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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 those 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. A small child in a high chair can be an absolute nightmare if all you see are the crumbs. Little kids drop food, throw food, drool food everywhere. The mess is overwhelming.
When my children were small, I was very 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 them and be overjoyed as opposed to the overwhelming sense of futility that your waitperson will feel. 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…and 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 that 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. You see, 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, Canaanite people suffered much stigmatization from the Israelites who conquered them.
Well, 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 here in Matthew’s Gospel. She knows that somehow Jesus is the Living God of Israel in the flesh. How do we know this? She calls him “Lord”. The only person a Jew would ever call “Lord” was the God of Israel. She also makes her request of Jesus in the way one would ask God for help. She continually cries out to him, “Have mercy on me, Lord.” She kneels before him and begs, “Lord, help me.” God shows us mercy. God helps us. Unlike the other gods that you have to strike a bargain with.
As far as what she was asking for, mercy is a word we Western Christians tend to be a bit short-sighted in our theological definition of it. To us mercy largely means acquittal in which 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.
Her request for mercy was what one made in the royal court to a monarch. It was a request for a king’s or queen’s favour towards you demonstrated 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 Mediterraneans. 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 was asking King Jesus to show her the healing balm of loving-kindness that the Lord God of Israel promises to his people by healing her demon-possessed daughter.
She also makes the 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 very desperate prayers for God to come and help.
So, the Canaanite woman’s request was a gravely serious one. Her daughter was possessed by a demon which was something only the Living God of Israel could do anything about, something she believed Jesus could do something about. Jesus says she has faith, great faith. This Canaanite woman has great faith. She’s the only person in Matthew’s Gospel that Jesus says this about. He never says this about any Israelite – his disciples or the religious authorities. 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.
Comparing her to the Israelites, among them the people who considered themselves to be the most faithful were the Pharisees who 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 wasn’t worthy 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 for God to heal her daughter of demonic torment, a desperate and humble desire for God to help her daughter because she believes God is loving-kind. That is what faith/faithfulness looks like. Add to this, she realized that the God she was petitioning was somehow embodied in Jesus, something the Pharisees never saw.
Jesus’ response to her was, at first, only troubling, then it got worse. At first, he’s silent. He says nothing. He seems to be, maybe, waiting to see how the disciples are going to react to this “Canaanite woman”. Just days before, Jesus had fed the 5,000. Then, that evening he walked on water and calmed a mighty wind that was battering their boat with waves. After that, 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. But, how did they respond? Indignance! “Send her away. She’s a bother to us.” Their faith was still too little, to crumby, to grasp the full scope of the “loving-kind” nature of Jesus, Son of God; that it wasn’t just limited to them.
Jesus’ response to her then appears to get worse and we need to talk about that. You know, sometimes the best way to get people to see that their beliefs and prejudices are wrong is to mimic them, behave like they are behaving. You folks probably remember that show from the ‘70’s called All in the Family and how it’s main character Archie Bunker was bigoted against women, racist, homophobic, and anti-everybody who didn’t share his political views. I think he used every derogatory term for any person who wasn’t a white, straight man with the exception of using the “N-word”. The writers of the show ingeniously used humour to get us Americans (I’m one of them) to look at Archie Bunker and say “Wait a minute. He’s me. I’ve a problem.”
So, I think Jesus here, though obviously not using humour, is mimicking his disciples prejudice against Canaanites and women and this is why his response to this Canaanite woman seems so uncharacteristic of him. He 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!” Jesus’ response to this cry for help is just plain cold-hearted. He says, “It is immoral to take bread from children and give it to the dogs.” Immoral!? Seriously, who’s calling who a dog here? He’s saying that because she is a Canaanite “dog” and it would be immoral for him to help her. Ouch! I would hope that at this point his disciples would be saying to themselves, “This humiliating act of racist, misogynist religious exclusivism is completely out of character for the Jesus we know to be the Son of God who shows mercy and heals. The way he is acting is not what we are about. Jesus, you made your point. We don’t want to be religious bigots. We want to be like you, like the loving-kind, Living God of Israel who created us all.
To give you some history, the early church had to overcome a lot of racial prejudice and religious exclusivity to be the Body of Christ into which God was calling 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. God was welcoming these once excluded people into the fold and so the people of God just had to get on board or lose their “saltiness” so to speak.
Moreover, it may have seemed to the early Christians that God was changing his stance on a few things. For example, roughly 1,300 years prior to this encounter, back when the Israelites invaded the Land of Canaan after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt, God told the Israelites to annihilate the Canaanites because they were idolatrous and perverted and he didn’t want their ways to be practiced by the Israelites. Moses gave them laws that included such things as men who dress like women and women who dress like men should be stoned to death. That seems really strange to us, but I suspect that’s how the Canaanites dressed and acted when they worshipped their idols.
In Jesus’ day, among the people of God were the Pharisees, the religious crumb police, the law-abiders who judged what was moral, good, virtuous, and beautiful in God’s eye. They 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 shows mercy and helps us, healed the daughter on account of the faith exhibited by her mother, the “Canaanite Woman”.
This is a lesson for us. There are a lot of people outside (and inside) the church that we look down our noses in disdain at. We think “those people” immoral and that if we have anything to do with them it would be immoral. We quote scriptures about how God is going to get “those people”. But among “those people” are some desperate people in whom God has planted “great faith”, people who cry to our God for help just like we do, but they can’t come to church to find that help and loving kindness. Why? We the disciples of Jesus are too preoccupied with crumbs to see the loving-kindness that God himself has been showing these hurting people before our very eyes! We see the speck in our neighbour’s eye, but fail to see the log in our own. Amen.
