Unlikely Hero

Matthew 15:22-28

One of the things that keeps my faith alive as a Christian is that our scriptures are not all convenient and perfect in their telling. Just like how complicated it is simply to be human, the stories of our faith are also complicated! Our heroes are complex, Abraham and Sarah, King David, Solomon, and maybe even Jesus aren't one-dimensional heroes that do no wrong or make no mistake like the heroes of the fairy tales we might tell our children.

If we dig deep into the astonishing depths that we can find in scripture, we can see complicated moral questions we struggle with today mirrored in the stories of Jesus, the Isrealites, and the early christian movement. And the story of the "Canaanite" woman in the Gospel of Matthew is no different.

This story breaks a narrative pattern, and forces us to confront a side of Jesus we only see in the parallel to this story in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 7. Usually, Jesus is the one who encounters the hard boundaries of his jewish colleagues and teaches how they must be lowered in a more inclusive and loving way. But in this unique story, we are surprised to see our hero ostensibly having high walls instead.

"A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, 'Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.' Jesus did not answer a word." Jesus did not answer a word! “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel." “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

How on Earth do we who worship Jesus as God; who embrace Jesus as the boundary breaking savior of the cosmos; who lean on Jesus' countering of narratives of oppression, colonialism, and hatred in scripture for guidance on how to live our lives today... how do we make heads or tails of this story?

Personally, I wonder about our need for our heroes, our leaders, our mentors to be perfect. Why do we need someone else to behave "perfectly" to be worthy of listening to or following? Is Jesus any less the Son of God, any less our savior, any less our guidepost to being human if this story is also a part of his story?

Any attempt to interpret Jesus' behavior in ways that soften it, or "de-problematize" it feels strained and contrived to me. There is one primary thing on display here: the author of Matthew seemed to have a significant problem with who this unnamed woman in scripture is. By calling her “Canaanite” (an ethinicity that no longer exists due to the conquest and, in some cases, genocide of Canaanite people by none other than the Isrealites themselves), Matthew paints this person not just as a gentile, but as something worse.

I see the word Canaanite as being analogous to how we refer to indigenous or native people today. But Matthew's use of it might be more like how many people (including John Wesley in his journals during missionary work as an Anglican Priest in the American colony of Georgia) referred to native or indigenous people as "savages." Canaanite is used here as an insulting word. It's surprisingly out of place. And it's also very ironic.

I think that this unnamed woman is the hero of our story. And that something ironic is happening in the subtext of Matthew here that is interesting, because Matthew is also the gospel with a peculiar geneaology of Jesus which includes Rahab (King David’s great, great grandmother) who was, you guessed it, a Canaanite.

Jesus' behavior is also out of place. This isn't the first gentile to cross his path. Bafflingly, Jesus seemed to have no qualms about healing a servant of a gentile Centurion earlier in Matthew chapter 8! But here, we have a woman who is a gentile that Matthew has doubled down to refer to as Canaanite even though we are in the region of Tyre and Sidon—places that actually existed—and not Canaan. And this woman sounds a lot like the woman in Jesus' parable who pestered the unjust judge whom Jesus extolled.

But Jesus ignored this “Canaanite” woman. Referred to her and/or her daughter as a dog. Earlier in Matthew chapter 10 Jesus warned his disciples: "Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans." So in some ways he is being consistent to his instruction. We have to remember here that Jesus is Jewish in our story. While the audience of the Gospel of Matthew were Christian, the Christian church did not exist in any way during the life of Jesus. And, being Jewish, perhaps Jesus had to wrestle with the taboos that were incultured into him like they were everyone else.

I wonder if Matthew, instead of being hopelessly racist against Gentiles, is setting his audience up here. That this surprise—doubling down on this woman's status before making her the hero and singular character in Matthew’s Gospel who seems to teach Jesus wisdom rather than the other way around—might have been Matthew's way of making his audience confront their own sense of who they deemed was a part of their community or not.

I have more exploring to do of this challenging text before I preach about it this Sunday, but one thing I think I am left pondering is how this passage might be challenging us to do the same. What if our ministry and our growth as a congregation isn't just about growing our church? What might it look like to be a people of faith who are unafraid to learn how to live our lives from more sources than just Christian ones? What if our leaders were not perfect but actually exemplified good leadership because they possess the capacity to learn from being wrong?