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Our Gospel reading this morning is a very odd sort of story, isn't it? Here we have Jesus telling his disciples that what goes into your mouth doesn't matter, it's what comes out of it – what you say, even, perhaps, what you think – that matters. And then he goes and says something that everybody, certainly today and, I suspect, throughout a great deal of history, finds incredibly offensive.
Well, the first bit is easy enough to
understand. Jews and Muslims both have very strict dietary rules,
and believe that breaking them makes you unclean, and unfit to be in
God's presence. And they also have strict rules about washing
yourself before worship, being clean on the outside before, one
hopes, being made clean within.
But Jesus was able to see, as his
followers couldn't, that what you eat doesn't actually matter. Many
of the rules – about not eating pig, or shellfish, for instance –
made sense in an era where there was no way of refrigerating food.
Eating them might give you a tummy-upset, but it wouldn't be the end
of the world if you did. What goes into your mouth, says Jesus,
eventually passes through and comes out the other end, but what comes
out – well, that just shows what kind of a person you are!
And then a few days later – we don't
know the exact date, that wasn't the kind of thing that the first
gospel-writers thought important – a few days later he's off in a
non-Jewish region, and he is so incredibly rude to the woman who
comes begging for healing. What is going on?
Of course, the traditional explanation
is that he was testing her. Well, that may or may not be the case, I
don’t know, but it’s what people often say because it’s what
they think Jesus is like.
The difficulty is, of course, that we
can't hear the tone of voice he was speaking in. Did he snap at her,
which is a bit what it sounds like? He had ignored her for some time
until the disciples asked him to deal with her or send her away. Was
he trying to be funny? I wonder how you “hear” him in your head
when you read this passage, or one of its parallels.
I tend to hear him as being thoughtful,
trying to work it out. You see, in the time and place when he was
brought up, he would have learnt to assume that the Jews were God's
chosen people, and nobody else mattered. Some things, it would
appear, given the situation in Gaza today, never change. But the
point is, Jesus didn't know any better, which I think today's
Israelis ought to.
It might sound strange to say “Jesus
didn't know”, because after all, He is God, he is omnipotent and so
on. But we believe – or at least we say we do – that He is also
fully human. Unlike the various gods and goddesses of Greek myth, he
wasn't born already adult, springing fully formed from his father's
forehead, or something. He was born as a baby.
Think about it a minute. A baby. Just
like (if there's a baby in the congregation, point to it) or my
younger grandson. My younger grandson is eleven months old, and just
learning to crawl and to pull himself up to standing. And, of
course, he has to learn what he may and may not play with, and what
is and is not appropriate for him to put in his mouth – although he
is beginning to outgrow that habit. And I bet Jesus had to do the
same. He will have chewed on Mum's wooden spoon when his teeth were
coming through, and when he was of the age to put everything in his
mouth – and later, he will have discovered that it makes a lovely
noise when you bang it on the table, and have to learn that not
everybody enjoys that noise!
And so on. He had to learn. We are
told he grew in learning and wisdom. Remember the time when he was a
teenager and got so engrossed in studying the Scriptures that he
stayed behind in the Temple when everybody else had packed up and
gone home – and then, when his parents were understandably cross,
he said “Oh, you don't understand!” Typical teenager – and, of
course, Jesus was learning the whole time about the Scriptures, about
who God is, and, arguably, maybe a tiny bit about who He was.
And here, perhaps, he is learning
again. We can't rely on the Gospel-writers' timelines, they tend to
put episodes down when it suits their narrative. And here is Jesus,
perhaps having slipped away for a few days' break into Tyre and
Sidon, where he was less likely to be disturbed than in Galilee. And
then this woman comes and will not go away.
We don't know anything about her, other
than that she was a foreigner – Mark says she was Syro-Phoenician,
Matthew, here, calls her a Canaanite. Either way, she was basically
Not Jewish. An outsider.
You know, the Bible is full of stories
about outsiders coming to know and trust Jesus! Just off the top of
my head you have the centurion whose servant was healed, the other
centurion who Peter went to after his dream to tell him it was okay
to do so, and the Ethiopian treasury official. Oh, and Onesimus,
Philemon's slave. Philemon himself, come to that, but I think by the
time the letter was written, it was becoming more widely accepted
that non-Jews could be Christians, as well as Jews.
But at the time, these people were
outsiders. No good Jew would have anything to do with them. And
Jesus ignores the woman, until his disciples ask him to get rid of
her. And even then, he doesn't heal her daughter. Instead, “It's
not right to take the children's meat and give it to the dogs!”
But I wonder. Do you remember the
wedding at Cana, which we are told is his first recorded miracle?
And his mother came to him and said “Disaster! They've run out of
wine!” His first reaction was basically, “So what? What's that
got to do with me?” but then he went and got the servants to fill
those huge amphorae and the water turned into wine. He changed his
mind. His first reaction was not to do anything, but if there is one
thing he appears to have learnt, it is to listen to the promptings
of the Spirit.
And in this case, too. The woman,
consciously or not, said exactly the right thing: “But even the
puppies are allowed the crumbs that fall from the children's table!”
And to Jesus, that was God's answer.
Yes, he could and should heal this woman's daughter. So he did.
With the comment that right then, her faith was probably greater than
his!
You know, the first time I heard this
sort of interpretation of this story, my immediate reaction was “No
way!” Jesus couldn't be like that – he couldn't have got things
wrong! You may be thinking the exact same thing, and I really
wouldn't blame you!
But, you know, it wouldn't go away.
Like a sore place in one’s mouth, or something, I kept on thinking
about it and thinking about it. Why was this so totally alien
to my mental image of Jesus?
Then I realised that, of course, it was
because I was confusing “being perfect” with “never being
wrong”. There’s a difference between being mistaken and
sinning! And, as I said, Jesus had to be born as a human baby,
to learn, to grow. And he may well have learnt, consciously or
unconsciously, that as a Jew, he was one of the Chosen, and thus
superior to everybody else. But he had already learnt, as we found
in the first part of our reading, that keeping the Jewish Law wasn't
what made you clean or unclean – so perhaps it wasn't such a huge
leap to discover that being Jewish or not didn't actually matter.
God still loved and cared for you, whoever you were.
And in the end, I found this thought
very liberating. It made Jesus far more human.
I realised that, while I had always paid lip-service to the belief
that Jesus is both fully human and fully divine, in fact, I’d never
really believed in his humanity! For me, he had always been a
plaster saint, absolutely perfect, never making a mistake, never even
being tempted. I realised I’d envisaged him overcoming those
temptations the gospel-writers talk about with a wave of his hand,
not really tempted at all. But, of course, it wasn’t like
that! St Paul tells us that he was tempted “in every way that
we are”, and if that doesn’t include really, really, really
wanting to do it, then it wasn’t temptation!
But if Jesus could be mistaken, if he
sometimes had to change his mind, if being perfect didn’t
necessarily mean never being wrong, then that changed everything!
Suddenly, Jesus became more human, more real than ever before.
The Incarnation wasn’t just something to pay lip-service to, it was
real. Jesus really had been a human being, with human
frailties, just like you and me. He had had to learn, and to
grow, and to change. Suddenly, it was okay not to get
everything right first time; it was okay not to be very good at some
things; it was okay to make mistakes.
And, what’s more, it meant that the
Jesus who had died on the cross for me wasn’t some remote, distant
figure whom I could aim at but never emulate, but almost an ordinary
person, someone I might have liked had I known him in the flesh,
someone I could identify with.
As I have frequently said, these
Sundays in Ordinary Time are when what we think we believe comes up
against what we really believe. Do we really believe that Jesus, as
well as being divine, was also human? Do we think of him as having
had to learn, to grow, to change. Do we think of him as having made
mistakes, having to change his mind, having to – to repent, if you
like, since that basically means changing one's mind because one
realises one is wrong?
And if that is so, if Jesus is not some
remote plaster saint, but a human being just like us – how does
that change things? How does that change our relationship with Him?
And how does it change things when we make a mistake?
