Sometimes I hear some of you tell me what it’s like when you’re hanging out with friends or neighbors or even family and you say something like, “I go to church,” or “I’m involved at Christ Church,” or even, simply, “I’m Christian.” What I hear is that pretty often, there’s a reaction from somebody – and usually a surprised or even negative one. “You go to church?”
It’s even worse for clergy. Most of my friends are not churchgoers, which is a good thing, but it does mean that once somebody finds out what I do, it’s not unusual for them to make a lot of assumptions about me that aren’t true. Ironically, some people end up showing the very intolerance and disdain they’d accuse a churchgoer of having.
It’s just sort of part of the job, and it’s ok. In fact, it’s actually kind of good – for any of us – because it means that choosing to love Jesus or to seek him or learn more about him is something that can never just be neutral in our lives. From time to time it will bring us up to an edge, a real moment in real life when two different understandings end up eye to eye. And in that sense, following Jesus can bring us to confrontation – not confrontation in an angry way but in a clarifying and changing way.
Confrontation is what the Gospel is about, and even the Isaiah reading, if you think about it. In fact, we’ve been hearing a lot about confrontation in Sunday readings lately. The confrontation of old assumptions, old lines of separating people out, old images of God. We had the fishes and loaves: “You think God only sent down manna back in ‘the day,’” Jesus says – in effect – “well, see what these fish and loaves tell you about God now.” Then we had walking on water: “The storm is frightening you?” Jesus says. “I can confront even these forces of nature and overcome them.” Two forces coming together.
And then – yet a more intense confrontation, and this one goes deeper. Because this time it’s someone confronting Jesus himself – and, in a sense, winning.
Till now, it’s been confrontations between Jesus and mostly his own people, admittedly with the specter of the Herod family hanging out there. But in Matthew, up till now, it’s been mainly Jesus confronting the religious authorities and assumptions of his own people.
But then he takes a little time away from home territory and heads out into the region of Tyre and Sidon, which is a whole different thing. Excuse a little biblical geography lesson, but it’s really essential to getting what this passage is about. These place names are biblical code, again – pointing to something more than just a map.
Tyre and Sidon were cities up on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, the Great Sea, in a non-Jewish region then called Phoenicia, under Syrian control. Jesus and his posse had been about 30 miles south of there in the Jewish area near the little inland Sea of Galilee. These were very different cultures.
And if you think, well, that can’t really make much difference – just flash for a second on Society Hill, here in Philly, and then parts of Northern Philly, and the way they are worlds apart in history and culture and living conditions, and that’ll give you a good reality check.
So while Jesus is there, a woman runs up shouting at him. A woman – from that region. In other words, she was from the “wrong” neighborhood, to start with. And in terms of religion, she would have been seen as sort of a pagan, maybe worshiping local deities but definitely nowhere in the spectrum of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to use biblical coinage. Way outside the fold.
So – wrong region and wrong religion. Two strikes.
And then – wrong gender. This is a woman, a foreign woman, who definitely is in no position to run up to and yell at – the passage says she’s shouting – a powerful Jewish male rabbi.
So, three strikes, really – wrong region, wrong religion, wrong gender.
Thus – a confrontation. An edge where we have two realities coming face to face.
And what’s interesting is what happens on that edge. Notice – she didn’t just run up and say, “Fix it,” which I’m certainly prone to doing. First she says, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” There aren’t many places someone gives Jesus a full title like that, and when we do, oddly enough, it’s usually an outsider who does it.
Look at the pieces. “Lord” – that’s already an acknowledgment of holy stature, then “Son of David” is reference to the Messiah who is to come from the lineage of David. This woman knows her stuff. And before she asks for help – on behalf of her child – she puts front-and-center who she believes Jesus is.
Which isn’t sucking up. I don’t think that would have worked. The whole situation is too urgent, and Jesus sees right through that kind of thing anyway. In that brief sentence, this woman creates a whole system of relationship, between Jesus and God, between Jesus and the Jewish people – and now, between Jesus and non-Jewish people.
That’s pretty daring for a woman to yell about. And she presses the point. She doesn’t back down, but takes Jesus’ response, which is really about household pets – the wording there suggests puppies – and goes further on his own terms. Her self-esteem takes a hit, but she doesn’t back down. In fact, she turns the tables on him: “Ok, Jesus, if I’m a dog, then even the dogs eat.”
In short, her behavior is shocking on all fronts, not just because of all the lines she’s crossing, but because it’s a real story. It’s not a teaching or a theoretical situation even a parable. This is embodiment; this is something somebody really went through. Remember, her daughter was tormented, whatever that meant – mental illness, epilepsy, something. This is the sweat and fear and risk and tenacity of someone who then went to some kind of hut to hold her child, to haul water, to find food. To pull her hair back off her face, and maybe to pick a scab off her foot. This is real.
And maybe that’s the power we can take away from it. Because it’s in real life that God’s bigger view gets worked out – through our irritation, our desperation, our insistence, our heartbreak. The edges of life where we find ourselves having to engage the question of who Jesus is – which, bumper stickers and billboards notwithstanding, is just never going to be easy if it’s real.
Because it means that we find ourselves both confronting the idea of who Jesus is – once he’s there, he doesn’t go away – and then having that idea be opened up wider. We both hold it and let it go, at the same time.
That’s what this story does. It captures who Jesus is – he’s Lord, Son of David, the great healer. And he’s all those things in a bigger way than people thought. This embodied, real-life story reminds us of what it feels like to be on the outside – and what it’s like to be on the inside and have an outsider wake us up to a bigger love of God.
In other words, this woman was essentially evangelism that came from the outside. There’s no one on a street corner here yelling at other people, which some of us erroneously think of as the only definition of evangelism. This is one of the passers-by yelling at the institution. “Let me in.”
Talk about confrontation. This makes us ask what evangelism even is, and maybe it’s not what we thought it was – we, who think of ourselves as “the Beacon,” and we are, in so many wonderful ways.
But how can we shine even brighter, how does that light really happen? What does this woman show us about how evangelism lies beyond the usual definitions? About how it can come into us from the outside and light us up? What does she tell us about how the message of God’s love is delivered, and where, exactly, the line is between “in” and “out”?
All I know is, somebody from the wrong side of the tracks, the wrong gender – and we can bring it home and add, the wrong skin color, the wrong accent, the wrong sexuality, the wrong musical taste – said, “Let God love me, too.”
If that’s not evangelism, I don’t know what is.