Keeping the Riff Raff Out

 

Isaiah 56:1,6-8

Matthew 15:21-28

 

News bulletin:

 

            This month’s meeting of the Apathy Club has been canceled due to lack of interest. According to Club President Marv Smith, there was nothing on the agenda anyway.

            Reading from a press statement he’d forgotten to release three years ago, Smith said that this marks the 4^th consecutive year in which in the club succeeded in not meeting. Or perhaps the 5^th or 6^th or even 20^th year; no one has kept records.

            When asked how he became president of the Apathy Club, Smith said he didn’t know and didn’t care. In fact, he didn’t want the job and doubted he’d ever been elected in the first place, but he didn’t have the time or energy to challenge it.

            Club secretary Al Perkins said that Smith had found his true calling as head of the Apathy Club. According to Perkins, “When Smith was told about the club, he said it sounded to him like a complete and utter waste of time. Inspired by that speech, club members unanimously elected him president.”

            Smith scoffed at that claim, pointing out that the idea of an Apathy Club member being inspired is an oxymoron, and that the club members had never voted on anything in their lives.  

            One club member, who couldn’t be bothered to remember his own name, moved that Smith should be expelled from the club for going to the trouble of holding a press conference. That member was expelled himself for initiating an action, which was a violation of club bylaw 2.2.

            Smith stressed that if you would like more information about the Apathy Club, then it probably isn’t for you, and that anyone interested in joining the Apathy Club is automatically disqualified.

 

            That was, of course, a parody of the human tendency to separate ourselves from others. Yes, there are valid reasons to join with other like-minded folks in an organized way. But it is also true that people like to divide the world into members and nonmembers, insiders and outsiders, even when it serves no purpose. There is something attractive about secret handshakes, entrance requirements, and exclusivity, about organizing the world into those who are us, and those who are them. 

 

            I suspect this human trait has its roots in the early competition for survival. A person had to order the world so as to distinguish those things that are dangerous from those that are not. This includes people who are dangerous.

 

           

 

            If someone is stronger than you and poses a threat to your life or property, how do you protect yourself? By joining with others in the same boat. In doing so, you separate the them (the people who pose a threat to you) from the us (the people who have your back).

 

            This necessary primitive survival technique does not allow for much gray area. Those who pose a threat are the bad guys, those who have your back are the good guys.

 

            In our world, we continue to engage in tribal warfare, the “us against them,” but we do so now on so many levels and for so many reasons that it has grown ridiculous. In the realm of self-esteem, for example, insecurity about our worth leads to a great deal of us-them behavior. If I can establish a group A that is better than group B, and I am a member of group A, then I have proof that I am a worthy person, far better than all those in group B. The survival of my ego is therefore guaranteed.

 

            The problem with this whole system is that it can never lead to peace. By definition, us against them requires a state of conflict. Every time we create an us against them situation, there is loss and destruction, pain, bitterness and hatred. Those things are not part of God’s intention for the world. And so “us against them” runs counter to the will of God.  

 

            Skeptics may ask, what about all that “chosen people” business with the Israelites. The Old Testament appears to be full of us against them, with a ferocity that shocks us today.

 

            The reality was, however, that God’s relationship with Israel was never designed to create us against them situations. In Genesis, the Lord stresses to Israel that the reason they are blessed is not because God chooses sides in the world between us and them, but so that through the Hebrews, God can bless others as well.

            You may be surprised to learn that the Israelite tribes were never restricted to one race or group of people. One of the heroes of the Exodus, Caleb, was a foreigner who became an Israelite leader.

            And in today’s reading from Isaiah, foreigners are specifically welcomed to the holy mountain of the Lord. “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel.” Even when we create us against them, God erases the barriers.

 

            This truth is clearly depicted in the stunning story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman in Matthew. This is a passage that makes us very uncomfortable. Because if we look at it objectively, there is really no conclusion other than that the Canaanite woman comes off looking a lot better than Jesus does. She is the one who shows compassion and understanding. In comparison, Jesus appears uncaring and even downright mean.

 

            In this story, Jesus wanders outside of the Jewish homeland and into foreign territory. There he runs into a woman who begs for help. She is polite and respectful. She is totally unselfish; she asks something not for herself, but for her daughter, who is in desperate need.

 

            How does Jesus respond? He ignores her.

 

            The woman, however, will not go away. She creates such a scene that the disciples can hardly stand it, and still Jesus pretends that she doesn’t exist. Finally the disciples come to him and say, “That lady is driving us crazy. Do something. Talk to her. Make her go away.”

 

            It’s an uncaring response, which Jesus matches with an uncaring response of his own. “I was sent only to save the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he says. This woman is not his problem, and so he won’t have anything to do with her.

 

            The woman persists. She fights through the disciples, comes right up to Jesus, kneels at his feet, and begs, “Lord, help me.”

 

            This annoying woman has forced the issue so far that Jesus has to abandon his tactic of ignoring her. He looks at her and responds with a statement so cold and heartless, it’s hard to imagine he could have said it. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

 

            Ouch! Jesus not only rejects this hurting person, he humiliates her. One of the worst insults among the people of that culture was to call them a dog. Jesus just called the woman and her innocent, suffering daughter, dogs. We have to ask, what did this woman do to deserve that kind of treatment? How do we possibly justify or even explain Jesus’ boorish behavior?

 

            The best way I can make sense of this is to rely on the basic Christian doctrine that says Jesus was fully human as well as fully God. As a human, he was subject to many of the same limitations as all humans.

            He wasn’t born speaking in complete sentences; he had to learn how to speak. He wasn’t born knowing how to dress himself; he had to be taught. As an infant, he had no carpentry skills; he had to learn them.  

 

            In the same way, it makes sense that he wasn’t born knowing the truth about prejudice. At some point, he had to learn it. We have to entertain the possibility that this is a story where Jesus learned that lesson; where he was not the teacher, but the pupil.

 

            There are strong clues that this story is intentionally about prejudice. The woman is identified as a Canaanite. Which is interesting when you consider that there were no Canaanites in existence in the first century. Some of the people of that area were descendants of Canaanite tribes, but there had not been a Canaan for centuries. The whole area had been reorganized politically and ethnically. Why refer to her as a Canaanite?

 

            The Canaanites were the tribes that the Israelites drove out of the land that became known as Israel or Judea. The Israelites and Canaanites had been bitter enemies. A classic us against them situation. In terms of Jewish history, the Canaanites were the bad guys.

            In using the name here, the story highlights the ancient prejudices that still existed between the Jews and their neighbors. Centuries after the battle over Canaan, the people of the region of Tyre and Sidon and the people of Judea still did not get along. They had no use for each, no respect for each other.

 

            That was the climate Jesus grew up in. From the time he was a baby, he heard about how bad the Canaanites were. It was drilled into him that they were enemies of God’s people. How could he help but pick up that attitude taught to him by his elders, by virtually everyone he knew? 

 

            There is no reason to think Jesus was anything but serious when he said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Prior to this incident, in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus was totally focused on his mission to the Jews and only the Jews. In all his encounters with the Jewish people, he never gave anyone the cold shoulder the way he did in this story. He had compassion on all of them.

 

            Prejudice is basically ignorance, and Jesus was not born knowing everything. In his response to the Canaanite woman he acted in exactly the way any Jewish man at that time would have.

 

            But something happens in that exchange. The woman meets Jesus’ insulting comment, not with anger or bitterness or defeat, but with grace. She accepts the premise that she and her daughter are indeed dogs, unworthy of respect, and then trumps Jesus’ argument. “But even the dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table,” she argues.

 

            The woman’s love for her daughter was so great that she was willing to do anything for her. She would even seek help from an ancient foe who despises her. When she is rejected, instead of circling the wagons and making it us against them, and retaliating, she lays herself wide open to whatever Jesus wants to do to her. She will suffer any scorn, abuse without giving in return. All this poor woman wants to do is to save her daughter. To save the life of the one she brought into the world and loves with all her heart.

 

            Jesus saw that and recognized that he was looking at God’s reflection. This woman was what love was all about. In her own small way, she was doing exactly what he had come to do: to save the lives of those God brought in to the world and loves with all his heart.

 

            And in that moment, perhaps, he saw the truth: that whole “us against them” line that he had been taught since birth was a lie. They weren’t enemies. In fact, this Canaanite woman was not even a “them.” She was an us. Jesus commented that she was a better us than just about any us that he knew.

           

            Jesus read the scriptures often and it wouldn’t surprise me if he went back and read that passage from Isaiah with new eyes.

 

            I don’t know for sure that this was the turning point. But I do know that never again in Matthew does Jesus draw a line between us and them. From this point on in Jesus’ ministry, there are no more outsiders. They don’t exist.

 

            When asked what is the greatest commandment, he says, “Love God and your neighbor.” In his parable of judgment day, when he talks about the separation of the sheep and goats, he makes no distinction between Jews and gentiles. The only us vs them in that story is those between those who show compassion and those who don’t. And in his final command to his disciples, Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all nations.”  

 

            Many of us are all too familiar with autoimmune disease. Our immune systems are set up to distinguish that which is self from that which is foreign. It is constantly testing cells to see whether they belong to the body or whether they are outsiders, germs-- pathogens. When the immune system finds something that it does not identify as self; it kills it, and so protects us from disease.

 

            Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system fails to recognize the self. For example, it mistakes blood cells for germs, and it attacks and kills them.

 

            Autoimmune disease describes the human condition pretty well. We look at all kinds of people we identify as them, not us. We separate ourselves from them, we isolate them, we attack them. What we don’t ever seem to get is what Jesus learned so quickly from the Canaanite woman: in God’s creation there is no them.

            When we misidentify people and attack them, we are attacking the body of Christ, we are attacking the self.

 

            On one hand we can say that Jesus saw the truth about prejudice through the eyes of an outsider. On the other hand, in the kingdom of God there is no such thing as an outsider. The astounding revelation of Christianity is the truth that Jesus saw that day. The truth that the only people who are not part of the group that lives in the light of God are those who decline membership, who choose not to.

 

            Some day autoimmune disease will be cured. There will be no more mistaking the body for germs. Because no matter how hard we try to separate ourselves from others, to creature us against them, God will not allow it.  

            Thus says the Lord who gathers the outcasts, who draws all people to the holy mountain.