For Family Of Christ PC(USA), Greeley, CO.
August 14, 2011
Isaiah 56:1-8
Matthew 15:21-28
It's interesting that these two texts came up in the lectionary on a Sunday that I was going to preach. I've spent a good bit of time with both of them, although I have studied them for different reasons.
One, the Isaiah text, is a text that I have loved for very personal reasons. Its oracle of radical inclusion, particularly of the inclusion of eunuchs is very important to me.
The time I spent with the Matthew text was less voluntary and personal. Part of the process of becoming a minister in the PC(USA) is a series of Ordination Exams. The standard path through the exams starts in your first year of seminary with the multiple choice Bible Content Exam, the most straight forward of the exams. In your third year you dig into the other four exams. There are three sit-down, limited time exams, Worship and Sacraments, Theology, and Presbyterian Polity. Each exam consists of three essay questions that you have three hours to answer. On the exam weekend, you take them on Friday morning, Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.
Then at noon Saturday comes the beginning of the last of the exams, the Biblical Exegesis Exam. This is a take home, open book exam that you have until 10:00am Thursday morning to finish. During those five days you do very little but study the text that has been assigned for the exam.
And guess what, this morning's Gospel text is the New Testament text that my Exegesis Ord was focused on. I have a 16 page scholarly paper already written about the story of the Canaanite woman, so I'm good to go on the sermon, right? Well, let's take a look at a section on the use of the verb Apoluson, shall we?
That request is, of course, the central theme of this question. Apoluson is an aorist active second person singular imperative. With the imperative, the aorist tense does not have to do with time, but with the quality of action. “A present imperative usually implies that the action is to be prolonged or repeated, while the aorist does not carry this implication.”[1]
The question becomes what do the disciples mean when they demand, in the imperative, that Jesus “apoluson” her. “Apoluw can, in fact, mean to send someone away in the sense of dismissing. It can also mean to send someone away in the sense of releasing them or granting their request. Matthew uses this word in both senses: Jesus is continually dismissing the crowds (e.g., Mt 14:15) but in the parable of the unjust debtor, the Lord releases the debtor by responding to his appeal and forgiving the debt (Mt 18:27).[2]
Exciting stuff, right? So maybe scholarly papers are not the best things to use as Sunday morning sermons.
Let's go back to the text then. Matthew borrows this story from Mark, but makes some changes to it that makes it distinctly his.
The biggest of those changes is in the nationality of the woman. In Mark, she is identified as "a gentile of Syrophoenician origin." But Matthew makes her a Canaanite and that's the only time the word "Canaanite" appears in the entire New Testament. No one else in the New Testament is ever identified as being a Canaanite, There's a very good reason for that: it's a completely anachronistic term, but the time of the New Testament there were no Canaanites, not one. There never really had been any to begin with; there was never a nation of Canaan. That was just the Israelite word for all the other people who lived in the land they believed had been promised to them.
Why then would Matthew describe this woman using such an outdated and, by that time, meaningless word? Matthew does that because, of all four Gospel writers, he is the one who is most concerned with connecting the stories of Jesus with the ancient stories of the Jewish people.
Matthew writes his Gospel with the intention of convincing a Jewish audience that following the teachings of Jesus is wholly consistent with Jewish history and faith. From the first verses of the Gospel he connects Jesus with great names from Israel's history. Abraham, Isaac and David. Rahab, Ruth and Tamar. Time and again throughout the Gospel, Matthew throws in little asides, This was done to fulfill this prophecy, or That was like so and so said. . .
Then the answer to the question "why did Matthew make the woman a Canaanite?" must be that he did it because he was trying to say something very specific to his Jewish audience.
When that audience heard Mark's "a gentile, of Syrophoenician origin" they would have just heard "Alien" or "Outsider" but when they hear Matthew's "Canaanite" they would have heard so much more. Yes, alien and outsider would have been in there, but so would "enemy". James Perkinson writes:
For the mind steeped in Israelite history, “Canaanite” glimmers summoning up a troubled image of polytheism, sacred prostitution, and ethnicity beyond the pale. The word opens an old memory, a rent in Matthew’s text. It marks the woman herself as metaphor, as more (and less) than mere flesh and blood. In the designation “Canaanite,” the voice that emerges is cast as a cry from far back, asking mercy, confessing a genealogy of possession.[3]
For Matthew’s audience, no one could be more outside than a Canaanite woman. I suppose it can’t be much of a surprise then that as soon as we hear her supplication the first thing we hear the very Jewish disciples asking the very Jewish Jesus to get rid of her.
The insiders want to get rid of the outsider. Even Jesus tries to get her to leave them alone, to give her the brush off. “Don’t bother me, I came for Israel, not for you.” When that doesn’t get rid of her, he gets really nasty, “it’s not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Then the Canaanite woman gives the response that changes Jesus’ mind and teaches him a lesson. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat he crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
At this pivotal moment in the Gospel text, let’s move to the Isaiah text, just to keep the tension up a little bit longer.
Last month, when Lisa Larges and I preached after the Undercare retreat, I explained that the text we were using was the last four verses of Second Isaiah, and, completely by chance, this morning’s text, on the next Sunday that I get to speak to you is the beginning of Third Isaiah. You’d almost think we planned it that way.
You might recall how I explained then that scholars divide Isaiah into three parts, each one dealing with a different aspect of the exile to Babylon. First Isaiah is about why the people of Israel are being sent into exile, Second Isaiah is about God’s promise to redeem them from exile and to return them home in joy and peace.
Third Isaiah is about their lives once they return to Jerusalem and the Promised Land.
Third Isaiah begins with an oracle from the Lord. It’s made clear that these are not the prophet’s words, but the words of God. God’s words begin with a simple, declarative statement “Maintain justice and do what is right”
Right there God tells them how to live in this new, returned community. Right and justice are to be the watchwords for all. And those words are loaded with import for the people. They mean that the poor and the weak should be cared for, the hungry shall be fed and the stranger shall be welcomed. In God’s vision of right and justice, everyone is important, everyone is cared for. Walter Brueggemann puts it this way:
The intent is to assure every member of the community security, dignity, and well-being. In the tradition of Isaiah, this is the primal ethical obligation of recovering Judaism." [4]
Think about that. In some ways, these verses form the preamble to the constitution of the newly reformed Jewish state. This is their mission statement, and it begins with a commandment to justice and to ensure that every member of the community is cared for.
But then, as if that wasn’t enough, the oracle rolls on and identifies two groups of people who, by the traditions and previous writings of the community, should be excluded. In Levitical and Deuteronical law, the foreigner and the eunuch were to be despised, were to be kept separate from the people and the faith of Israel.
But by this oracle, by this direct Word from God, that is no longer the case, no longer are they to be kept apart, now there is a place for them in God’s community, they will be gathered in and welcomed. They shall be given “a monument and a name better than sons and daughters,” they shall be brought to God’s holy mountain and made joyful in God’s house of prayer.
That’s an important message for all of us, who would clearly be foreigners to the nation of Israel, but it’s an especially important message to people like me, people who identify as transgendered, transsexual, genderqueer or who in any way identify as differently gendered.
The Levitical prohibition against eunuchs being part of the Jewish community and Jewish worship in particular is often used against us. Just as there are what the LGBTQ community have named “bash texts” that are used to prove that homosexuals have no place in the church, the laws against people with “mutilated genitals” entering the temple are used as bash texts against the trans community.
But this text, particularly verses 3 to 5, ends that prohibition. And it doesn’t just say, “I guess it’s okay for you folks to come to church,” it says that in the church, by keeping covenant and Sabbath, we will find a home that provides us will all the things that we can dream of. In God’s house, within God’s walls, we will have an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. Going back to Brueggemann,
The community of Judaism is to be a community that remembers, cherishes, and preserves the name and identity of those otherwise nullified in an uncaring world.[5]
And isn’t amazing that, thanks to the Common Lectionary, people all across the country and the world are gathered together this Sunday morning to hear that text of welcome for the trans community?
Except they’re not. Anyone in a church using the lectionary as written will not hear one word about eunuchs. The interdenominational committee that put together the lectionary realized that we are so uncomfortable thinking about eunuchs on Sunday morning that they specifically skipped all mention of them in the prescribed text for the day. They “comma’d us out.” That is, in the lectionary this text is listed as “Isaiah 56 1,6-8” and reads like this:
Thus says the LORD:
Maintain justice, and do what is right,
For soon my salvation will come,
And my deliverance be revealed.
6And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
To minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
And to be his servants,
All who keep the Sabbath, and do not profane it,
And hold fast my covenant —
The UCC, the United Church of Christ, has as for years used the comma as a symbol of inclusion, “never put a period where God has placed a comma” they say, but with this choice by the lectionary committee, I would have to add: “never us a comma to exclude those who God has included.” Such a great opportunity for learning and welcome gone, replaced with a lowly comma.
Touching base once more with Walter,
The oracle intends to overcome every fearful limitation that is thinkable, that constitutes a human response of defensiveness and fearfulness, every fearful limitation that is not grounded in Yahweh's own purposes and commands"[6]
And even today the intention of this oracle is too radical, too far out to be fully included in Sunday worship. Nope, we’ve got to water it down, got to make it less than it is, less than it could be, just so that we protect people from squirming in the pews when they hear the word “eunuch”.
Back to the Gospel text, we were just at the point where the woman says to Jesus, “fine, you want to call me a dog, I’m a dog, but the least you can do is treat me as well as you treat the dogs”
It’s at that point that something happens to Jesus. Jesus learns from this woman, Jesus changes his mind and grants here request while congratulating her on the strength of her faith.
Now, I don’t know if in that moment of change that Jesus thought back to this text from Isaiah, back to its oracle of radical inclusiveness, but I like to think that he did. I like to think that in that one moment Jesus went through the changes that God has been trying bring about for thousands of years, first in the Jewish community and then in the world at large ever since this oracle was written.
God calls us to radical inclusion. God calls us to welcome the weak, welcome the poor, welcome the despised, welcome the other; and we have fought that call for thousands of years. In some way or another I think we all struggle with that to this day, just as Jesus struggled with it that day he met the Canaanite woman.
I hope that we can learn from his example. Our God is a God that gathers all people in, God will continue to gather more people in.
Our job is to welcome them, to “maintain justice and do what is right” so that one day, through our welcoming work, God’s house can truly be called a “house of prayer for all people”
Amen.
[1]Croy, N. Clayton, A Primer of Biblical Greek (William B. Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1999) p 158.
[2]Shipp, R. Mark, Bread to the Dogs: Matthew 15:21-28 and Tensions in Matthew’s Understanding of the Gentiles (Koinonia, Volume 2, Fall 1990) pp 113-114
[3] Perkinson, James W., A Canaanitic Word in the Logos of Christ; or The Difference the Syro-Phoenician Woman Makes to Jesus (Semeia, no 75, 1996) p 64.
[4] Brueggeman, Walter; Isaiah 40-66; (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, Kentucky, 1998); p169
[5] Ibid; p171
[6] Ibid; pp172-173
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