of what it means to be part of the people of God, those who know, know so deep down in our hearts, that we do not need to settle for crumbs but can cling on for blessings. Because it is God’s will to gather all in and deliver us into an abundant life.