Matthew 15-16 "The Canaanite Woman"

“A person who publishes a [blog] willfully appears before the populace with his pants down. If it is a good [blog] nothing can hurt him. If it is a bad [blog] nothing can help him.”- Poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Born on this Day 1892

Matthew 15:21-28

Who is this Jesus? Is he going to answer this woman's plea? Is he being rude? Wait...did he just call her a dog? What?

I've always been embarrassed by Jesus' behavior toward the Canaanite woman, but I'm more embarrassed by pious attempts to excuse or sanctify Jesus' behavior. For example, take Calvin...please.

Calvin has two problems with this story. First, Jesus is silent. That's not the problem, though. This is the problem: How could this woman have faith and pray if she has never heard the Word of God proclaimed? As Calvin writes in his commentary, "This seems to be contrary to the nature of faith and prayer as Paul describes it in Rom. 10.14—that no-one can pray aright unless the Word of God has led the way." How does Calvin resolve this apparent contradiction? Jesus has been silent, but only outwardly silent. Calvin: "We must note that although He then suppressed His words, He spoke inwardly to the woman's mind and so this secret instinct stood in place of the external preaching." Really. Calvin posits telepathy to excuse Jesus' rude silence and to harmonize this story with Paul. That's embarrassing.

Second, when Jesus does speak, it's not nice talk. Calvin acknowledges that it at least appears this way.* What possible reason could Jesus have had for being so condescendingly rude? It's all for the woman's  sake, of course. "Christ's motive...was not to quench the woman's faith but rather to sharpen her zeal and kindle her fervor." "He was chiefly concerned with making a trial of the woman's faith." "And she thinks the door is closed on her, not to drive her away altogether, but rather to make her try faith to get through the cracks in the wood."

OK. Not as bad as telepathy. But it's still an attempt to justify or excuse some plainly derogatory remarks. "Well, you know, I'm sorry I was so hard on you, but, you know, it was for your own good. Your faith is stronger for it."

"Oh. Wow. Thanks. Now, about these splinters...."

I don't know. It's such an unsatisfactory apologetic. And neither Matthew nor Mark offer apology when they tell the story. Why do we feel compelled to defend our precious idea of Jesus? Why do I? Because  that's what I'm going to do next.

Where is Jesus? He's in the region of Tyre and Sidon: cosmopolitan, urban seaports, crossroads of the empire, filled with many cultures, many faiths, and no faith, far from Judea and Jerusalem. He's on the edge of his experience, on the edge where the outsiders meet the insiders.

And just here he is confronted by a Canaanite woman—an ultimate type of outsider/Gentile—who calls him Lord, Son of David, and, on that basis, pleas for mercy for herself, healing for her demon-possessed daughter.

Who is Jesus? This is a defining moment. Is he the Son-of-David Messiah that the Jews expect? Is he going to take up the battle against Israel's ancient enemies, including the hated Canaanites who Israel drove out of the land of Canaan, the promised land? Or is he someone else, a different kind of Messiah? Is he only sent to the lost sheep of Israel? Or is he sent for the whole world? Is the bread, his eucharistic body, only for the children of Israel, or is if for all the needy dogs of the world, even for all creation?

Silence. Pondering silence. Prayerful silence. Who am I? Father, who am I?

And when he speaks it's almost as if he were thinking/praying aloud. "I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel, right, Father? It's not right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs, is it, Father?" And, wonder of wonders, the Father speaks to him with the voice of the Canaanite woman! "Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."

What then did Jesus do? You know what he did. He granted her plea for mercy and broke the boundary between insiders and outsiders. He praised her faith. He healed her daughter.

What then shall we do? We shall listen to the Canaanite women in our world, for God may speak to us  through them, calling us to break boundaries between insiders and outsiders. We'll be in good company if we do.

*And Calvin should know about not nice talk. Earlier in his commentary on this passage he unleashes on "...that dog Servetus" who "was absurd as well as ungodly...." Unlike the Canaanite woman, however, Servetus could not continue the conversation because the absurd and ungodly dog had been burned at the stake. Notice Calvin speaks of Servetus in the past tense.

Matthew 18: A Total Misreading of the Text

One section from our reading today is one of the more popular passages in all of the gospels. Matthew 18:15-20 has long been used by the church as a model for church discipline. The way the passage is typically read, understood, and practiced is that if someone is in sin, you go to them individually to try to correct their behavior. If they do not listen, you then go to them with two or three people. If they still will not listen to your advice and correction, you take their story before the whole church. And finally, if they still will not modify their sinful ways, they are to be expelled from your community, a practice traditionally known as excommunication.

But this is not how the actual biblical passage reads and is a poor misunderstanding of Jesus' words. Jesus says, "...if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector." While the church has often interpreted this passage as the license and liberty to excommunicate the unrepentant sinner, this is actually the EXACT OPPOSITE of Jesus' words. Jesus is not asking us to break communion with pagans and tax collectors, because these are the very people with whom Jesus frequently communed. He constantly befriended and loved those who the world loved to hate. He constantly communed with all the 'wrong' people. He constantly loved the unlovable.

"Treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector"

With these challenging and engaging words, Jesus is inviting his followers to actively engage and commune with people who are resisting the way of Jesus. He's not asking us to break these relationships and solely commune with those that are like us. He is inviting us to push further into community and fellowship with those who badly need the good news of Jesus. May we have the courage to not resist and avoid relationships with the other, those different than us, and our enemies.

Matthew 13-14 "The Sound of Silence"

Back to the memory faults (intended) for this one. Here's a link to the fellas the way I remember them. Good audio, but out of sync. I still want to play guitar like Paul Simon.

The Sound of Silence

Simon & Garfunkel

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

In restless dreams I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone.
'Neath the halo of a street lamp,
I turned my collar to the cold and damp,
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night,
And touched the sound of silence.

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more.
People talking without speaking.
People hearing without listening.
People writing songs that voices never share
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence.

"Fools" said I, "You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you,
Take my arms that I might reach out you."
But my words like silent raindrops fell,
And echoed
In the wells of silence.

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.
And the sign flashed out its warning,
In the words that it was forming.
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls.
And whispered in the sounds of silence."

Reading Jesus quoting Isaiah in Matthew 13:13-17 brought to mind this Simon & Garfunkel favorite. Scriptural themes run through it:

• visions
• seeds
• dreams
• light in darkness (albeit neon, which we find is an idol in the final stanza)
• silence
• people talking without speaking
• hearing without listening
• pleas to hear and touch
• no one daring to disturb the silence (with apologies, no doubt, to T.S. Eliot)
• prophets/false prophets
• false gods/idols

It is so like us to hear without listening, to praise and worship Jesus without obeying him or practicing what he preaches, to fill our ears with great music and fine preaching, without “understanding with our hearts.” (13:15) To listen in scripture is to obey, not just to hear and then go on about our daily idolatry as the people in Paul Simon’s song do. To listen is to hear and do, a theme that runs throughout Matthew, clearly stated in 7:21-28.

It is so like us to be echoes in the wells of silence. Whoever has ears, let them hear: The sound of silence is hearing without doing; it is our silence in response to Jesus' call if we hear and turn away.

Matthew 13-14: Hidden and Sought

One of today's chapters, Matthew 13, contains a slew of cryptic stories from Jesus. This section of Matthew's gospel is full of ambiguous parables, usually followed with a statement from Jesus encouraging his disciples to have "eyes to see and ears to hear" his message. Jesus is intentionally mysterious and vague, and yet he expects his followers to work hard in understanding his message. He doesn't make it easy on them.

And he doesn't make it easy on us. While the good news of Jesus can be boiled down to loving God and loving others, in practice, this is incredibly challenging. The Kingdom of God just isn't easy to comprehend and be a part of. It's like a seed that dies or gets choked out almost every time it's planted. It's like a hidden treasure that we must sell everything to acquire. It starts as small as a mustard seed but grows to the size of a tree. It's like yeast that works its way into every crack and crevice of our lives. But it's definitely not obvious, and it's definitely not easy to ascertain.

The challenge for us, as contemporary followers of Christ, is to always be on the lookout for the Kingdom of God. It won't always be easy to spot, but if we have eyes to see and ears to hear, we will begin to notice the subtle and simple, yet profound ways that God is active in the world, ushering the good news of redemption and restoration in to a world that has so often separated itself from the way and will of God.

Matthew 10-12

Initial thoughts, mostly on chapter 10....

Who is Jesus? As he is the blessed one who blesses us, here he is the sent one who sends us.

Where is Jesus? He's where he was sent.

What then shall we do? Go where he sends us, as he sends us, and do what he tells us to do—just as he went where he was sent, as he was sent, and did what his Father told him to do.

He sends us to the lost ones as he was sent to the lost ones. He sends us poor, as he was poor. He sends us to bless as he blessed us. He sends us to preach, teach, and heal as he preached, taught, and healed. He sends us to give freely as we have freely received. He sends us as sheep amidst wolves as he was a lamb among the wolves of this world. He fearlessly sends us and we are to go without fear as he went without fear.

The church is not gathered in, huddled in fear; the church is sent out, generous and fearless. As Jesus is.

Matthew 8-9

We were blessed by the preacher who practiced what he preached.

That line from Lucinda Williams captures the essence of chapters 8 and 9. (See my first post on Matthew 5-7 for Lucinda's song.) Jesus is the preacher who practiced what he preached.

Jesus ended his Sermon in chapter 7 with a caution that hearing demands action, words call forth deeds. To call Jesus 'Lord' without doing the will of the Father is to take Jesus' name in vain. We may consider ourselves insiders based on our confession, but we may find ourselves outside the kingdom of heaven based upon our deeds. This is a theme that Matthew's Jesus will return to again and again.

In chapters 8-9 Jesus practices what he preached in chapters 5-7. He not only teaches and preaches as one with authority, but he practices that authority in blessing those who are outside the traditional understanding of 'blessed.' Jesus—himself blessed as poor in spirit, as mourner, as meek or gentle, hungering and thirsting after God's righteousness, as merciful, as pure in heart, as peacemaker, and as persecuted and reviled—now goes about being a blessing to other outsiders. He was blessed to be a blessing.

The cultural understanding of 'blessed' goes something like this: The way things are is the way they were meant to be, the way God ordained them to be.  The wealthy, healthy, and powerful insiders deserve to be so, else they wouldn't be wealthy, healthy, and powerful. The poor, sick, and powerless—the outsiders—deserve to be so or else they wouldn't be poor, sick, and powerless. God is just. Those who deserve to be blessed are blessed and those who do not are not blessed.

Jesus sees this understanding of justice as broken, as unjust, as sin. In these two chapters he goes to the outsiders—lepers, a Roman centurion, women (Peter's mom and the woman with the issue of blood—who is both unclean and a woman, twice removed from the insiders), demon-possessed people, sick people, paralyzed people, tax collectors, sinners, dead people, blind people, mute people—and heals them (restores them to physical and social and religious and community health). He declares their faith great. He helps them. He blesses them.

As a result, he runs into resistance from insiders who are invested in the status quo, both the economic status quo (the Gadarene swineherd community) and the religious status quo (represented here by the Pharisees). These insiders cannot imagine a God who would bless those who don't deserve it.

So, who is Jesus? He is the one who goes about teaching, proclaiming the kingdom, and healing. He is the one who has compassion on the crowds of outsiders, the one who practices authority over demons, illness, death, and nature. He is the one who embodies the Beatitudes of chapter 5, the one who does the will of the Father.

Where is Jesus? He's with sinners, outsiders, losers.

What then shall we do? We shall do the will of the Father as outlined in chapters 5-7. We shall act on the words we heard Jesus preach in the Sermon. We shall go about, seeking out sinners, outsiders, and losers, not just waiting and expecting them to find us. We shall heal and restore. We shall follow the preacher who practiced what he preached.

Matthew 5-7 (cont.) (again)

In his commentary on Matthew, Dale Bruner writes about how Dispensationalists have blunted the sharply radical call of the Sermon on the Mount by claiming that the ethic described there is only applicable to a future Dispensation (or a future time) in which Christ returns and establishes his Kingdom. In other words, the Sermon on the Mount is not practical for living in this current Dispensation, so we are not expected to behave according to the impractical demands to love our enemies, do good to those who persecute us, turn the other cheek, forgive as we are forgiven, etc.

There is, however, another way of approaching the Sermon. Here's Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from The Cost of Discipleship:

"Humanly speaking, it is possible to understand the Sermon on the Mount in a thousand different ways. But Jesus knows only one possibility: simple surrender and obedience—not intrepreting or applying it, but doing and obeying it. That is the only way to hear his words. He does not mean for us to discuss it as an ideal. He really means for us to get on with it."

 And here's Soren Kierkegaard, from I don't know where:

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

What then are we to do? Spend some dreadful time alone with the New Testament this Lenten Season. Then get on with it.