This underscores an aspect of the
Gospels that we often overlook: Jesus teaches, yes; and he certainly heals and
shows power; but there is something else, Jesus learns and he changes. What was
said about Jesus as a child—that he grew in wisdom and knowledge—is still
happening for the adult Jesus in his three-year mission: Jesus learns. He grows
in wisdom.
Wisdom is a constant theme of many
movies, TV shows, literature, and even graphic novels, although it rarely
described as such.
Remember The Matrix? Neo undertakes a journey to discover his role in
overthrowing the Matrix starting with his first meeting with the Oracle, a
grandmotherly figure peering into an oven baking cookies, in an apartment where
the students hang out as if they are doing their homework after school.
In The Empire Strikes Back, Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the
Force under the tutelage of the ancient Jedi master Yoda, who seems at first to
be an eccentric, slightly annoying little creature but turns out to be steeped
in ancient wisdom.
The film The Way, director Emilio Estevez cast his father, Martin Sheen, as
a man named Tom who walks the Camino de Santiago, “The Way of St. James.”
through northern Spain. Along the way he encounters all kinds of people and
discovers the difference between the “life we live and the life we choose.”
Recently, the latest iteration of
Star Trek has just wound up its three-year story, which was built around an
older, wiser, Jean-Luc Picard, imparting hard-earned wisdom to his younger
cohorts—and, most of all, the wisdom they impart to him!
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom
is the personification of God’s knowledge, God’s creativity and God’s
transforming love. Rather than focusing on the power of God that sends plagues
to Pharaoh, parts the Red Sea or those other “big” miraculous things, Wisdom is
a way of meeting God through other ways of knowing. It is more intuitive,
depends on our senses, and comes out of reflection, artistic and musical
expression. Wisdom is where heart, emotion, and thinking meet.
So it makes sense that when the
earliest Christians looked for ways to describe their encounter with Jesus, it
was the Wisdom literature that spoke to them the most. Their experience of
Jesus was not just of a person who did powerful things, but their encounter was
one that opened their eyes, their hearts, and their minds to the very presence
and person of God. In Jesus, they experienced both the knowledge of God and the
welcome of God.
This is at the heart of Jesus’
encounter with the foreign woman in today’s Gospel. Jesus and his disciples
went into a Gentile region near Galilee when a woman from those parts asked him
to heal her daughter. At first, he flat-out ignored her. He wouldn’t even
acknowledge the request.
She shouts after Jesus and the
disciples. Finally, he turns to her and speaks the conventional wisdom
concerning the Messiah. When he says that he was sent only to the Jews – not to
Gentiles like her. He even says that “it is not fair to take the children’s
food and throw it to the dogs.” Did you hear that? He calls her a dog!
Nevertheless, with courage and
desperation, she persisted. “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that
fall from their masters’ table.” Finally, the picture begins to make sense.
Jesus commends her faith and affirms her as a beloved child of God. “Woman,
great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was
healed instantly.
I don’t know about you, but this
story startles me because it does not fit with my soft, cuddly picture of Jesus,
who here acts in an arbitrary, harsh, and unloving manner—until she changes his
mind!
For centuries, preachers have
struggled to make sense of it—and to explain away Jesus’ apparent bad manners. Some
say that the Greek word Jesus used for “dog” really means “puppy.” (Uhm, no. It
doesn’t.) Some say that he was critiquing the cultural norms of the day…
really? By being rude? Maybe Jesus was using this encounter to test and stretch
his disciples’ understanding of God? Hmm… we’ll see.
Here’s an idea. Maybe the Gentile
woman taught him! And the early Church remembered the encounter because they
too were learning that lesson over and over again themselves! The lesson? That
God’s reign is bigger than tradition or culture or “the way we’ve always done
things.”
Remember, Jesus grew up in the
first century and that he lived his early life only among Palestinian Jews. He spent
almost all of his ministry among Jews – the children of Israel. His training
was Jewish. His bible was the Hebrew Scriptures. He lived in a social and
religious culture that saw Gentiles as “other,” often as unclean, or taboo.
Was Jesus was stuck in such a
mindset or was he deliberately pushing the envelope? After all, he did
deliberately go to a place where Gentiles lived when he encountered this
persistent woman. Did this encounter cause him to re-think commonly accepted
views about Gentiles?
Whatever happened between Jesus
and the woman, he clearly went from saying “no!” to commending the woman’s
faith and answering her prayer. I think Matthew’s Church remembered this
encounter precisely because those early Jewish Christians were starting to see
their Gentile Christian companions in a new light! In short, in this story,
Jesus is showing an early Church the importance of learning something new.
Jesus’ mind might have been changed,
but the real news is that the early Church—the Church of Matthew’s Gospel—was changing!
They went out from Palestine into the wider world of the Roman Empire; and they
were leaving the Synagogues of the Diaspora and going into new communities, and
discovering over and over again that Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit, and the
grace of God was changing people in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. Over
and over again, they were encountering people about whom they would say “…Great
is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And in that they found
healing!
In this transformation we see the
challenges and inner struggles faced by every succeeding generation of Christians.
Their transforming, God-provoked re-imagining of a long-held, commonly
practices mirror and inform the struggles we experience ourselves in a troubled
culture during this excruciatingly troublesome year.
Amid our struggles for inclusion, our
long history of racial inequality, the ways we understand Jesus, the Gospel, we
will meet and encounter people who challenge our long-held, often cherished
notions of faith.
Ten days ago, two branches of the
Church recognized in their calendars of saints the sacrificial witness of two
very different saints on the very same day—August 14. The Roman Catholic Church
remembered the witness Saint Maximillian Kolbe and the Episcopal Church
remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels.
Maximillian Kolbe was a Franciscan
priest in Poland who overcame his early, learned anti-Semitism and after the
Nazis invaded his country sheltered Jews fleeting the Holocaust. For this he
was arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In 1941, when a prisoner escaped,
ten other prisoners were rounded up to be executed. Kolbe stepped in and
volunteered to die instead of one of the others, and so the Nazis executed him
on August 14, 1941. He was canonized in 1982.
Jonathan Daniels was a seminarian
who grew up in Keene, New Hampshire and attended the Virginia Military
Institute and eventually the Episcopal Theological Seminary in Cambridge, Mass.
In 1965, he answered the call to go to the South and help register
disenfranchised black citizens to vote. And on August 14th, he was jailed
in Haynesville, AL, along with six other Freedom Riders including a Catholic
priest. After six days. August 20th, sixty years ago today, they
were released but while waiting for a ride, they were confronted by a deputy
sheriff who aimed his shotgun at a young girl named Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed
her aside and was killed in the blast. The priest was wounded trying to protect
the others. Ruby Sales continues to be an activist for civil rights and justice
to this day.
I don’t know if I would ever have
the courage of either of these two saints, but their example inspires us to
seek faith where it will be found, to speak out against racism, tyranny, and
bigotry in all its forms. The story of the Gentile woman challenging Jesus is
the story of the Church—of us—being challenged every day to seek the face of
Jesus in the faces of the people God gives to us every day, and to remind us of
our baptismal promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons whoever and
wherever they may be.
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