I was listening to a program on Minnesota Public Radio
called “Speaking of Faith.” On the program was a Jewish theologian who read a
passage from the Talmud, which is the central book of rabbinic teaching in the
Jewish faith. The passage was a familiar story we know well from the book of
Exodus. The Israelites are escaping from the Egyptians by crossing through the
Red Sea on dry land, the waters of the Red Sea towering on either side of them.
As the last of the Israelites reach the safety of the far banks of the Red Sea,
the Egyptians enter the Red Sea in hot pursuit. Just as in the story from
Exodus, once all of the Egyptian army had entered the Red Sea, God allows the
waters of the sea to roll back over the Egyptians, drowning them in the waters.
However, instead of the Israelites rejoicing in the destruction of the Egyptian
army, as we hear in Exodus, the story from the Talmud says that an angel,
having seen the watery destruction of the Egyptian army, turns and sees God
sobbing at the sight. The angel asks, “Why are you weeping? Your children, the
Israelites, are safe and their enemies are destroyed in Red Sea.” God replies
to the angel, “I weep, because the Egyptians are my children, too.”
So often as humans, we look at and define our world with
human eyes and group people as being either with us or against us, in other
words, “we or them,” “friends or foe.” If people agree with us or are like us,
we think of them as insiders and assign
them a place within our circle of “we”. Those who either disagree with us or
are different from us are outsiders and we place them in the circle of “them,”
or foreigners. As human beings we normally don’t much care for the “thems”
around us. We find within the gospel today, the human “we” and “them” into
which we group people. The “we” of the story are the Jewish apostles and
disciples who follow Jesus and the “them” of the story is the Canaanite woman,
a pagan, and a foreigner. She is following Jesus crying out, “Have pity on me,
Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.” The prejudice of the
apostles toward the foreign woman becomes very apparent when they tell Jesus to
get rid of that non-Jewish, foreign woman for being a pest. Jesus turns to the
woman and tells her that his mission is only to the lost sheep of the Jewish
faith, not to the non-Jews. But she persists, begging, “Lord, help me!” Jesus
tests her a little further by asking why he should help her, for it would be
like taking food from the mouths of children and feeding it to the dogs. She returns
that even dogs eat the scraps left over from the dinner table. Jesus amazed at
the faith of this non-Jewish, foreign woman, tells her that because of her
great faith, her daughter is cured and then he makes it so.
In our world of “we or them”, as we compare the gospel of
last week, when Jesus walked on the waters of the Sea of Galilee, to today’s gospel, who has the greater faith? Is
it Peter, whom Jesus personally knows and chose as an apostle, a fellow Jewish
believer, or is it this stranger, a woman from a foreign land, who is not even
Jewish and is unknown to Jesus? In spite of how well Peter knows Jesus and has
witnessed miraculous wonders performed by Jesus, Peter’s faith in Jesus falters
and he begins to sink into the sea. The Canaanite woman’s faith in Jesus never
falters but only grows stronger. Who has the greatest faith? Is it the apostles
in the boat of last week’s Gospel, who upon seeing Jesus cannot even recognize
him but cower in the boat thinking he is some kind of ghost or demon seeking to
destroy them, or the Canaanite woman of today’s gospel, to whom the very same
cowardly apostles deride and voice their contempt to Jesus? Who has the greater
faith? I think we all know the answer.
In today’s gospel, Jesus shatters the way we look at and
define our world. Through the eyes of Jesus, there are no groups of “we” or
“them”. There is no longer the word, “foreigner.” In the world which God
created all people are seen by God as God’s children. Early on, in ancient
times we hear God tell the Israelites that he is not exclusively their God, for
he is also the God of their enemies, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the
Jezubites, and the Moabites. God is the God of all peoples.
God only creates goodness. That which separates the human
family, the racism, the prejudice, the sectarianism which is perpetuated from
generation to generation, was created by humanity. It is we, as humans, who
have unleashed this demon upon ourselves. If we take the time to examine the
misery, the violence and the death in human history that this has caused,
including what is happening today in the Ukraine, in Syria, in Iraq, in other
places torn by war and in our own nation, we find that this creation of ours
has not served the human family well. It robs us of happiness and peace. It
robs us of our humanity. Humanity, like the Canaanite woman, falls on its knees
to Jesus and cries out, “Have pity on us, Lord, Son of David! Our children are
tormented by the demon we have created!”
All people of the world, as seen through the eyes of God,
are children of God. Therein lays the hope for all of us. From the moment of
creation, when God breathed life into the world, all people and all cultures
were bonded together as one, as children of God. In the prophecy of Isaiah, God
tells us that all people of all nations will travel together to the mountain of
God, feast together on the bounty from God’s table, learn from God and walk in
God’s light. The miracle that occurs in today’s gospel is not only about the
exorcism of a demon from the life of a little Canaanite child. It is the
exorcising of the demon of separation and fear that was endemic in the hearts
of the apostles and disciples. Their eyes were opened and later they would
travel throughout the world into every culture and nation proclaiming God’s
love for all people.
The power of healing, the power of reconciling a torn
humanity, did not end when Jesus ascended into heaven. He gave that power to
his disciples, to you and to me, to break down the barriers and the fear that
separate people, to become reconcilers of a broken humanity. He gave to you and
to me the power to see our world through his eyes. What we need is the faith of
the Canaanite woman to believe and to act on the power Jesus has given us. May our faith be such that we may hear from
the lips of Jesus, “Great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.”
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