Matthew 15:10-39 Then he called the crowd to him and said to
them, "Listen and understand: 11
it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes
out of the mouth that defiles." 12
Then the disciples approached and said to him, "Do you know that the
Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?" 13 He answered, "Every plant
that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. 14 Let them alone; they are blind
guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall
into a pit." 15 But
Peter said to him, "Explain this parable to us." 16 Then he said, "Are you
also still without understanding? 17
Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes
out into the sewer? 18 But
what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what
defiles. 19 For out of the
heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false
witness, slander. 20 These
are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not
defile."
21Jesus
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.
29After Jesus had left that place, he passed along the
Sea of Galilee, and he went up the mountain, where he sat down. 30 Great crowds came to him,
bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others.
They put them at his feet, and he cured them,
31 so that the crowd was amazed when they saw the mute
speaking, the maimed whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing. And they
praised the God of Israel.
32Then Jesus called his disciples to him and said,
"I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for
three days and have nothing to eat; and I do not want to send them away hungry,
for they might faint on the way." 33
The disciples said to him, "Where are we to get enough bread in the desert
to feed so great a crowd?" 34
Jesus asked them, "How many loaves have you?" They said, "Seven,
and a few small fish." 35
Then ordering the crowd to sit down on the ground, 36 he took the seven loaves and
the fish; and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to the disciples,
and the disciples gave them to the crowds.
37 And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the
broken pieces left over, seven baskets full.
38 Those who had eaten were four thousand men, besides women
and children. 39 After
sending away the crowds, he got into the boat and went to the region of
Magadan.
Isaiah 56:1 Thus says the LORD: Maintain justice, and do
what is right, for soon my salvation will come, and my deliverance be revealed.
Isaiah 56:6-8 And 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-- 7 these I will
bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their
burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house
shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. 8 Thus says the Lord GOD, who
gathers the outcasts of Israel, I will gather others to them besides those
already gathered.
It has,
occasionally, been said of me,
that I am ‘very English’!
But the thing
is, I’m never quite sure whether I should take this as a compliment?…
I suspect it depends on who is
saying it,
and also on which
particular aspect of my cultural baggage
it is that has prompted
the observation.
Part of me
wants to simply reply, ‘well of course I am, how could I be anything else?’
After all, I was born in England, to
English parents, with English grandparents…
My native language is English, and I
speak it with a home counties accent.
But I don’t
think that’s necessarily what is always meant,
when people tell me that I’m ‘very
English’.
There are
other aspects to being English beyond parentage and accent,
that all combine to create the
culture that comes into view.
I’m reading an
interesting book at the moment,
called ‘Watching the English’ by Kate
Fox;
And she
identifies a number of characteristics of ‘Englishness’
which go beyond the obvious, and
into the cultural.
One of these,
as you may be able to guess,
is conversation about the weather,
which she says has many similarities
to a religious or liturgical response,
between a priest and their
congregation:
So, I say,
‘the Lord be with you’,
and you reply, ‘and also with you’.
I say, ‘Lord
have mercy upon us’,
and you reply, ‘Christ have mercy
upon us.’
I say, ‘Nice
day isn’t it?’
and you reply, ‘very pleasant for
the time of year.’
I say, ‘it’s a
bit chilly today’,
and you reply, ‘at least it’s not
raining.’
And so we
could go on, all day if necessary!
Well, earlier
this year, Dawn and I attended
the London Baptist Association ‘St
George’s Day’ event,
which was
billed as an exploration of Englishness
in a multicultural city.
As part of the
preparation for the day,
we were asked to fill out an online
questionnaire
which rated us on an ‘Englishness
scale’.
Interestingly,
on this occasion I didn’t come out at the most ‘English’ person in the room;
that honour went to one of my fellow
ministers,
a woman of West Indian heritage,
whose parents had come
to the UK as part of the Windrush generation
in the Government
sponsored post-second-world-war mass immigration.
She had
decided, in her teens, that her West Indian accent,
and
her Afro Caribbean cultural heritage,
were going to be a disadvantage to
her.
So she had
consciously and deliberately bought into
a very specific perception of what
it meant to be ‘English’.
She had changed
her accent,
but more than this, she had changed
her cultural values and mores,
and she had very
effectively adopted the nuances and attitudes
of the English educated middle
classes.
So, what does it mean to be English?
And does it matter?
Alternatively,
what does it mean to be Scottish?
And does that matter?
Well, I guess we’ll find out on
September the 18th!
But what does
it mean to be Welsh, or Northern Irish,
or indeed Irish, or Australian, or
Filipino,
or any one of the many nationalities
represented here this morning,
in our wonderful
multi-cultural congregation.
And what does
it mean to be Ukrainian, or Russian,
or Iraqi, or Syrian, or Jewish, or
Palestinian…
Does any of this matter?
Well, it seems
to, doesn’t it, given how much of the trouble in our world
finds its origins in disagreements
between people
who are at loggerheads over issues
of cultural, ethnic, or national identity.
From casual or
institutional racism, to ethnic cleansing,
questions of who is ‘in’, and who is
‘out’,
questions
of tribalism and protectionism,
questions
of nationality and ethnicity,
dominate and determine so much that
goes on in our world.
And it has
always been the case, it seems,
that ethnic, cultural and national
identities carry troublesome baggage.
Take the story
of Jesus the Jew and the Canaanite woman,
a story loaded with ethnic tension
if ever there was one.
As we spend a
few minutes unpacking this story,
and considering how it might speak
to our contemporary situation,
I’m going to be drawing
on some material
and
if you’d like to know more, I’ll happily point you to what they’ve written.
But firstly,
I’d like to tease out the differences
between ethnicity, cultural
identity, and nationalism,
because whilst they are often
treated as the same thing,
I don’t think they are the same
thing at all.
Someone’s
ethnicity is a simple matter of genetics;
it is something over which we have
no choice.
And it is
often denoted by physical characteristics shared by genetically related
peoples.
So, things such as skin colour,
shape of the eyes and nose, or height,
can all be markers of ethnicity.
I was born
looking like this,
and have had very little choice in
the matter.
My ethnicity
is probably best described as Caucasian,
meaning that I am descended from a
particular tribal group from central Europe.
But someone’s
cultural identity
is more a matter of where someone
was born,
than it is to do with who their
parents were.
So, I speak
English this way, because I was born and raised in Sevenoaks.
If I’d been raised in Yorkshire, I’d
still look the same,
my ethnicity would be
the same,
and
I’d still be culturally English,
but I’d speak with a different
accent,
and
probably like cricket more than I do!
Similarly, if
I’d been raised in France, I’d still look the same,
but I wouldn’t be culturally English
at all.
So my English culture,
is a function of the society within
which I was raised,
and to some extent of the choices I
have made.
There are
English people who look like me,
and there are English people who
look nothing like me.
We may have
different ethnicities, but we share a common culture.
And then
there’s the issue of nationality,
which is less a social construct,
and more a political construct.
So, my
nationality is British,
which, at the moment, includes those
who are Scottish,
as well as the Welsh, and the
Northern Irish.
Britain, the
United Kingdom,
is a political entity, comprising
many ethnicities, and a variety of cultures.
I can remember
being taught Geography by a Welshman,
and he used to get very upset if any
of us English lads
ever used the word ‘England’.
“It’s
‘Britain’, boy!” he would shout,
demonstrating both his commitment to
the political union of the nation,
and also his pride at his own Welsh
culture.
He was, I am
sure, also very aware, although he never said it,
of the history of English
suppression of the Welsh.
Where over
many centuries, for political reasons,
the Welsh culture was devalued at
the hands of the English
to the extent that the Welsh
language was almost entirely wiped out.
A similar
narrative of conquest lies behind the current debates
regarding Scottish independence.
And the
troubles in Northern Ireland
owe much to the activities of a
certain Oliver Cromwell
who seemed to need to do
something with his army
once he had overthrown
Charles the First of England.
All of which
points to an important observation:
when ethnic and cultural identity
become fused with national identity,
we create the recipe for dangerous
and demonic nationalism to emerge.
In recent
centuries,
both within these Islands, and on a
global scale,
The culture of
Englishness has acquired implications of imperialism,
connotations of conquest.
And this
political ascendancy took the form of an expansionist political ideology,
backed by an efficient military,
facilitated by a strong
economy,
and legitimated by a mythology of
divine approval.
And it was
ever thus.
Before the
English it was the Romans,
the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the
Egyptians, even the Israelites.
And in more
recent times we have seen the rise of other empires,
from communist block to global
capitalism.
And this is
the context within which we read
our story from Matthew’s gospel this
morning.
Time and
again,[3]
religious communities have demonstrated
their capacity
to become complicit with the
imperial narratives
of the host nation that offers them
protection or advantage.
Christians
have been no exception to this,
and there are plenty of examples of
times and places
where people have edited their
version of Jesus
to fit their nation’s narrative of
imperial conquest.
However, one
of the themes that we keep coming back to here at Bloomsbury,
is the idea that Jesus’ life and
message are centred
on the articulation and
demonstration
of
a radically different framing story
– one that critiques and exposes the
imperial narrative
as dangerous to itself
and to others.
Jesus does not
proclaim the kingdom of Israel,
or any other earthly power.
Rather, he
says repeatedly
that through him a different kingdom
is coming into being;
one that is
defined not along national, cultural or ethnic lines,
but by values of peace, justice and
reconciliation.
The story of
the Canaanite woman from Matthew
is just such a story which challenges
the nationalisms of the first
century.
We know that
Matthew is re-writing Mark’s version of this story,
and he makes a surprising change to
Mark’s language
as he retells it for his own
readership.
Matthew is
often thought of as the most Jewish of the four gospel writers,
and yet, surprisingly, he identifies
the woman in this story as a ‘Canaanite’,
unlike Mark, who calls her a ‘Greek,
born in Syrian Phoenicia’ (7.26).
Matthew’s use
of Canaanite here is surprising,
first, because the term appears
nowhere else in the New Testament,
and second, because Canaanites were,
strictly speaking,
non-existent at that
time!
To call
someone in Jesus’ day a Canaanite
would be an anachronism,
like calling a contemporary
Norwegian a Viking,
or
a contemporary Scot a Celt;
it was a word from the past.
This gives us
a strong clue that in using this term Canaanite,
Matthew is wanting to signal something
more than simply her ethnicity,
or even her culture.
We’re in the
world of nationality here, the world of
politics and empires.
Canaan was not
only a place name,
it was an ideologically loaded
geographical marker.
You see, the
term Canaanite was a direct evocation
of Israel’s violent conquest of
Canaan at the end of the Exodus.
It’s a story
found in the biblical books of Exodus and Deuteronomy,
and it’s a disturbing story of
violence and nationalism,
all legitimated by a mythology of
divine approval.
According to
the old story, the land of Canaan was good,
but the Canaanites were evil.
So why did the
Israelites kill the Canaanites?
‘Because God told them to’, says the
Old Testament story.
And Matthew
knows this,
and his use of the term Canaanite for the woman is quite
intentional.
His use of
this term denotes the woman and her daughter
as the worst kind of outsider.
They are Canaanites, the quintessential enemies
of Israel.
And Matthew
tells the story this way
to show Jesus deconstructing the
violent conquest narrative
that
had previously dominated the relationship between the Jews
and
the descendants of the original inhabitants
of the land
flowing with milk and honey.
Matthew is
wanting to show that the Kingdom of God
is not the same thing as the
national identity of the people who worship God.
Matthew has
already included non-Jews in his story in striking ways,
from the naming of the Canaanite
women Tamar and Rahab
in the Genealogy of
Jesus (1.3,5),
to the visit of the Gentile Magi
(2.1-12),
to the healing of the
Roman centurion’s servant (8.5-13).
And Matthew
will include Gentiles in an even more striking way
at his story’s end, affirming that
Gentiles
must be included in the
circle of disciples (28.18-20).
But here, in
between, during Jesus’ unique excursion into Gentile territory,
Jesus encounters this woman
identified by Matthew as a Canaanite.
Their
encounter is disturbing, not least because Jesus appears to be racist.
He responds to her request for mercy
and healing for her daughter,
first by ignoring her,
then by saying, ‘I was
sent only to the lost sheep of Israel’ (15.24),
then by using language
that to our ears sounds indefensibly dehumanising
and, I’ll
say it again, racist:
He refers to her people
as ‘dogs’ (15.26).
Some readers,
trying to ‘save’ Jesus from the appearance of racism,
along with the appearance of
changing his mind,
would say that Jesus was simply
engaging in wordplay with the woman,
that he knew all along
that he was going to heal her daughter.
However,
playing with a distraught mother,
and using dehumanising language to
do so,
doesn’t seem to ‘save’ Jesus from
much, if we’re honest.
In Jesus
defence, we should note that he doesn’t say,
‘I was sent only to the elite people
of God,
the chosen ones, holy
Israel,
not to you hopeless
dogs.’
No, rather Jesus
identifies his fellow Israelites as ‘lost sheep’,
hardly itself a great nationalistic
affirmation or compliment.
Jesus is no
Zionist here.
In this light,
Brian McLaren suggests that maybe Jesus is saying something like this:
‘Woman,
I’m sorry about your daughter.
But
I have enough problems with my own Jewish people.
Herod,
a Jewish ruler, just killed the prophet John, my close colleague.
The
Pharisees are misleading the people,
and
we just had a very harsh confrontation.
In
fact, they’re plotting my assassination as we speak.
So
my own people have lost their way, and I’ve been sent to them;
that’s
why I can’t help you.’
Her clever and
persistent reply, however,
seems to convert Jesus,
so that he gains new insight into
the God-given scope of his mission.
It may be that
this Canaanite woman knows the original call to Abraham,
that God will bless Abraham and make
his descendants a great nation
so that they will bring blessing to
all nations.
If so, her
statement about dogs eating scraps that fall from the table
would then mean:
‘Yes, I understand that your calling is to your people.
But since your people
are supposed to bring blessing to the rest of us,
wouldn’t it be good to
let this scrap of blessing fall to my daughter?’
It’s telling
that the woman isn’t interested
in recapturing the lost wealth of
her ancestral lands.
She merely
wants the crumbs of bread that fall from the conquer’s table.
And whatever
she knows or doesn’t know,
in this encounter, instead of a Jew
violently and mercilessly
conquering a Canaanite
in harmony with the old stories of Exodus and Joshua,
the Canaanite wins and conquers the
Jew
so that he responds to
her request for mercy.
Jesus then
utterly reverses his earlier statement.
‘I was sent only to the lost sheep
of Israel’ recedes into the past,
and he now moves
dramatically forward to care not only for one Gentile girl,
but for literally
thousands of Gentiles.
In the
following episode, in verses 29-31, he dramatically heals multitudes,
and they are quite obviously
Gentiles,
because Matthew specifies that they
‘praised the God of Israel.’
And then, even
more dramatically,
Jesus feeds the Gentile multitude in
a way that perfectly parallels
his earlier feeding of five thousand
Jews.
But there is
one critical difference.
When Jesus feeds five thousand Jews,
there are twelve baskets left over.
The number clearly
signifying the twelve tribes of Israel.
But when he feeds four thousand
Gentiles, how many baskets are left over? Seven.
Many have debated what
that number might signify…
For the probably answer, we need to
turn to
one
of the more terrifying passages in the Hebrew Scriptures,
certainly
in terms of its justification of religious violence.
According to
the Hebrew story, in about 1,400 BC,
Moses gave the word of the Lord to
Joshua, his successor in leadership,
instructing him what to do when he
leads his people into Canaanite territory:
Deuteronomy 7:1-5 When the LORD your God brings you
into the land that you are about to enter and occupy, and he clears away many
nations before you-- the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the
Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations mightier and more numerous
than you-- 2 and when the
LORD your God gives them over to you and you defeat them, then you must utterly destroy them. Make no
covenant with them and show them no mercy. 3 Do not intermarry with them,
giving your daughters to their sons or taking their daughters for your
sons, 4 for that would turn
away your children from following me, to serve other gods. Then the anger of
the LORD would be kindled against you, and he would destroy you quickly. 5 But this is how you must deal with
them: break down their altars, smash their pillars, hew down their sacred
poles, and burn their idols with fire.
What seems to be happening in Matthew’s
story,
is
that Jesus takes the old ‘destroy the Canaanites’ narrative,
and
dramatically turns it around.
The reversals are striking.
Jesus
does not follow Deuteronomy’s ‘no mercy to Canaanites’ policy,
but
rather shows mercy to this Canaanite woman and her daughter.
According
to Deuteronomy, seven nations are to be destroyed ‘totally:
yet
seven baskets of loaves are gathered as a symbolic testimony
to
the fact that through the ministry of Jesus,
Canaanites
are not to be destroyed, but fed.
According
to Deuteronomy, Canaanite daughters are dangers,
and
will lead Israelite sons astray,
but
Jesus, an Israelite son, sees a Canaanite daughter not as a danger,
but
as a person in need, and heals her.
If Jesus’ first feeding miracle and its
twelve-basket surplus
suggested
a reconstitution of the twelve tribes being led through the wilderness
with
a new kind of manna,
[as
we explored when we looked at that story here a couple of weeks ago,]
then this second feeding suggests a new
kind of conquest,
not
with swords and spears, but with bread and fish;
not
to destroy, but to serve and heal.
Jesus seizes the old narrative, shakes
it, turns it inside out,
and
offers a new story that reframes a future radically different from the past.
He rejects the narrative of nationalism,
and
proclaims instead a common citizenship
within
the kingdom of heaven.
And in so many ways, in our world today,
the
nations of the earth are still living out the old story
of
conquest and imperialism and violence and subjugation.
Nationalism still has the capacity to
unleash the demonic,
and
recruit the indifferent and unaware to its cause.
From the rise of the far right in
Europe,
to
the recent successes of the British National Party,
to
the dis-assimilation of minority ethno-religious groups
and
the consequent rise of extremist groups and associated Islamophobia…
Whether it’s the English oppression of
the Welsh, the Scots, or the Irish,
or
warring factions in Iraq,
or
tensions in the Ukraine,
or
ongoing violence between Israel and the Palestinians,
or
Canaanites as Matthew might refer to
them!
We live in a world where empires
dominate, and people are subjugated,
where
militarism and money are soul-mates,
and
where the mythology of divine approval provides the necessary legitimation.
And I find myself wondering what Jesus
would do…
I wonder what might it mean for the
powerful to discover
that
power is only meaningful when it is used to bless the weak,
rather
than to protect the vested interests of the powerful.
I wonder what might happen if the
followers of Jesus
started
calling the powerful to account,
refusing to offer the narratives of
divine legitimation
for
the violence and oppression offered on our behalf.
I wonder what it might look like if more
Christians
rejected
the politicised narratives of nationalism,
and
celebrated instead the glorious, God-given diversity
of
ethnicity and culture.
I wonder what might happen if more
churches were inclusive of those
whom
others would want to reject,
rather than setting themselves up as the
last bastions of legalism
in
a world gone to the dogs.
I despair sometimes that we have such
capacity to get it so wrong.
It
is too easy for us to become like the Pharisees,
convinced
that purity is more important than mercy,
and
that religious observance is more important than justice.
It
is too easy for us to enter into our alliances with the powers that be,
justifying
our compliance on the basis of holiness.
And cutting through this comes the story
of Jesus,
rewriting
the script, retelling the story of what it means to be human,
and
what it means to belong to one another.
To be a follower of Jesus is a far
different affair than many of us were taught.
It
is a long way from the vision of little England
that we sang into being at my school
in Kent
as
we weekly intoned the stirring words of Blake’s Jerusalem.
The Kingdom of God is not England,
nor
is it America, or Israel, or any other nationally defined entity.
Any nation that claims to be doing the
work of God as it kills his enemies,
has
taken for itself that which belongs only to God.
And any religion that aligns itself with
such activity,
proclaiming
the blessing of God on the smiting of the ungodly,
is
a long way from the kingdom of Heaven.
Rather, to be a follower of Jesus means
to join
what
McLaren calls Jesus’ peace insurgency:
it is to see through every regime that
promises peace through violence,
peace
through domination,
peace
through genocide,
peace
through exclusion and intimidation.
Following Jesus means forming
communities that seek peace
through
justice, generosity, and mutual concern,
and
a willingness to suffer persecution but a refusal to inflict it on others.
To follow Jesus is to become an atheist
in
regard to all bloodthirsty, tribal warrior gods,
even
those that call themselves by the same name
as the God we proclaim and worship.
To follow Jesus is to become a believer
in the living God of grace and peace
who,
in Christ, sheds God’s own blood
in
a manifestation of amnesty and reconciliation.
To follow Jesus is to repent, to
believe, and to follow . . .
and
together, these mean nothing less
than
defecting from the empire’s campaign of violence
to
join Jesus’ divine peace insurgency.
