The Canaanite Woman (Matthew 15)

     Today’s Gospel is the story of the Canaanite woman and  her daughter. There are some interesting things going on in this story, which reveal much about the nature of Jesus and his teaching.

    Today’s reading begins, “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” Jesus takes himself into Gentile territory. It suggests that Jesus believes, or knows, that he can take his message of the kingdom into Gentile country, and that there may be an audience for it. It’s also possible that he is going into Gentile country to avoid the authorities in Jerusalem. After all, at the beginning of chapter 15 of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus has been telling the Pharisees and scribes that they are hypocrites for wanting to uphold their traditions at the expense of the commandments. We can imagine how the scribes and Pharisees react to that, so Jesus may think it prudent to get out of town for a while. 

    But something else is happening in this story. Being in Gentile country, “in the district of Tyre and Sidon,” gives Jesus an opportunity to demonstrate a new teaching, especially to his disciples, who have a narrow view of their ministry, as they soon demonstrate. Jesus will show that he is not limiting his ministry to Israel, and intends to take his teaching to the wider world, and he chooses to reveal this in a roundabout way.

   The Canaanite woman (called the Syro-Phoenician woman in Mark’s Gospel, definitely a Gentile) with the demon-possessed daughter, hears about Jesus and finds him. “Lord, Son of David” she shouts; she knows exactly who he is. And this recognition from a Gentile, an outsider, and a woman, no less, in a time when women were subordinated in every way, is a significant turning point in the ministry of Jesus. As the story unfolds, Jesus reveals his new teaching. And we notice that she mentions her daughter, tormented by a demon. Note that she’s asking for help, not for herself, but for her daughter.

    Jesus doesn’t answer at first, and eventually replies, not to the woman, but to the disciples who want to get rid of her. A superficial reading of this is that Jesus is not interested, can’t be bothered even to reply to the woman, and, and talks only to his disciples to say that he is sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But his real intention becomes clear in his response to the woman. Jesus is deliberately misleading the disciples at this moment.     

    And in the interaction between Jesus and the woman, we see the apparent paradox in Jesus’s Gentile ministry. When she requests Jesus to heal her daughter, he replies with a remark, not about healing, but about food! “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” We’re meant to understand the comparison the way the woman does: she, a Gentile, is one of the dogs under the table. Why does Jesus compare Gentiles to dogs? If that’s what he thinks of Gentiles, what is he doing there?

    Jesus is triangulating, to placate his followers who believe in their superiority to Gentiles (and to dogs too), and to appear to reinforce this attitude, at least in public, in the presence of a Gentile woman. At the same time, he responds to the woman’s request, that he heal her daughter, as soon as it becomes clear that the woman is not intimidated by Jesus or by her supposed inferiority, and has faith in Jesus’s ability to do what she asks of him. His remark is not a rejection, but a spiritual test, the kind of test that a fully aware, awake, genuine spiritual guide will make of anyone seeking spiritual help, to test the seeker’s own awareness or insight, or, in this case, faith. Jesus takes advantage of the situation to make it clear that faith is what matters, not a social or religious or ethnic or any other kind of distinction. Jesus is abolishing the Jew/Gentile distinction at the very moment when he appears to be reinforcing it. He is in Gentile territory because he is including Gentiles in his kingdom. And it is the Canaanite  woman who recognizes Jesus for who he is, and makes it possible for him to use the opportunity to reveal his nature and his teaching.

    In this story, Jesus’s removing the demon from the woman’s daughter, nothing is said about the daughter’s faith.  In other words, there is no suggestion that the daughter had to earn her healing by professing anything in particular, by affecting any particular religious attitude, or even by expressing gratitude. Jesus never asks her to. There is no religious test in Jesus’s ministry, just as there is no ethnic test.

    What can we learn from this story? We need not be afraid to take the message to the Gentiles, that is, to people outside our religious or social circle, and beyond. The story reminds us that there is a real need in the world for signs of God’s power, for signs of his power over the demons of our time. There are demons abroad in the world today, and if the news of the past several days is anything to go by, many people are possessed by these demons. Our challenge is to find the faith to overcome these demons, and to remind ourselves that God has power over them. May we have the faith of the Canaanite woman, as Jesus leads us into Gentile country. Amen. (20.VIII.17.Adv.)

Transfiguration (Luke 9)

“This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him.” From the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 9, verse 35.

    In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

    We commemorate the Transfiguration twice a year, on the last Sunday after Epiphany, and on August 6.  This double commemoration emphasizes the importance of the event. The Transfiguration occurs at the end of Epiphanytide as a summing up of what has been revealed in that season: Jesus as the divine and human Son of his Father, and the relationship of the Father and the Son with the Holy Spirit. We can also understand it as a foreshadowing of the Resurrection, which is definitely another transfiguration and an even greater revelation of the nature of Jesus. Transfiguration occurs again in August, close to the end of the church year in the Orthodox calendar, and just before the celebration on August 15 of the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God. The proximity of the two feasts is not accidental; it emphasizes, again, who Jesus is and keeps before us the role of his Mother in the history of salvation. His Mother shares, in effect, in her Son’s transfiguration.

    “And his clothes became dazzling white.” Light is often associated with divinity. In our time, accustomed as we are to bright, steady light whenever and wherever we want it, we are perhaps too used to it. We can turn night into day, and we have so much light in our cities at night that we can’t see the stars. We can banish darkness. And so perhaps we don’t realize how stunning light can be, and what a powerful symbol it is for God. Peter and James and John, however, are dazzled by the very bright light of the Transfiguration, brighter than any light they had seen. This is no ordinary light; our Orthodox friends call it “the light of Mount Tabor,” or “the uncreated light,” which is nothing less than the divine radiance. And they soon see what this light is revealing to them: the presence of Jesus with the prophets Moses and Elijah.

    But this is only the beginning of the revelation. Peter says, “Let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” This tells us that, at this moment, Peter understands Jesus to be of the same rank, or on the same level, as the prophets. He seems to have forgotten that he, earlier in the chapter, at verse 20, had proclaimed Jesus to be the Messiah. The other disciples at that point compared Jesus to Elijah, or John the Baptist, or other prophets whom they don’t name. They were not ready to see Jesus as Messiah, except Peter.

    It is conventional for preachers to say at this point, the dwelling-building proposal, that this is another example of Peter’s well-intentioned but clueless reaction to what is really going on. After all, Luke the Evangelist says, “Let us make three dwellings...not knowing what he said.” He goes on to say, “They were terrified as they entered the cloud.” I’m skeptical of Luke’s comment, since Peter has just said, “It is good for us to be here!” That doesn’t sound like terror, or cluelessness, to me. I suspect, and this is my own speculation of course, that Luke thinks that the disciples ought to be terrified, and so he says that they are. But the disciples themselves say no such thing. Perhaps the Evangelist would have been terrified.

    I think that something else is going on here. Peter is not clueless. Peter and the others are sufficiently mature spiritually, that they are capable of seeing the divine light, and the prophets too. They have been helped by Jesus to be open to the reality of God, by teaching, miracles, and example, so that when Jesus takes them up the mountain, they are ready for the next step.

    Already in Luke’s Gospel, demons have recognized Jesus as the Holy One of God, or the Son of God, in the story of the Gerasene demoniac. But now God himself announces Jesus’s sonship, in the cloud that overshadows Jesus and the disciples. I’ve been thinking about this “cloud” and what it represents. Of course, it probably is a real cloud; mountains make their own weather, and they are frequently obscured by clouds. The cloud can also describe the state of mind of the disciples; they are in a new situation, and so they may be experiencing a certain darkness, after the experience of the Transfiguration, which may have blinded them momentarily, perhaps like those of us who come from wintry places remember being dazzled, even blinded, by sunlight on snow.

    “And from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him.’” We recall the words of God to Jesus at his baptism, when he says, “You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.” Then, only Jesus hears it. Now, Peter, James, and John hear it. Before this point, demons had proclaimed the Sonship of Jesus; now God himself says it, again, so that not only Jesus can hear it, but his closest disciples as well. It is interesting to think about why God let the demons know this before the disciples; I’m not going to speculate about this now, but it is worth keeping in mind that humans are not the only creatures in the universe capable of perceiving the reality of God.

    “When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone.” Jesus, in other words, is more than a prophet. They are not on the same level as he is. The disciples don’t see them, because they don’t need to, because their understanding of Jesus has gone beyond them. Peter has already understood that Jesus is the Messiah; now they all realize that Jesus is more than the Messiah, more than the Anointed One. Prophecy, and the coming of the Messiah, are only steps on the way to a full understanding of the ministry of Jesus, the Son, the Chosen.

    There is still more. “And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.” Jesus has been telling them that there is more to discipleship than dazzling visions. Only after Jesus rises from the dead will they have a full understanding of what the vision really means. They are to keep it a secret, until the right time. The right time is after the Resurrection. The purpose of the vision is to prepare the disciples for what is to come, to strengthen them and to give them confidence in the dark days to come. The light of the Transfiguration will always be there, even when the disciples can’t see it. If they can recall it, keep it in mind, they will see their way through all the way to the Resurrection.

    And so we will see our way through to the Resurrection, strengthened by the faith that has been handed down to us, faith founded in the experiences of the disciples, who saw the transfigured Lord and heard the voice of his Father. The light of the Transfiguration continues to shine, no matter how dark the cloud is on the mountaintop. That light leads us to the mountaintop, where we will hear the voice of the Father, when he says, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

    In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. (5.VIII.17.Adv.)