September 9, 2018
23rd Sunday of Ordinary Time
“Familiarity breeds contempt.” So, goes the old saying. And contempt doesn’t always mean a kind of disdain. More often I think in my own life it means a lack of attentiveness-a failure to really notice things. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been walking with Nancy on our now very familiar Saturday path to the Farmers’ Market and I’ll look at a newish building and say “when did that go up?” only to have her respond “it’s only been there about 10 years now. ”
I am reminded of this as I read today’s Gospel because I can’t tell you how many times I have read or heard this Gospel and missed it. Maybe it was just because it so jarringly at odds with what I tend to think about who Jesus was. Then again, it could be that unlike Jesus, I live in a world filled with cute puppy videos.
A woman, non-Jewish, approaches Jesus and begs him to heal her daughter and Jesus, our hero, responds, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Even in our times-puppy videos notwithstanding-that’s pretty insulting. But in the time of Jesus, and still today in much of the Middle East, to call someone a dog is just about the most degrading term you can use. Mangy, flea-bitten, scavenging pests-like sewer rats but much bigger and less likeable-that’s how dogs are viewed in the time of Jesus.
With that in mind, I read this story again and I am stopped dead in my tracks. A woman kneeling at Jesus’ feet begging assistance for her child and he cuts her off with a racial and religious slur? Just sit with that image for a second or two.
And while we’re sitting with that image, let’s remind ourselves that as jarring as this scene might be for us, for most, if not all of his disciples it’s not jarring at all. What Jesus said may very well have been exactly what they were thinking. In these regions where Jews lived as minority among Phoenicians, Samaritans and Greeks, there was a lot of emphasis on maintaining purity-separateness. Just having this woman at the doorstep, we can be quite sure she was not allowed into the house, is a defilement.
So what happens next?
Well, persistent women are apparently NOT an invention of the 21st century.
A lot of the commentaries I looked at regarding this passage talk about the humility of the woman. (Interestingly, I think all of them were written by men.) The way I picture what happens next is that the woman looks up at Jesus, straight into his face, and says “even the dogs get the crumbs.” Effectively, she is saying, “you can call me what you want, but help my child.”
And, this brings me to a point that I want to spend a little time praying with in the coming weeks. A few years ago, when I was preparing a homily on this same text, I was pretty sure that this scene was all about Jesus finding a teachable moment. He mirrors the religious and racial bigotry of his own time and his own people. And then he pivots:
“For what you have said, your daughter has been healed.” Jesus holds up the faith and fierce persistence of this so-called unclean woman as an example for his disciples.
See, I told myself, Jesus wasn’t a religious bigot, he was just pretending to be, you know, to make a point. And then, as I was preparing this week for this homily I came across the Lectio Divina webpage of the Carmelites for this passage. And there it said this:
“Observing the reactions and the attitudes of the people, Jesus discovers the will of the Father in the events of life. The attitude of the woman opens a new horizon in the life of Jesus. Thanks to her, he discovers better the project of the Father.”
So, just maybe, Jesus wasn’t pretending. Maybe, as he hears the woman’s response, Jesus is ashamed of himself. And, as he travels in this region of all different kinds of people and many different religious practices and beliefs, Jesus is coming to the recognition that “God’s project” is bigger, more inclusive than he first imagined.
And, if that is the case for Jesus, maybe it needs to be the case for me as well.
I want to close with a little passage from Marcus Borg’s book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. He sums up his argument with these words:
“Thus we have what I would call a transformist understanding of the Christian life…It is a vision of the Christian life as a journey of transformation exemplified by the story of discipleship as well as by the exodus and exile stories. It leads from life under the lordship of culture to the life of companionship with God.
It is an image of the Christian life not primarily as believing or being good but as a relationship with God. That relationship does not leave us unchanged but transforms us into more and more compassionate beings, into the likeness of Christ.”