Sunday Sermon - 16 August
I have a favourite place at our cottage. It’s been my favourite place for the 21 years that we’ve lived there. It is, what I call, my Sitting Rock.
It is high up on a ridge on our property with a wonderful view of the lake. I can see our beach so when the kids were little I could sit there and keep an eye on them while they played down by the water. I can see the dock. I can see the raft when they're out swimming. I can see almost everything from my special, sacred place.
Since I like my comforts, I have another nice, flat rock beside my Sitting Rock where I used to put my wine, or my scotch or bourbon, or martini (my drink of choice depended on my mood in the moment).
It's a great spot. I go there mostly to think, to be by myself with nature, and to listen to the waves lap on the rocks and shore. I guess that’s why I’m talking about it today because it helped me to dig into this morning’s Gospel.
This past Wednesday, I was whipper-snipping around my Sitting Rock when I stumbled over it, lost my footing and went tumbling down the ridge. I scraped up my leg. I scraped up my arm. I pulled muscles in places I didn't even know had muscles. As I lay there wondering what on earth had just happened, I had one thought: my favourite spot just hurt me!
I admit that's a fairly trite example but it was what came to mind as I was thinking about this Gospel while sitting on my beloved rock after my fall — how life is full of contradictions, how sometimes the things we love the most can hurt us the most.
Our children can bring us extraordinary joy and sometimes extraordinary worry and pain. The people we love most—our partners, our spouses, our closest friends—are also the people who have the greatest capacity to hurt us, precisely because we have opened ourselves up to them.
Love isn't always consoling. Love isn't always easy. Sometimes love is complicated. Sometimes it's confusing. Sometimes it just plain hurts.
That brings us to this rather uncomfortable Gospel today. The Jesus we encounter in this passage doesn't seem much like the loving Jesus we expect. We know Jesus as the one who welcomes people. The one who heals. The one who tells us to love our enemies. The one who reaches out to people on the margins. The one who looks at suffering and has compassion.
Then we meet this woman. Her daughter is desperately ill, and she comes to Jesus crying out: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
What does Jesus do? Nothing.
Matthew says: “But he did not answer her at all.” That's hard enough. She cries out, and Jesus is silent. Then the disciples say: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us” and Jesus seems to reinforce their exclusion by stating: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Yet she persists. She kneels before him: “Lord, help me.” Jesus responds with those extraordinarily difficult words to hear coming from our Lord’s lips: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
What? Really? Is this Jesus? The Jesus we love, the Jesus we call the embodiment of God's love? The Jesus who tells us to love our enemies? The Jesus who welcomes sinners and outsiders? Why is he treating this desperate woman so harshly?
That’s an important question and one we shouldn't rush past.
A lot of preachers and biblical scholars use theological arguments or linguistic translations to soften Jesus’ words and meaning but I don't think we should try to make Jesus nicer than Matthew makes him. Matthew presents Jesus in this way for a reason. If we try to explain away the harshness of Jesus, we miss what is happening in this extraordinarily powerful encounter.
Let’s begin at the beginning. This morning’s story begins with boundaries. Just before the story of the Canaanite Woman, Jesus has been arguing with the Pharisees about purity and he says something very relevant: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth.”
In other words, holiness isn't primarily about external boundaries i.e religious rules such as what you eat, what you touch, who you associate with. What really matters is the condition of the heart.
Then Matthew immediately takes Jesus into Gentile territory where they encounters this woman. Matthew doesn't simply call her a Gentile. He calls her a Canaanite. That is intentional and significant. A Canaanite is not merely a Gentile foreigner. The name carries the weight of Israel's ancient enemies—the people who were historically and culturally opposed to Israel. They were, if you will, on the other side of the tracks. They were outside the boundaries of who belonged. Outside the boundaries of who was acceptable. Outside the boundaries of who was considered “one of us.” She was, in every sense of the word, unclean, untouchable, out of bounds.
Here she is before them. A woman, a Gentile, a Canaanite. An outsider in almost every possible way. She comes to Jesus asking for mercy and the remarkable thing is that she seems to recognize (calling Him the Son of David) and understand Jesus’ power better than the insiders do.
The disciples want to send her away. Jesus initially appears to want the same. But she won't go. Instead, she kneels and courageously persists, saying: “Lord, help me.”
Then comes that difficult image of the children and the dogs. Jesus says that the children's food shouldn't be thrown to the dogs. Harsh, harsh words from our loving Lord, but she takes the metaphor and expands on it without denying her place in their eyes: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.”
Suddenly everything changes.
Jesus says: “Woman, great is your faith!” and her daughter is healed.
Think about that reversal. Was it a change in Jesus’ heart or did He know how she would respond and used her as an example to the others about the persistence of faith? We’ll never know. What we do know is what Matthew next tells us. The person everyone assumed was outside becomes the person Jesus holds up as an example of faith. The woman whom the disciples and, as far as we know, Jesus, wanted to send away becomes the woman Jesus praises. The outsider becomes the model disciple.
That is where the contradiction becomes important. Perhaps the woman isn't the only one being challenged. We often read this story as though Jesus is testing the woman's faith. Maybe there is something to that but I wonder if Matthew is also showing us Jesus challenging the disciples — and challenging us.
Look at the disciples' response to her: “Send her away.” Why? Not because her daughter isn't suffering. Not because they don't believe she's desperate. Simply because she's bothering them. She's outside their circle of acceptability. She's inconvenient. She's not ‘one of us’.
Isn't that something we can recognize? We all have boundaries. People who are “in.” People who are “out.” People whose suffering touches our hearts and people whose suffering we would rather not have to deal with.
This woman crosses the boundary. She refuses to accept the category into which everyone else has put her and Jesus ultimately does something that we have seen Him do before and as remarkable as it is, isn’t unexpected to those who know Him. He crosses the boundary too.
The Gospel reading begins with Israel, with God’s chosen people, but we know how the story ends. We know Jesus, after His resurrection, commissions His disciples in Matthew 28:19 saying: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.”
The mission begins with Israel but it doesn't end there. The table gets bigger. The circle gets wider. The mercy of God keeps expanding.
This is when the first part of the Gospel becomes so important. Jesus has just said that what defiles us comes from the heart. Then He encounters someone whom His culture would have considered unclean and what comes out of her heart? Faith. Persistence. Trust. Humility. Love for her daughter.
Jesus says: “Great is your faith.” So perhaps the real question isn't who is clean, who belongs or who deserves God's mercy. Perhaps the question is, what is in our hearts? The person we think is outside the circle may actually be closer to the heart of God than we are, and that brings us back to the uncomfortable Jesus.
Maybe love isn't always what we expect it to be. Sometimes love is comforting and consoling, tender and gentle, but sometimes love challenges us. Sometimes love makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes love exposes our assumptions and reveals our biases and boundaries. Sometimes love pushes us and forces us to see another person differently.
Sometimes love hurts.
My Sitting Rock didn't stop being my favourite place because I fell over it. I still love that rock but now I have a slightly different relationship with it. Every time I sit there I’m going to recall the contradiction that happened when I wiped out on Wednesday and acknowledge that a place I love also hurt me. Perhaps that's a small reminder of something much bigger - love does not guarantee that we will never be hurt. In fact, quite the opposite. The people and things we love most are often the things that can hurt us most deeply.
Faith is not the promise that life will always be simple or comfortable or make sense. It may even hurt. Faith is learning to remain in the relationship even when it is painful, awkward, nonsensical and uncomfortable. Today we are reminded to be persistent and courageous, and to plough through the pain, never giving up on our faith. Just like the Canaanite woman. She doesn't understand Jesus' response and she sure as heck doesn't accept the answer. She doesn't walk away. She stays. She challenges the insult. She persists and she trusts. She trusts in the faith of her Lord.
In the midst of all the contradictions, something beautiful happens. The boundary is broken. The daughter is healed. Jesus declares: “Great is your faith.”
Those are words we need to hear today because there are times when our faith is confused. Times when God seems silent. Times when the people we love hurt us. Times when the world seems completely backwards, and we feel as though we are falling from the very places we thought were our most sacred, safest and loved places in the world. Times when life makes no sense—and even times when Jesus Himself doesn't behave the way we expect Jesus to behave.
But faith is not about having all the answers. Faith is sometimes about contradiction, not consistency. Faith is what this woman of Canaan reveals to us: to keep showing up, to keep asking, to keep trusting, and to keep believing that somewhere, somehow, there is still a place for us—for you—at God's table.
If there is room for a Canaanite woman, an ultimate outcast whom everyone wanted to send away, then there is room for all of us. For God's table is bigger than the boundaries we draw. God's mercy is wider than the labels and categories we put on people. God's love keeps doing what God's love has always done: breaking through the lines we draw, tearing down the walls we build, and making room for one more.
Although sometimes that kind of open, unconditional love hurts. It hurts because love asks us to let go of our certainty. It hurts because love challenges our assumptions. It hurts because love asks us to make room for people we might rather keep outside the boundary - but love urges us to step out of those boundaries and to take risks - and sometimes risks hurt.
I believe that's the good news in this difficult Gospel. There are no outsiders at God's table. No one is out of bounds to God.
Yes, sometimes love hurts but God's love doesn’t give up, and we mustn’t give up on it, ever. For God’s love will break through the boundaries that divide us, tear down the walls we build, and remind us that no one is beyond the reach of God's mercy.
Amen.