Years and years and years ago I was an assistant manager of a steakhouse.
If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant industry, then you know how crumby a
restaurant can be. Crumbs are
everywhere. Crumbs mean dirty. Dirty says, “Don’t eat here.” So when I was on duty out on the floor during
the meal rushes and when the restaurant was empty between meals, you would find
me neurotically pushing a carpet sweeper keeping them floors clean. That experience has left my eyes irreversibly trained to notice crumbs on the floor. Crumbs on the floor will be the first thing I
notice when I enter a restaurant, a house, your house. Let’s not even talk about restrooms.
People generate a lot of crumbs, children especially. Being masterfully crumby, children wreak havoc
in restaurants and create a lot of extra work for the person serving them. I cannot tell you how disappointed the wait
staff got when they saw a family come in with a small child who needed a high
chair. Children drop food, throw food, drool food. The mess gets overwhelming.
When my children were small I was vary thankful that we had a dog. A dog will clean the crumbs (and the kid). Dogs love cleaning up under the table. Every restaurant should have a crumb
dog. When a family with a small child comes
into the restaurant the crumb dog would see the situation more graciously. Instead of dreading the extra work of
cleaning up the mess, the crumb dog would eagerly wait for the smorgasbord of
bits that would soon be spread before it.
It wouldn’t even mind cleaning up the high chair. The high chairs are nasty. Food gets smashed
into every little crevice and they always seem to acquire the lingering odour
of a full diaper. A crumb dog will lick
it clean.
Looking at our passage today, this Canaanite woman compares herself
to a crumb dog eating the crumbs of the mercy, the grace, the loving kindness
of “Israel’s” God. Being a Canaanite she lived with the
religious stigma that she didn’t deserve the mercy, the loving kindness of Israel’s
God the way Israelites did. The
Canaanites were one of the peoples of the Land that the Israelites didn’t
completely annihilate when they returned from Egypt. As a result her people suffered much
stigmatization from the Israelites who conquered them.
There is something special about this Canaanite woman. She appears to know something about Jesus
that only the Twelve Disciples and Satan and the demons know. She knows that somehow Jesus is the Living
God of Israel in the flesh. She calls
him “Lord”. The only person Jews call
“Lord” is their God. She makes her
request of Jesus in the way one would ask God.
She continually cries out to him, “Have mercy on me, Lord.” She kneels before him and begs, “Lord, help
me.” God shows mercy. God helps us.
Mercy is a word we Western Christians tend to be a bit
short-sighted in our definition of having spent some time in the exile of
Medieval Roman Catholicism. To us mercy
largely means acquittal. God doesn’t get
us with the penalty that our sins deserve.
That’s majoring on a legal courtroom understanding of mercy that is
actually quite minor in the Bible.
The request for mercy is what one makes in the royal court. It is a request for a king’s or queen’s
favour towards you shown in acting on your behalf. The Greek word for mercy is more or less the
same word they used for olive oil. Olive
oil was a main staple of life for ancient Mediterranean peoples. It was also a healing balm. Such is the love of God. In Hebrew the word for mercy means undeserved,
unconditional loving-kindness. In asking
for mercy this Canaanite woman is asking King Jesus to show her the healing
balm of loving-kindness that the Lord God of Israel promises to his people.
In her request “Lord, help me” the word she uses for help isn’t the
word you use to ask somebody to come help you in the kitchen. It’s the word you use to get a doctor to come
running to help you in a gravely serious situation. It’s the word typically used in desperate
prayers for God to come and help.
Her request was a gravely serious one. Her daughter was possessed by a demon which
was something only the Living God of Israel, something only Jesus could do
anything about. She has faith, faith
unlike anything Jesus had been able to find in Israel not even among his
disciples. Remember, they are not in
Israel anymore and it is this “Canaanite woman” (said with an air of indignation
both because she’s a Canaanite and because she’s a woman) that has faith.
Among the Israelites the people who considered themselves to be the
most faithful, the Pharisees, were like the crumb police in a restaurant – like
me. They were only concerned with
religious rules and regulations, morality, ritual cleanliness – petty
things. They felt entitled to the loving
kindness of their God and believed that anyone not ethnically like them to be
unworthy of it. They believed that “petty
things” could separate a person from the loving kindness of God, from his
coming to help them. To the Pharisees,
to be faithful was to be faithful in the petty things of outward appearances. Jesus called that hypocrisy.
This Canaanite woman’s faith/faithfulness was her desperate, humble
desire to have God heal her daughter of demonic torment. A desperate and humble
desire for God to help her daughter because he is loving-kind is what faith/faithfulness looks like. Add too this,
that she realized that the God she was petitioning was somehow embodied in
Jesus, something the Pharisees never saw.
Jesus’ response to her is troubling at first. He’s silent, waiting to see how the disciples
are going to react to this “Canaanite woman”.
Just days before, Jesus had fed the 5,000, walked on water, and calmed a
mighty wind that was battering their boat with waves. On that day they worshipped him and confessed
him to be the Son of God. So, knowing
who he is and having been with him for so many healings we have to ask whether
they will clue in and understand that his loving kindness could be for this
“Canaanite woman” too, this non-Israelite.
How did they respond? Indignance! “Send her away. She’s a bother to us.” Their faith is still too little to grasp the
full scope of the “loving-kind” nature of Jesus, the Son of God.
Sometimes the best way to get people to see that their beliefs and
prejudices are wrong is to mimic them.
So, Jesus says to the women, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of
Israel.” In great desperation, she falls
to her knees and begs, “Lord, help me!” But then, Jesus' response to this cry for help is just plain cold-hearted. “It is immoral to take bread from children
and give it to the dogs.” He’s implying she is a Canaanite “dog” and it would be immoral for him to help her.
I would think that at this point his disciples would be saying to
themselves, “This humiliating act of racist religious exclusivism is completely
out of character for the Jesus we know to be the Son of God. It is not what we are about.”
The early church had to overcome a lot of racial prejudice and
religious exclusivity to be the Body of Christ into which God had called the
Gentile peoples. They had to welcome
Samaritans, Canaanites, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Scythians, barbarians, and so
forth into the fellowship of the Body of Christ because that’s what God in
Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit was doing. It may have seemed to them that God was
changing his stance on a few things.
For example, roughly 1,300 years prior to Jesus' encounter with this Canaanite woman the Israelites
were invading the Land of Canaan. God had told the Israelites to annihilate the Canaanites because they were idolatrous
and he didn’t want their ways to be practiced by the Israelites. Through Moses God gave them laws that included such
things as men who dress like women and women who dress like men should be
stoned to death. I suspect that’s how
the idolatrous Canaanites dressed and acted when they worshipped their
idols. Among the people of God in Jesus’
day, the Pharisees, the religious crumb police, the law-abiders who judged what
was moral, good, virtuous, and beautiful in God’s eye would have had nothing
but disdain for this “Canaanite woman” particularly that she thought that
Israel’s loving-kind Living God would have anything to do with her. They likely would have said that her daughter
was demon-possessed because she simply deserved it for what she was. But Jesus the Son of the Living God of
loving-kindness who helps us healed the daughter on account of the faith
exhibited by her mother, a “Canaanite Woman”.
This is a lesson for us.
There are a lot of people outside the church that we look down our noses
in disdain at. We think “those people”
immoral. We quote scriptures about how
God is going to get “those people”. But
among “those people” are some desperate people of great faith, who cry to our
God for mercy, for help, but they can’t come to church to find it. Why?
We the disciples of Jesus are too preoccupied with the crumbs! Amen.
