2023.08.20 | It's Me!
“It’s Me!”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. NehringSenior
Minister & Executive Director
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
August 20, 2023
Mt. 15:21-28
The Gospel reading describes a meeting between Jesus and a Canaanite woman of Greek descent. The setting is the territory of Tyre and Sidon, located in the coastal area north of Galilee near the modern city of Beirut, a society of Arabs.(Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and Children: Neglected Stories from the Bible. (Orbis: Maryknoll, NY, 1994) 121)
Jesus and the Canaanite woman appear to be different from each other. He was a man. She was a woman. He was single. She was a parent. He was a Jew. She was a pagan. He was a foreigner. She was a local. The list goes on.
On first blush few would have noticed that they had anything in common. They were different in race, nationality, gender, religion, family form, political parties, and socio-economic class--just for starters. That was, at the beginning of the story. But by the end, those who are paying attention learn that they are more alike than different.
To better understand where they found common ground, we must dig deeper into the story.
II
Imagine being Jesus, when he and his crew landed in Tyre and Sidon. Jesus had been on a marathon schedule healing the sick, teaching and preaching to the masses, and he had a posse of peeps tagging along, to boot. They were all exhausted and desperate for some PTO.
Like some of us when we finally get away, Jesus was praying for anonymity. If there had been pagers or cell phones in his day, he would have thrown them in the Sea of Galilee en route to his vacation spot. If he had had a VISA charge card, he would have intentionally left home without it and paid cash.
Perhaps it was his desperate need for peace and quiet that caused Jesus to choose a vacation spot that was most unlikely—a place that his peers considered spiritually unclean. Jesus’ decision to vacation in Tyre and Sidon would be the modern equivalent of observant Jews spending a week on my family's hog farm or my grandparents spending a week in Vegas. No one would have expected it. In fact, most would have said, “If that’s happening, then pigs fly.” Turns out, they do.
In spite of Jesus’ stealth vacations plans, he did not escape notice. Just as he was about to turn in for the night, a woman was pounding at the door and refused to leave.
In an effort to restore peace to the household--and at the risk of being seen possibly receiving a sex worker--Jesus answered the door and tried to persuade the woman to leave, but she would not.
As any parent knows who’s made a midnight run to the emergency room with a sick child, you do whatever it takes to get the best medical care available for your child, regardless of the time of day or the hospital’s affiliations.
In Jesus’ day, he was a one-man Emergency Room. Yet, at that moment, he seemed reluctant to practice medicine. In fact, in a most “un-Christ-like” way, he was incredibly rude to the woman, even referring to her and her people as “dogs,” and explaining that he didn’t serve her kind. (By modern standards, Jesus makes the admissions staff in a private for-profit hospital seem gracious when presented with a request for out-of-network services.)
The gospel lesson for today might have ended there, but the woman wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. Rather than jetting from the scene, she turned back to Jesus saying: “Sir, even the dogs (the Gentiles) under the table eat the children’s (the Israelites) crumbs.”
With that sentence, Jesus was transformed, and his seemingly cold heart was warmed, and he said to her, “For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.” So she went home, and found the child lying quietly on the bed, and the demon gone.
III
What caused this change in the two of them? What caused a foreign woman in a strange land to seek the ministry of a healer who did not share her religion? What caused Jesus to travel to what his people thought was a God-forsaken land for a spiritual retreat?
My sense is that the answer to these questions lies in the fact that they were both desperately in need of balance in their own lives. They needed to find a balance between their own needs and the needs of those around them. The pair also shared a sense of rejection and isolation, and they shared a deep passion for the missions in which they were engaged.
Jesus needed time, space, and prayer to reflect on his vocation and mission. He was struggling with who he was: a prophet sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and the realization that his own people didn’t welcome him.
Meanwhile, the woman was desperate to find a cure for her daughter whose malady had taken over their lives, made them social outcasts, and led others to believe that they deserved their suffering.
The woman was on a healing mission for her daughter. Jesus was on a healing mission, he thought, solely to the Jews. In the end, the outcast mother called him to conversion. She called Jesus to expand that scope of his ministry beyond his home culture to the whole people of God.
Jesus accepted the mother’s prophetic call and healed her daughter, so that the mother could return home and the family can resume life as full members of society.
On first blush, it may seem that the mother and daughter pair were the only ones who experienced healing in this story; but if we step back from the encounter and examine it in the larger context of the gospels of Mark and Matthew in which it appears, we see that Jesus is also profoundly healed and changed by his encounter with the Greeks.
Jesus is helped by the mother’s acknowledgement and acceptance of who he was and her openness to his ministry. (At last, in this foreigner, Jesus found someone who understood and embraced his true identity. In fact, she had a better sense of who he was and what he was called to be and do than he himself.) Furthermore, she acknowledged and embraced his identity and ministry at a time when his own people did not. Ponder that for a moment.
In addition, the Canaanite woman also taught Jesus a profound lesson about the meaning of humility and faith. Unlike he who displayed arrogance, she exhibited humility. Unlike he who was spiritually at sea, she displayed the utmost confidence in God’s purposes and power.
In refusing to be turned away, the woman’s faith was revealed, and Jesus (not his visitor) was changed. That’s right, he had a conversion experience!
Through this woman’s witness, Jesus gained insight into himself and his mission, and the world would never be the same.
And you know what, the same can be true for us--all of us--when we dare to see and believe that we all have needs. When we give up the “we-they” dichotomy. When we lay down the burden of having to always see ourselves as other people’s saviors, and get saved ourselves. Repeat after me: it’s me. It's us. Not them. Amen.