Sunday, August 14th, 2005
Pentecost + 13
Jerusalem Baptist Church, Emmerton VA
Matthew 15: (1-9), 10-28
1Then Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem and said, 2‘Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.’ 3He answered them, ‘And why do you break the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? 4For God said,* “Honor your father and your mother,” and, “Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.” 5 But you say that whoever tells father or mother, “Whatever support you might have had from me is given to God”,* then that person need not honor the father.* 6 So, for the sake of your tradition, you make void the word* of God. 7 You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:
8 “This people
honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
9 in vain
do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.” ’10 Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘Listen and understand: 11it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.’ 12Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?’ 13He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’ 15But Peter said to him, ‘Explain this parable to us.’ 16Then he said, ‘Are you also still without understanding? 17Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? 18But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. 19For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. 20These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.’ 21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22Just 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.’23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’24He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’26He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.
Sometimes we catch a glimpse of the humanity of Jesus that is SO human that it is in jarring contrast to what we’re accustomed to assuming Jesus was – a loving, gentle savior, always calm, cool, and collected, always ready to rattle off the perfectly appropriate saying or scripture. It is a dangerous thing, to forget the complexity of what is involved in God coming to earth and dwelling among us.
Yes, there is a simplicity to the Gospel that cuts through all the other STUFF that we may want to throw up to defend our lives, such as they are, but there is at the same time the issue of how his humanity – his FULL humanity – played itself out in his ministry.
Exasperation is a fully human emotion … placed by God, and part of who WE are and who Jesus is.
So we have the setting. We’re still following the story, after the death of John the Baptist, after the feeding of the 5,000, after the walking on water, after the healings that Jesus performed in Gennesaret. None of these events took place in a vacuum. Word got around, as it always does, by word of mouth, and I suspect in a surprisingly short amount of time, for the limited technology available in first century Palestine.
These incredible miracles have just happened, and Jesus has been healing people in numbers – not just here and there, in isolated incidents. And what do the Pharisees and the scribes do? They try to divert the attention from the wonders that have been witnessed and experienced and point out that the disciples are breaking the rules by not washing before eating. Jesus lets loose on them. Can you hear it in his words? (read v 7-9)
Jesus then turns to the people to whom he’d been ministering, and the lesson begins. Only the disciples are more concerned at how the lesson reflects on the Pharisees and scribes than they are on the actual lesson itself. They seem to get so agitated by how upset Jesus’ comments made the Pharisees that they didn’t hear what Jesus was saying, so much so, that we find Peter, who just that morning had walked on water, asking Jesus to explain it to them again – you can almost hear him saying “ah, sorry Jesus, I got distracted there for a minute and missed what you said … something about blind guides? Could you repeat that for us?”
Jesus’ answer leaves nothing to the imagination. In his earlier statement, he says it fairly plainly, but … in a way that is … acceptable in mixed company. This time around, there’s none of that, in fact, Jesus gets graphic: “are you still without understanding” seems to have been a nice way to translate what in the Aramaic is surely something closer to “did I stutter? Whatever goes into your mouth passes through your body and comes out smelly at the other end?? It’s what comes out of your mouth – the words you speak, that are the true reflection of what is inside your hearts and minds. THAT is where your righteousness or defilement is determined. What you eat has very little to do with anything.” He goes on to list, after starting with evil intentions, he lists or alludes to the breaking of the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth commandments. If you need to look it up, compare the list in verse 19 with Exodus 20: 12-16. He’s saying that all those horrible things don’t come from outside our bodies, they come from inside our hearts. THAT is where they are born.
As we’ve studied, both in Sunday morning Bible study, Wednesday evenings, and throughout our discipleship times, the focus of the religious practices of the Pharisees and Sadducees had been lost. They had lost sight of the whole reason God had called them into relationship with God’s self: for fellowship. In so frantically trying to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’, they lost sight of the very one who’s presence they were intended to seek: God. And in losing sight of the purpose, their hearts became hardened to the reconciliatory message of the Gospel.
Then, as quickly as it happens sometimes, Jesus leaves and goes further north, into Syrian territory. We have a situation that is echoed later by the woman who was possessed by a spirit of divination, whom we read about in Acts chapter 16 a couple of Wednesdays ago, who followed Paul and his companions around for days, crying out “These men are slaves of the most high God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation!” Here in Matthew we have a gentile woman calling Jesus by a name that would mean much less to a Gentile than to a Jew in those days – “Son of David” – the name for the Messiah. And just like the possessed woman would several years later, this woman does not let up. There is something to be said for the mothering instinct, the drive that would make a woman humble herself, go to the extreme she does, to do something for her demon-possessed daughter. It gets to the point that the disciples even urge Jesus to send her away, because she is such a bother.
What happens next is hard for me to read. Current sensibilities cringe at the way the Gospel has Jesus inferring that the woman before him is comparable to a dog begging for scraps at the table, when he has seemingly more important people to tend to in the house of Israel. Our sense of equality, if not, simple politeness, rears back at the suggestion.
But let’s look a little more closely at the event. Are there similar situations we can point to in the scriptures? Yes, several times throughout the Old Testament we have Prophets convincing God to do something other than what was originally intended. This is similar in that Jesus states first that he was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. The woman insistently asked for help, and Jesus responds with what is harsh in today’s language: it’s not fair to take the children’s food and give it to the dogs. Then comes the turning point. The woman takes Jesus’ own analogy and turns it around: even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.
Growing up, we had two dogs, one after the other. Neither of them were inside dogs, so we didn’t have to worry too much about it, but on those summer mornings when we ate breakfast out on the patio, under the wisteria canopy, we invariably had Rascal sitting at our feet, begging for anything we would give him. And he WOULD take ANYTHING. He knew where the good food was, and he also knew where to go to get it. ME. I probably shared more breakfast food with Rascal over the 5 years I stayed in the house before coming back for college than I can recall, but it was his insistence that ended up breaking me down.
The kids try to do the puppy dog eyes today when they REALLY want something from me, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but it is always a struggle.
It is hard to say no when you love someone.
I think Jesus may have been compelled by his love, combined with the woman’s persistence, as well as her cleverness. It is interesting to note that Jesus uses the same response, “Let it be done” as he did with the Roman Centurion and his son in chapter 8 of Matthew.
So what does this mean for Jerusalem Baptist Church at Emmerton?
This week we had our Vacation Bible School. Most of you were aware of it, many of you participated in it in some way. Most of the children who came are children we know. Some attend church elsewhere, but some don’t. We tend to focus, to gravitate naturally, on and to those with whom we have something in common. Children who know the language, know the routine, as it were. The ones who know what is expected of them. It is harder to do that with people and children who come from a background that is devoid of those same touchpoints, those who DON’T know where the Old Testament or the New Testament are, those who DON’T almost automatically know that correct, the ‘Church’ answer to the questions, those who DON’T know what is appropriate and inappropriate to say and do ‘in church’. A tantalizing thought is that, in his humanity, Jesus was discovering his purpose as he went along. Perhaps this, along with the encounter with the Roman Centurion, brought Jesus to the point of realizing that it WASN’T just to the children of Israel that he was bringing the good news of the Kingdom. So we’d LIKE to say, along with Jesus, “we’re here for the people who know … or SHOULD know”, but with Jesus, we are compelled to go beyond that, beyond the safe confines of this room, out into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth … and take the Kingdom of God with us, TO them.
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