Heart [Proper 15A]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Matthew 15:10-28

Heart

How dare Jesus talk to them like that? They were better than him. He was a nobody from nowhere. Sure, Jesus had a handful of followers and some popularity but pretty much anybody with some charisma can brainwash a few naïve peasants. To them, to the Pharisees, he was inferior. His father was a hillbilly carpenter – if that guy was even his dad. There were rumors that his mother was already knocked up when they got married – just another loose teenage girl with no morals. It's no surprise he shows his elders no respect. Just look at the kind of family he comes from.

And that group he calls his disciples. What a joke. They are a shabby bunch; they don't even observe basic purity laws. Can you imagine: they don't wash their hands before they eat. And their leader has the chutzpah to walk around like he is expert on Torah? His disciples don't even follow Torah. Torah, the Law handed down from God to Moses, from Moses to Israel, that was the Pharisees' thing. They were the pros from Jerusalem, from the big city; Jesus was the amateur from Nazareth – and you know what they say about that town, “Does anything good come from Nazareth?” It's a rhetorical question; the answer is no. So who does Jesus think he is? Who is he to challenge them? He should be chiseling their stones or building their tables.

To his credit, Jesus takes it all in stride. His disciples come bearing the upsetting news, probably hesitant to break it to him: The Pharisees were pretty offended by that last comment. But Jesus just brushes it off. For him the Law is about the heart. What one eats or what one does is not the end game. God is not about manners; God is about transformation – changing hearts and lives to change the world. Jesus knows it starts inside. He would rather his disciples eat with dirty hands than speak with dirty hearts. He said as much. The Pharisees didn't like it. But it wasn't the first time; won't be the last. He doesn't apologize: Torah was made for the people, not the people for Torah. Purity is not about hands; it's about heart and soul.

And that is why the second half of our Gospel lesson today is so intriguing. After Jesus offends the Pharisees and their delicate sensibilities, he heads straight into a territory just teeming with impurity – the gentile region of Tyre and Sidon. And there he is approached by a woman, a gentile woman, more specifically, a Canaanite woman. “Canaanite” as in enemies of the Hebrew people since the very beginning, since the book of Genesis. It was a hatred passed down through the generations. This woman, on her own, approaches Jesus, a Jewish man, a rabbi. How dare she?!

Sure, his disciples are a little careless when it comes to hand-washing rituals, but they are not about to let this slide. No Gentile woman, no Canaanite, is going to talk to their teacher – act as if she was worthy to grace his presence. That would be an embarrassment. She is an enemy, a woman, and from an impure place. She is, in their minds, of inferior stock. And so they beg Jesus to send her away. Far be it for them to risk impurity.

Just moments earlier Jesus and his disciples are accused of being in violation of purity code. But it's all good now because they've found someone even less pure. Jackpot.

The disciples words and actions are pretty straight forward here: they want this woman gone. It is much harder, I think, to interpret Jesus' words and actions in this story. I mean, he certainly doesn't look good – at least not at first glance. Remember she is there because her daughter needs healing; her plea is for mercy. And his reputation precedes him: he responds to cries for mercy; he heals those in need. Or does he? First, he ignores the woman – doesn't even bother to deny her plea. Then he tries a quick brush off line. Then, when she persists, begging Jesus to heal her daughter, a desperate woman in a desperate situation, he calls her a derogatory name, in that context, an ethnic slur. Not exactly the most flattering Jesus story.

Maybe Jesus struggled with the cultural biases and prejudices of his family and community, like we all do. It's possible. But given the context, it seems to me that it must be more complex than it seems to be on the surface. He just said to his disciples, just a few verses earlier, “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” It would surprise me if Jesus would then turn around and belittle a desperate woman with ethnic slurs. It would surprise me even more if the writer of the Gospel, who is a Jesus fan, would show Jesus immediately violating his own teaching. If Jesus really meant what he said, he might have just defiled himself.

Now, maybe I am letting Jesus off of the hook too easily; that is possible; but I think he is projecting the biases of his disciples and, by extension, the early Church. And by projecting those prejudices and ultimately subverting them, Jesus exposes the ugliness that lived in their hearts and proceeded from their mouths. The New Testament is surprisingly honest about the early divisions and discrimination with which the Church wrestled. The first leaders of the Jesus' movement were hesitant to let Gentiles, us, in at all. They thought they were looking for the lost sheep, not for the dirty dogs. It's just that Jesus kept pushing it.

Healing this Gentile's daughter would not be out of character for Jesus. Earlier in Matthew's Gospel Jesus performed a healing for a Gentile. He healed females – young and older. And so perhaps Jesus is simply verbalizing the thoughts of his own disciples' hearts – letting them experience their true impurity – not the hand stuff, the heart stuff. The story does end with Jesus healing the daughter and marveling at the woman's amazing faith. Transformed in the eyes of the Jesus' followers: she comes to Jesus as a Canaanite “dog”; she leaves as an enduring example of faith – an example for even the disciples.

In Graham Greene's excellent novel The Power and the Glory, he writes, “This [human race] was the race which had invented the proverb that cleanliness was next to godliness – cleanliness, not purity.” And of course we did. Cleaning is easy; purity is hard. It is much easier to apply a quick spit and polish than it is to allow God to purify our hearts of things like racism, and pride, and greed. We humans get caught up on things like hand-washing rituals because it is much easier to argue about some rules than it is to let God transform our hearts, much easier to spin complex justifications or throw out some red herrings than to truly examine those ungodly things that burrow their way deep down inside of us.

And so we find ourselves acting like the Pharisees or Jesus' disciples more often than we care to admit. We claim the moral high-ground as if it were a sniper's tower – trumpeting our superiority as if we, and “our kind”, were alone made in God's image. These dark whispers hide in the corners of our souls: “How dare he have dark skin in this neighborhood?” “How dare he fall in love with another man?” “How dare she bring her 'inferior' culture into this country?” And we, in this social media age, bombard the Internet with all our vitriolic opinions, flooding blogs and comment sections, condemning people we do not even know. They become merely pawns in our political and ideological games. Human beings boiled down to a single attribute, a single stereotype, a single talking-point – all to justify the precious hatreds to which we cling so stubbornly.

It is humanity at our worst. And it happens in the Church, unfortunately, as often as it does outside of the Church; it happens as much in our country as it does beyond our borders. It is a human problem. We are at our worst when we look at another person and refuse to see their humanity – their fragile, scared, complex humanity. We are at our worst when we refuse to see that we're all built of the same dust, all made in the image of the same God, all loved by an impossibly infinite love. The book of Revelation ends with people from every nation, every skin color, every language, a beautiful family surrounding the throne of God – a vision of the Heavenly Kingdom of which God dreams. But because of our prejudices, because of the sin in our hearts, too many people, too many Christians, refuse to see it, fail to dream God's dream, fail to catch God's vision.

And it is that lack of vision that begins to eat away at our hearts. The evil intentions of our hearts become the evil words that become the evil actions that become the evil words we use to justify our evil actions. Driving a vehicle into a crowd or hanging a child on a lynching tree: it never starts that big; those things start with a dehumanizing thought or word – a seed planted by a parent or a politician or a pundit or a pastor. An evil like white supremacy is not natural; it is planted and it is nurtured, deep in the fertile soil of the human heart. And once it is in, it is hard to get it out.

We are a world of people carrying around poisonous prejudices as if they were precious treasures – spewing hatred, and starting wars, and inflicting violence. Passing down our hatred like an evil inheritance to our children and our children's children. And I have to admit, I don't know about you, but sometimes I look at the brokenness and chaos in this world, I feel the weight of the despair, and hope starts feeling like a foolish fantasy, the coming Kingdom of God seems forever away. Some days it feels like these cycles of evil will just never end.

And I am reminded of my favorite line in The Power and the Glory: “It was for this world that Christ had died: the more evil you saw and heard about you, the greater the glory lay around the death; it was too easy to die for what was good or beautiful, for home or children or civilization--it needed a God to die for the half-hearted and the corrupt.”

And so Christ died – for a world of people desperate for mercy, desperate for love, half-hearted and corrupt – even for those spewing hatred, and starting wars, and inflicting violence. Christ died for this world – this broken world of broken people. Christ died for the Canaanite woman and for all the desperate outsiders begging to be heard, crying out for mercy. Christ died for the disciples: for those who wear their prejudiced hearts on their sleeves. Christ died for the Pharisees and for all the self-righteous religious people who are too selfish with God's love. And Christ died for us. To break the cycle. To plant a new seed in our hearts. So that love would grow and finally choke the evil out.