Matthew 15.21-28

And Jesus left there, withdrew into the area of Tyre and Sidon. And, would you believe it, a Canaanite woman from that region came and cried out, saying, “Have mercy on me, Son of David! My daughter is evilly possessed.” And he answered her not one word. And the disciples coming to him asked him, saying, “Send her away, because she’s making a scene.” And he answered, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” And he answered and said, “It is not right to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord; but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” Then Jesus answered, “Woman, great is your faith! May it be as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that hour (Jen's Translation).

Ever embarrassed to admit that you’re a church-going, Bible-believing Christian? Let me just say that there are days when I’d really rather keep quiet about this occasionally embarrassing fact.

Lately I have become addicted to blogging. For those of you who do not suffer from this virtual addiction, here’s a definition: “blog” is short for “web log,” a kind of website where a person can record their thoughts, observations, and comments on whatever strikes their fancy, and then “publish” them on the Internet, where anyone can visit the site and read what they’ve written. Almost like an on-line diary of sorts. I collaborate with three others in writing a blog called "A Few Voices,” the purpose of which is to comment on things cultural and political from a religious point of view; the idea motivating this blog is that the dreadful caricature of American Christianity commonly promoted—without reflection or serious examination or challenge—is one that doesn’t fit us, the few voices behind afewvoices.com. I also write a personal blog, the sole purpose of which is to provide a semi-anonymous forum where I can rant and rave about things that drive me crazy or tick me off. And I am addicted to reading blogs. I read about a dozen regularly, and by regularly I mean daily. All of them are religious, specifically Christian, and most are Church of Christ blogs by other seminarians who are addicted to wondering obsessively about the same things I do. And I keep up with the latest appearances of religious news by checking The Revealer, “a daily review of religion and the press.”

It’s here, at The Revealer, that some of the most truly embarrassing things about being a Christian in America today can be found, exhibited for general amusement and, possibly, to shame the rest of us into letting these good brothers and sisters get away with such shenanigans. The most recent headline at The Revealer tells you where you can go to order your very own copy of the 16-cassette tape series, “Patriarchy Made Simple.” Scroll down the screen for a link to an article with information about how prayer helps you shed pounds [editor's note: you can read the whole article here, if you're desperate, ahem, faithful enough to try it].

Yes, I have my moments of excruciating embarrassment about being a Christian.

Matthew’s story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman sounds like something you might read on The Revealer, about a TV evangelist/healer who walks around the streets of NYC, tight-lipped and clench-jawed, ignoring the bag lady shouting desperately after him, “Help me! Help me!” Not a stellar moment for Christianity. Not a stellar moment for Jesus, either.

It’s one thing to be embarrassed by a TV preacher shouting some nonsense about prayer hankies. It’s quite another to be embarrassed by your very own Lord, the Son of God, Jesus himself. And we’re presented with an embarrassment in this text. Suppose this were you, walking down the street with a woman shouting “help me” following after you. You’d say to yourself, “What would Jesus do? Jesus would help this woman.” But forget it! Not even Jesus is doing What Jesus Would Do—all of a sudden, Jesus is acting like he’s his own Evil Twin. Jesus ignores this woman. And the disciples aren’t any better; their only concern is to plead with Jesus to shut her up, because she’s making a scene. They don’t ask him to stop and help her—they just want her gone, this very embarrassing, ultra-inappropriate Canaanite female person. They’re not doing What Jesus Would Do anymore than Jesus is.

This text burdens us with its demand that we rationalize Jesus’ inexplicable behavior. We feel obligated to find ways of reading it that make it look less un-Jesus-like. Jesus can’t come off bad, after all, so we have to find some way to understand this so that Jesus comes off all right. But it’s not that easy. Jesus calls this woman a dog! Such is our collective desperation to understand this in a “nice” way that some commentaries suggest—in all seriousness, now—that what Jesus actually called her was something more like “nice little puppy.”

So what’s going on here? Well, here are some possibilities: 1) Jesus really was sent to the Jews first and foremost, and he’s not being rude or cruel, just telling the uncomfortable truth; in salvation-history terms, Israel is first, Gentiles are second. 2) Jesus is expressing a deep truth about all ministry: human beings are finite and ministry must always be done locally if it is to be effective; hence, he emphasizes that he must minister to those among whom he finds himself, that is, Israel. Others will just have to wait. 3) Jesus is concerned with teaching his disciples a lesson about who’s in and who’s not out and therefore employs some irony and dramatic roleplay as an attention-grabbing teaching technique.

Let’s consider Door #1. Perhaps it is true to say that Jesus was sent to the Jews first; Jesus is, after all, the “Messiah,” a figure that Israel had been waiting on for years, a word which would have no meaning at all outside of Israel’s history. But is this really what Jesus says, when he finally speaks? He says, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Perhaps your Bible reads simply, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The more literal double negative—“I was not sent except to Israel”—comes across a little stronger, a little more emphatic; in effect, Jesus says, if not for Israel, I wouldn’t be here at all. To read this as a claim of mere chronological precedence—Israel happens to be the people God deals with first, and therefore to whom Jesus is sent—doesn’t capture the full sense of this statement. Even to read this as a claim of pecking order within the kingdom of God doesn’t go far enough. What Jesus says sounds like an exclusive statement without exception. Plus, is a pecking order within the kingdom of God really something that sounds consistent with Jesus’ teaching? Perhaps Door #1 only opens onto an empty room after all.

Maybe Door #2 offers us a better explanation. Maybe Jesus was simply trying to say, “Look, I was sent to do a thing and I was sent to a particular place at a particular time, and I have to be about this, and I’m sorry, but this is simply outside my purview.” After all, Jesus was human, too; he needed to rest and eat and he had only two hands and two feet and 24 hours in a day like the rest of us. There’s simply a limit to what can be done, and you have to do what you can where you are. Maybe Jesus is just trying to say, I have to do my ministry where God put me in the first place.

Tom Long, homiletics prof at Emory, makes sense of this encounter by comparing Jesus to the founder of a battered woman’s shelter. If a homeless man shows up on the doorstep of a battered woman’s shelter begging for help, Long points out, the founder of the shelter may feel a great deal of compassion and yet still have to say no to his plea. Can she, should she, hand over the resources, finite and limited as they are, that she had worked so hard to gather for the women whose need is great, to someone who isn’t a part of the group she ministers to? (Long, Matthew, 176).

As tempting as this explanation is, I find two things unsatisfactory about it. First, Jesus has withdrawn into the area of Tyre and Sidon, and is hanging out in the iffy border-lands between Israel and Gentile territory. It seems that he is looking for some R & R, but this bothersome and loud Canaanite woman has somehow heard about him, and seeks him out. If the issue is localized, specific ministry to those whom you happen to come across—well, this woman fits the bill as well as anyone else who has ever sought Jesus out. Second, we’re not talking about disbursing funds, or even some kind of ministry which seems to involve belabored effort; while it is true that Jesus is human and therefore is subject to the same kinds of physical demands as everyone else who has ever lived, Jesus’ healing ministry has always been a sign of the divine side of Jesus. It’s certainly something outside of normal human capacity; something which, as a budding theologian interested in religion & science questions, I’ll just shrug and mumble “I dunno” if you ask me how he did it. The analogy to the women’s shelter, then, falls apart right at the point where it is supposed to illuminate. Jesus isn’t going to run out of healing juice in the same way that the women’s shelter is likely to run out of money.

So perhaps we’ll opt for Door #3. Maybe Jesus just doesn’t really mean it. At least, not in a straightforward, literal way. Perhaps he’s being ironic! Jesus can be tricky sometimes, as well we know. Maybe he makes this statement so strongly so that everyone will understand that he can’t possibly mean what it sounds like. Certainly, the woman doesn’t seem put off; she, at least, seems to think that, no matter how final that first statement sounded, that there is room for her in Jesus’ ministry.

So maybe it goes something like this: Jesus has been hanging out with these disciples of his for awhile, and he knows that there are some things they’re just having trouble getting their minds around. So Jesus decides to play it out. Here’s the perfect opportunity for a little bit of dramatic lesson-teaching. So first, Jesus ignores the woman—just like any righteous Teacher of Israel would do. The reaction of his disciples, though, is a little disappointing: instead of saying, “Rabbi, don’t you hear this woman crying to you for help? Why won’t you stop and heal her daughter?” No, they say, “Jesus, can’t you deal with this? Shut this woman up, she’s embarrassing us, GOSH!” So Jesus says, to everyone, still playing his ironic role, “I was not sent but to Israel.” The disciples apparently have no objection to this statement, but the woman knows better. Instead of leaving, she comes and kneels at Jesus’ feet and says, simply, “Lord, help me.” Maybe the disciples were grimacing and muttering amongst themselves, and Jesus saw that they still weren’t getting it—this woman’s demonstration of faith and trust was still not yet enough to soften their arrogance and self-assurance regarding their own guaranteed places in the kingdom, and the woman’s obvious out-of-placeness. So he plays it out even further, telling her, “It’s not right to take the children’s food and give it to dogs.” Maybe the disciples “Amen-ed” and nodded. But the woman knows better. Certain that the Jesus she has heard of, and trusted enough to follow after, would be willing and even eager to help her—no matter who she is, or isn't—she replies, “even the dogs have a place, under the table, eating what the children don’t want.” Maybe the humility of this reply startles some of the disciples out of their self-satisfied stupor. Maybe Jesus is so happy that this woman is so certain of him and so trusting that he can no longer bear to continue in his ironic stance toward her, and now turns to her, eager to heal, eager to show her and the disciples that she and her daughter, too, no matter how “inappropriate” they are, are equally a part of God’s kingdom.

I like this one—you can probably tell. This ironic interpretation makes sense of everything: Jesus’ weird behavior, the disciple’s teenage-like angst over their image, the woman’s persistence, Jesus’ eventual change of heart.

What’s missing, though, is any indication that the disciples got Jesus’ message. If this was the whole point, if Jesus went to such lengths to teach this lesson, well, there’s no indication that anyone ever got it. There’s no verse to follow the healing of the woman’s daughter that tells us anything about the disciples, whether they continued to be embarrassed by this woman’s presence, whether they were happy or annoyed by the fact that Jesus paid attention to her request, whether they repented of their juvenile obsession over image.

And even in this interpretation there is a lingering sense that Jesus was somehow a little unkind to this poor and desperate woman. She has no idea that she is the occasion for an inventive and ironic episode designed for the disciples’ benefit. Certainly whatever callousness Jesus displays in using her this way is a great deal less disturbing than his unkindness in a straightforward interpretation in which Jesus calls her a dog and tells her she has no part in the good news he is preaching to Israel. But still, a little uneasiness remains: does Jesus really use people in this way? Are we comfortable with this idea, and should we be?

So I want to propose yet another possibility—one which doesn’t get a door, because there’s never any “Door #4” on game shows. Certainly there is a lesson being taught here. But perhaps Jesus isn’t the all-knowing Teacher in this story. Maybe Jesus, just like all the rest of us, has something to learn from life; maybe what happens in this exchange is that Jesus, too, is a learner, and the Teacher in the story—unwittingly—is this fragile and yet courageous Canaanite woman, whose persistence teaches even Jesus something new about the nature of the kingdom. Perhaps Jesus was stunned at the prospect that the Good News he was preaching to Israel communicated itself even to those outside its borders, to people who had no preparation, no ongoing relationship with Yahweh, no idea of what it meant—but who somehow grasped the essence of the limitless grace of the kingdom of God anyhow, somehow grasped that this kingdom, unlike any other kingdom they’d ever known, has no borders to defend, knows no outsiders. Perhaps it took a moment for Jesus to absorb this stunning truth. Perhaps even Jesus was dazzled by the unbounded grace of God, kneeling before him the figure of this inappropriate woman, humbly yet persistently asserting that she and her daughter, too, had a place in God’s kingdom, as even the dogs have a place under the kitchen table. Gently and obstinately, the woman keeps insisting, we belong here, too.

Isaiah tells us, in the Old Testament reading for today, that God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel, will “gather others to them, besides those already gathered.” Jesus knew the outcasts of Israel. He ate with them, talked with them, touched them and healed them, and ignored the protests and slander of the “righteous.” But this outcast is not an outcast of Israel; she is another…but one who will gathered as well, to those who are already gathered.

Perhaps it makes us a little uncomfortable to contemplate a picture of Jesus who’s not in complete control, who isn’t omniscient—who doesn’t know the future, who doesn’t necessarily know the intimate details and thoughts of everyone he encounters, who might have to learn along the way just what it means to be the Son of God. Maybe Jesus seems a little less righteous this way, a little less perfect. But righteousness doesn’t have to mean getting things right automatically, without having to think about it; perhaps righteousness, even in Jesus, includes being able to listen to the outcast and learn what righteousness is all over again.

We have to ask ourselves, now, where are we in this story. And it's pretty obvious, isn't it, that we stand with the disciples--the ones who, no matter which door you choose, which interpretation you choose, come off badly every time. Because it’s human nature, isn’t it, to think of ourselves and others in terms of what we are and what we aren’t, in terms of who is in and who is out of a particular group. It’s nearly impossible to describe yourself without employing these kinds of descriptors. And we experience a kind of natural affinity for those whom we can see are like us in some way. I gravitate to fellow students when I socialize at church; we have something to talk about (or more accurately complain about) that others don’t. In China, I experienced a sort of affinity-on-steroids for my fellow Americans; if I was walking down the street and saw a foreign face that I didn’t know, I would shout “Lao wai!” [“Foreigner!”] and accost the person, pathetic in my eagerness to connect.

But the flip side of this natural tendency of all of us human beings is that seeking out people who aren’t like us is then “unnatural.” It’s not that we can’t do it. It’s just that we don’t tend to, and it’s harder for us. No matter how much you want to break these barriers down, or deny that they exist, they are there, challenging your “unnatural” desire to live in a kingdom that doesn’t defend its borders.

And the church is by no means immune to this way of thinking, this who’s in, who’s out mentality. We know this, to our shame. It’s not just a Church of Christ problem, or an American Christianity problem. It’s been the church’s problem since the very beginning, when the Jews and the Gentiles were trying to figure out what to do with each other. It’s the problem Paul addresses in Romans, taking turns bashing the Gentiles and then the Jews, telling each group, “you’re not ‘in’ and they’re not ‘out’. God has called all of you, and God doesn’t make mistakes.”

In this world, where we have to learn from each other how to be righteous all over again, all the time, in every encounter, the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman gives us a picture of profound righteousness. Jesus, the Son of God, allows himself to be corrected by a loudmouthed, embarrassing female who insists on making a scene. This is righteousness at its truest and most humble. May we all find the strength to follow Christ’s example.