SunAug172008
Yours, Mine…or Ours
This is not one of the most popular stories in the Gospel of Matthew. It’s not one you hear very often, and it’s definitely not the first thing you would turn to as an example of how Jesus responded to children. Although we never see the sick child in this story and neither does Jesus, his response to her mother’s plea for help is, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Well no, I suppose not. It would not be fair to carefully prepare a meal for your family, finding that perfect balance between nutrition and your children’s willingness to actually eat it, to arrange appropriate portions and corral the family into setting and sitting at the table, only to place the meal under the table or out in the yard for the dog. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But in the particular situation Matthew gives us, this still seems like a backwards choice of metaphor to me.
A woman approaches Jesus asking help for her child and he ignores her. Only after she makes herself a nuisance does he actually respond and when he does his words are less than gracious. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Whose children are we talking about here? The Canaanite woman is speaking of her own very real suffering child. Jesus is speaking of his metaphorical yet still suffering children, the children of Israel, and the words he chooses put the interests of his and hers, yours and mine, in conflict. “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Whose children are being fed in this metaphor and whose children are being compared to dogs?
The children Jesus is talking about are “the lost sheep of Israel,” and as a Canaanite, this woman and her daughter don’t count. But what is a Canaanite? There are so many outsiders in the Bible that it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. So we’ll go back to the part that, thanks to Cecil B. DeMille, everyone remembers. The Israelites were slaves in Egypt, and after a few plagues, Moses led them out of Egypt and through the Red Sea into the Promised Land. Unfortunately, though that makes an excellent ending for a movie, it’s a little bit more drawn out than that. First of all, they wander around in the desert for forty years and second when they finally get to the Promised Land, there are people in it. Those people are the Canaanites and the Israelites have to take the Promised Land from them by force. Clearly, they were only partially successful because for years to come, you have prophets complaining about the Canaanites and their religious practices. So now we have a Canaanite woman, the Baal and Asherah-worshiping kind the scriptures warn men about, approaching an Israelite man for help. How many generations of rivalry and resentment are behind his words? “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Versions of this story vary, and Matthew could have given this woman one of any number of ethnic origins, but in his story the woman is Canaanite, and so is the child for whom she advocates. The child is indigenous in a colonized land, she is young, and she is female. Then like today, that can be a deadly set of circumstances, especially when combined with serious illness. Today, children born with AIDS in developing nations do not have access to sufficient medical treatment. This child too, whatever her ailment, is highly vulnerable and the mother is desperate, desperate enough to approach an Israelite man for help. How crushing might his words have been? “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Such words do not paint Jesus in a particularly flattering light. It’s unsettling to hear the defender of the weak and vulnerable, the one who said, “let the little children come to me,” respond to a child’s need by not being able to say anything nice, after first not saying anything at all. It’s frightening, to see that such moments of reckless indifference really can happen to anyone. Did even Jesus suffer from compassion fatigue? Every town he goes into, he gets mobbed by people who all want something from him. He heals and he teaches and nobody seems to get it, least of all the disciples who need everything explained. How much can we really expect from one man? How many healings will be enough? But we want to expect more from this one man, because he is more than just a man. He is the one who was sent to the “lost sheep of Israel,” to the children of Israel, and they are called “lost sheep” and children because they are a very vulnerable people who have been conquered and oppressed again and again. He has so many to teach, so many to heal. It’s a tall order, even without adding in Canaanites and who knows what other people in need. It really just wouldn’t be “fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Jesus had an important and difficult call. He could not afford to allow himself to be distracted. I have spent the last three years surrounded by people with truly amazing passion for so many important causes. Liz is working to end poverty. Drew is doing work in Appalachia to stop mountaintop removal. Alexandra cares so deeply about worker justice. Jerry was arrested in an anti-torture protest, and Charlene is building a Katrina just rebuilding solidarity movement. I’m sure you know people like that too, people who are doing truly important work, who are doing so much that you wonder how they do it. It can be inspiring, but it’s also overwhelming to know that there is so much pain, so much need, so much that I am not doing. But what I’ve realized is that none of them are doing it all either. Each of them has a very specific call, just like everyone else. It’s not about comparing. It takes all of us.
But what about Jesus? And what about the Canaanite girl in need of healing? Is his call that specific? “Only to the lost sheep of Israel?” Yes, he has a responsibility to take care of his people, his children, and he cannot neglect it, but does that responsibility extend to other children as well? Can it? It may not be “fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” but care for the vulnerable is not like a loaf of bread. It is not a limited commodity.
This is only part of the argument the Canaanite woman makes. Somehow in that split second her response has even deeper nuance to it. When she could easily have responded in anger or despair to Jesus’ hurtful metaphor, instead she uses it to make her point. Rather than protesting having been compared to a dog, she concedes Jesus’ priorities by reusing his words. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” As a parent, she knows first hand that she is responsible first and foremost for her children’s care, and she does not deny that Jesus has that same responsibility to the vulnerable people he serves. She makes room in her rebuttal for Jesus’ argument that he has his own children to take care of, but that doesn’t stop her from persisting in taking care of her own daughter. “Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Yes, you are responsible for your call, for your children, but I am responsible for mine too, and we have a communal responsibility for all God’s vulnerable children. Help me.
That got through. Finally, Jesus responds as we expect him to, “‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.” Instantly! How many ailments do you wish could be healed instantly? Your suffering? My faults? Our worldwide problems? Instantly. So often in these healing narratives, Jesus heals in response to a person’s “faith.” “Your faith has made you well.” “Woman, great is your faith!” Faith…and miracles happen! Where can I get faith like that? And what is it? It’s so hard to quantify something like faith enough to say that it’s “great,” great enough to lead to healing. The Canaanite woman, who is likely of a very different “faith” than Jesus, not to mention the differences between her faith and ours today, does not articulate some profound belief that he approves, except belief that the healing she seeks for her daughter is possible.
What is really impressive in this narrative is in her persistent action. This is a woman who defied all normative social barriers to chase after Jesus, who shouted for help, and when he did not answer made it quite clear that she would not be quiet, who was so persistent in her shouting that she got on the disciples’ last nerve, who would not take his first “no” for an answer but kneeled before him to ask for help, who turned his insult around on him so that he saw that she too, this Canaanite woman, the kind the scriptures warn you about, she too had great faith. If you look at the other passages where Jesus praises faith, you will see this same persistence exhibited again and again. It takes great faith to keep on going, in spite of your suffering, my faults, our worldwide problems, especially when we cannot know whether our hard work will be rewarded. Not everyone of great faith and great persistence will be made well instantly, but this one, this time, in spite of all barriers, is made well instantly.
In this interchange, Jesus overcomes not only the suffering of a child we never see, but the barriers that have made her invisible to him. Jesus shows the underbelly of his humanity by echoing the society in which he lives, turning away a “foreign” woman, but he also shows the best of his humanity. He learns. He grows, and in doing so he shows that anyone, even the one sent “to the lost children of Israel,” can learn from anyone, even from a Canaanite woman and her suffering invisible child.
So whose children are we called to care for in their vulnerability? Today, when children continue to be born into that same deadly set of circumstances and even more horrific others, this question cannot be merely academic. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs…yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Now, I did actually watch the movie “Yours, Mine, and Ours” before I stole its’ title for my sermon. I watched the original one, the one with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, and one line really stuck out. At the critical moment when the whole family of his and her eighteen children are united in their new home for the first time, Henry Fonda says, “Let’s get one thing straight. There’s no more mine and there’s no more yours. From now on, everyone and everything is ours.” Each of us is called in her or his own way to communal responsibility for the vulnerable. Yes, we have a responsibility to our own calling and to our own children that we cannot shirk. But when it comes to the vulnerable of the world, which children are yours, which are mine, and when is there no more mine and no more yours? When is every one of them ours?