Did you notice it? In today’s Gospel, Jesus the Rabbi is taken to school.
When we read the Gospels, we see Jesus teach, 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 (Luke 2:52) — still happens for the adult Jesus. Jesus not only teaches, but he also 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 away 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.”
And we mustn’t forget Spider-Man, who is always learning that with “great power comes great responsibility.”
In the Hebrew Scriptures, Wisdom is the personification of God’s knowledge, creativity and transforming love. Rather than focusing on the power of God that sent plagues to Pharaoh, parted the Red Sea and those other miraculous special effects, Wisdom is how we meet 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.
That’s why, 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.
Wisdom is at the heart of Jesus’ encounter with the foreign woman in today’s Gospel.
Jesus and his disciples travelled through a Gentile region near Galilee when a woman from those parts approaches Jesus and asks him to heal her daughter. At first, he flat-out ignored her. He wouldn’t even acknowledge the request.
She pleads and shouts after Jesus and his disciples.
Finally, when he turns to her and speaks the conventional wisdom concerning the Messiah, he says that the Messiah is only for the Jews, not for Gentiles like her. He brushes her off saying that “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Did you hear that? He called 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, the Gospel tells us, 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’ rudeness. We can’t imagine that the guy who would flip over tables in the Temples or go toe to toe with the religious leaders of his day could be… sarcastic! And the lengths they’ll go to smooth it over is incredible. 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 callous and unkind? 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 Jesus… that in saying that God’s covenant extended to everyone regardless of their status was bigger than they imagined. And maybe the early Church remembered their encounter because they were learning that lesson for 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 the 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? I think he was pushing the edges of faith outward, taking it to new territory literally and figuratively. I think he chose to bring Good News to everyone. After all, he did deliberately go to a place where Gentiles lived when he encountered this persistent woman. What did he expect? Either this encounter caused him to re-think commonly accepted views about Gentiles… or it was his chance to prove a point!
Whatever happened between Jesus and the woman, he clearly went from saying “no!” to complimenting the woman for her 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.
Maybe Jesus’ mind changed or he was breaking new ground, 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 known 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.
Last Friday, August 14, two different branches of the Church recognized in their calendars the sacrificial witness of two very different saints on the very same day. The Roman Catholic Church remembered the witness Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Episcopal Church remembered Jonathan Myrick Daniels. Maximilian 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, on August 20th, 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.
Sales was so traumatized by Daniels' murder that she nearly lost the ability to speak for the next seven months. Despite death threats made to her and her family, Sales testified at Tom Coleman's trial, where he was acquitted by a jury of 12 white men and said in a CBS television interview a year after the killings that he had no regrets, declaring, "I would shoot them both tomorrow."
Sales herself would later attend the same seminary as Daniels and works today as an advocate for civil rights and social justice.
I don’t know if I would ever have the courage of any of these 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 see the image of God in the faces of all the people God gives us every day and reminds us of our baptismal promise to seek and serve Christ in all persons and to love our neighbor as ourselves, whoever and wherever they may be.
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The 12th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 15A
https://www.lectionarypage.net/YearA_RCL/Pentecost/AProp15_RCL.html
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