I just learned something, preparing for this Sunday’s sermon. Matthew, of all people, had a sense of humor! It shocked me, honestly. Matthew is the sternest of all gospel writers. He routinely uses the harshest, most serious, unforgiving language. In Matthew’s narrative, Jesus finishes more than a few of his speeches with the infamous words, “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” And every pastor loves it when a gospel passage for a Sunday morning ends with those wonderful words and you look into people’s eyes and say with a straight face, “The Gospel of the Lord.” (Thank you, Jesus!)
Matthew is tough. But apparently, he also had a sense of humor. To explain how I found out about it, let me first explain the leverage that gospel writers enjoyed. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as a few others not represented in the Bible, basically set out to tell the story of Jesus as best they knew it and as best they had learned about it; naturally, what they each tell us is very similar. But in one important respect they all differ. They all arrange materials somewhat differently. One gospel writer groups all the parables together, another one spreads them out; one tells a few healing stories with a lot of detail and embellishment; in another gospel, you just get a short summary. Often, the gospel writer will make a subtle statement by the way he arranges and pairs the narratives about Jesus in his book.
Case in point, Matthew, chapter 15, today’s gospel lesson! Matthew pairs Jesus’ criticism of the traditional food purity laws and immediately follows it up with the story of a human purity story – the Canaanite woman. Now, there is some irony in that. When Jesus criticizes the traditional purity laws, he’s saying that it’s not the food that you eat which makes you unclean, but rather the trash you store in your heart and the trash that comes out of your mouth. He is setting the moral bar high. Whose hearts are entirely clean and pure? Whose words, even if they are not formally trashy are always pure? Now, it’s a little bit harder for us to understand his argument since we never grew up with purity laws. I think I never ever had second thoughts about eating a schnitzel or a delicious, barbecue sauce dripping pulled pork sandwich. Have you? In the world that our Lord inhabited, that was different. There existed at Jesus’ time a religious formalism that taught you to stay away from certain foods for the sake of staying away from them, for the sake of fulfilling your religious obligations, for the sake of the law. But our Lord was more interested in a different kind of purity, one that grows from the heart and makes the whole person new. Well, so far, so good, right? And you ask me, “What’s funny about that?”
Nothing, except the story that comes next, when Jesus goes out into the country and meets a woman who seems awfully pure in her intentions to save her daughter. And Jesus learned a lesson here that many men have learned the hard way: Don’t ever mess with a mother fighting for her child! And how weird is it that the person who took such a grand stand on food purity laws and raised the moral bar so high is now essentially saying to the woman, “No, lady, you’re not pure enough for me to help you. You are from the wrong tribe. I was sent to serve the children of Israel.” And he tops it off with a little insult worthy of an early morning tweet by one of our contemporaries: he compares her with a dog eating from the master’s table, an insult.
I feel that Matthew exposes Jesus here a little bit by pairing these seemingly contradictory stories. It’s like someone quoting President Thomas Jefferson on his moral high plane saying that all men are created equal and next he describes Jefferson’s life at his farm in Virginia with his slaves. It makes you wonder and pause and think.
The story of the Canaanite woman, as well as Jesus’ eventual change of mind triggered by the woman’s amazing humility, is a very important story for us today, especially in the context of recent events. The Canaanite woman is like a Jewish woman to all anti-Semites. She is like a black woman to all white supremacists. She is like a poor white woman, also called “White T.” to those who are driven by class distinctions. The Canaanite woman is the person who is not from your tribe. But she is part of God’s family. Even Jesus got caught up in the tribalism of his time, just as so many people are caught up in the tribalism of our time; yet, he turned it around and recognized who she was, a sister in faith: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
Many years ago, there was a woman who lived in a small village in France. Trained as a nurse, she devoted her life to caring for the sick and needy. After many years of kind and selfless service to the village’s families, the woman died. She had no family of her own, so the townsfolk planned a beautiful funeral for her, a fitting tribute to the woman to whom so many owed their lives.
The parish priest, however, pointed out that, because she was a Protestant, she could not be buried in the town’s Catholic cemetery. The villagers protested, but the priest held firm. It was not easy for the priest either, because he too had been cared for by the woman during a serious illness. But the canons of the Church were very clear; she would have to buried outside the fence of the cemetery.
The day of the funeral arrived, and the whole village accompanied the woman’ s casket to the cemetery, where she was buried–outside the fence. But that night, a group of villagers, armed with shovels, sneaked into the cemetery. They then quietly set to work– moving the fence.
God bless those townspeople! I feel that God is asking us, is asking you and me this morning where we can be part of moving the fence, of including people who are wrongfully excluded. I feel that God is asking us this morning where our heart-felt principles run counter to the realities we live. And I feel that Matthew, the gospel writer, is encouraging us to recognize our own contradictions and, smiling at our lack of insight, is telling us, “Go, try again! It’s no big deal. Even Jesus had to learn.”
It is a fact of life: those who set the moral bar high for themselves will be more easily exposed. They are bound to fail at some point, in some area. Thomas Jefferson is a more famous example. But Jefferson wasn’t wrong in his principles, it just took him a little longer than a lifetime to translate them into his own conduct. So, blessed are those who set the moral bar high for themselves and try to do the right thing before God! Even if they fail, God’s grace and mercy is with them. Always!
Amen.