The Expanding Mind of Christ
Matthew 15:21-28
August 16, 2020
Rev. Elizabeth Mangham Lott
St. Charles Ave. Baptist Church

21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, "Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us." 24 He answered, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." 26 He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." 27 She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table." 28 Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly. 

In the age of TikTok, YouTube, and iPhones, kids are amazingly savvy. I realize they are technology natives in a way my generation was, but I am still impressed by what creativity + modern tech can generate. My friend’s daughter is quick and clever when it comes to making videos, and she has started to use these skills to make persuasive arguments to her parents for all kinds of things. She’ll make a video outlining the reasons a guinea pig makes a great pet and guaranteeing the easy care and maintenance children can offer for their new guinea pig. She’ll partner with a best friend to highlight the benefits of a sleepover and why the girls very much need more time together than just an afternoon hangout. She’s determined enough and creative enough that these videos often impress her parents and win the day. Well, except for the guinea pig.

My friend is equal parts impressed by her daughter’s skill, amused by her fierce determination, and genuinely swayed by the case her daughter lays out. Again, except for the guinea pig. I’m carrying this uniquely modern perspective into today’s text because it doesn’t land well for my August 16, 2020, ears to hear Jesus refusing to help a woman in need and speaking to her in a metaphor that places her squarely in the role of a dog on the floor beneath his table. I need to be in the mindset of a loving and delighted parent who is being dazzled and amazed by her growing child because I don’t like hearing the words of Matthew 15 in a dismissive and disrespectful tone that Jesus initially seems to take. And I’m not particularly comfortable when Matthew’s gospel has Jesus focusing so singularly on “the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” because I know that language oversimplifies Jesus’ participation in the very real rabbinic debates of the early 1st century AND has been used to support centuries of anti-semitism from and Christian superiority within the Church.

So. We have a story before us today that very much ends in healing a child and spotlights the dogged determination (bad pun) of a mother who loves her daughter. But the story is not so much about the healing part as it is the way the woman’s determination changes the mind of Jesus. She is taking on the adrenaline-fueled posture of a mama protecting her child and appears unconcerned with whether or not she belongs in the room or at the table. She is also stepping into the role of a peer and arguing with Jesus in a rabbinical tone the way we would expect Jesus to spar with other Pharisees and religious leaders. 

And when we listen to what she says, we realize this woman knows better than Jesus who he really is, and she is making the case that HE is the one who needs to wake up to the breadth and height and length and depth of the love of God that is fully realized IN HIM. The Caananite woman (identified as Syrophoenician in Mark’s telling) expands the mind of Jesus the Christ by helping him understand his mission and his teaching are for more people than even he can imagine. This is a big, important scene.

Carla Works (Prof. of NT at Wesley Seminary in D.C.) notes, “In the passage that immediately precedes this story, Jesus responds to challenges from the scribes and Pharisees by reframing the boundaries of clean and unclean. In 15:18, Jesus declares that what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and what comes out of the heart determines what makes one clean. What comes out of the Canaanite woman’s heart is faith -- certainty that Jesus has power enough for Israel and power enough to save her non-Israelite daughter.

Her words demonstrate that the boundary separating her from the house of Israel must be reconsidered. With a faith so pure, how can she be deemed unclean? The encounter with the Canaanite woman prepares the reader for Jesus’ great commission to go and to make disciples of all the nations (28:20).” There is a conversation happening about a mother and daughter but also about Jesus and the whole wide world. Likewise, there is a reading/listening audience in mind beyond the audience in the room with Jesus and the woman.

It’s helpful for us to remember that the woman is not the only one making her case with this text.  The gospel writers were documenting the life and teachings of Jesus long after his death. In fact, these stories were finally written down even after Paul’s letters circulated through the early churches. That means there are layers to the narrative of the healing—this really isn’t just about the daughter who is instantly healed but about the mission of Jesus expanding beyond the bounds of a 1st century Jewish conversation into a broad perspective that is for all people. And it is the outsider woman who expands the mind of the Christ in order to offer that broad perspective for all people.

In thinking about the woman’s determination changing the mind of Christ, I am intensely impressed and inspired by how many times she won’t take “no” for an answer. In v. 23, “he did not answer her at all.” Being ignored doesn’t deter her in any way. Now she is just shouting after Jesus and the disciples who very much want him to send her away. Instead, Jesus finally speaks to her but only to say, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” A second “no.” Ah, but now she knows she has his attention. She is in his presence. They have locked eyes. She kneels before him, a posture reserved for worship and deference to power, and pleads her case directly, to his face. 

At this point Jesus says the food from the table isn’t for the dogs—he’s the table and the food and the seated guest, and she’s the dog below. It hits me hard no matter how much exegesis I throw at it. But this woman isn’t knocked off course by whatever Jesus is implying here. No, she pushes back on his understanding of himself—completely disregarding the insult in his message because she knows the essence of what she is asking for is far more important than the insult (regardless of what his tone or intention, now lost in translation, may have been). Even dogs get crumbs, Jesus. You know better. And there is more than enough of your power to go around. There is more than enough of whatever direct line you seem to have to the Divine to go around. There is a generative love in you that comes from the Source of the entire Universe, and that love can heal my daughter and then go on to heal the whole world. “How do you not seem to know this about yourself,” her words and posture ask.

After our beloved basset hound Lucy died in 2014, I remember the first time we ate a meal with rice. Our children were 5 and 8 at the time, so still young enough that rice with a meal was a particularly messy component, but we’d never really had to, knowingly/consciously, deal with the clean-up. The meal was over, and the kids were moving toward bed or whatever came next, but I looked at the floor and saw rice everywhere. Not only was I baffled by this, but I quickly discovered you also cannot easily sweep up cooked, sticky rice. It clings to the broom and makes a new, different sort of mess. I had no experience with this because Lucy had always taken care of it. Clever, quiet, waiting for her moment, she knew there would be a veritable feast beneath the table as her younger siblings dropped bits of their dinner all night long. There was always more than enough to share; always abundance at our table.

Now I still don’t like the metaphor, and I still find this to be a problematic story. But as my friend, Pastor June Joplin, said of this text just last week, “That’s a wrinkle I’m not too concerned to smooth…at least not today.” Instead, she points to the persistence of faith in the gospel text. “Faith, this story tells us, is not a matter of giving quiet, internal assent to some important idea…Faith is not something you keep inside, something that you keep to yourself; something that you keep quiet and that keeps YOU quiet. Faith, Jesus wants us to know in this story, is persistent and loud and unfazed by social customs that require politeness and meekness and propriety. Faith does not behave according to rules set by those with power and privilege. Faith does not follow cultural scripts about who is allowed to have a platform and who can speak to whom. Faith does not care whether bystanders are comfortable or not. Faith embraces struggle.” 

I love that it is the outsider—a triple outsider—a woman among men, a Gentile among Jews, a Canaanite among Israelites—who “gets” what faith is really about and then teaches Jesus. Her expansive understanding of the consequences of the radical love of God not only saves her daughter but changes the very mind of the Christ to understand more fully who he is and how he is shaped and what he is called to do in the world and why the world needs him to be fully awake to this reality. She wakes Jesus up. She opens his eyes to a world he wasn’t seeing before. She makes the light go off in his imagination.

And THIS is who is modeling faith for Jesus and for the disciples and for you and for me. "Woman, great is your faith!” Friends, may we embody the faith of this mother. May we petition God, the Source of Love, for what this old world needs. May we go to the mat for what we know is right. May we understand that faith is active, dynamic, robust, loud, and even impolite! In a world that feels like it is on fire, may we have the faith to rush in and face the great needs and deep pain with the radical love of God, fully revealed in Jesus the Christ, as seen and named by this Canaanite woman, a mother who loved her child, an outsider who understood we most be as bold in our living as we are in our praying. Friends, may your faith be great.

Amen.