The
gospel for next Sunday[1]
has Jesus in Jerusalem confronting the pharisees and scribes. They had seen Jesus’s disciples eating
without washing their hands first. We
think of hand washing before food as sensible, among Jews however it was a
religious requirement, and the scribes and pharisees were shocked. This legalistic piety seemed always to irritate
Jesus. You hypocrites! Isaiah was
right when he said: “This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts
are far from me… teaching human precepts as doctrines”. And he proceeds to explain that what defiles
a person is not eating non-kosher food or failing to wash your hands, but what
comes from the heart, the words and actions that reveal the inner person. Jesus was angry – blind guides of the
blind, he called the religious leaders.
Then,
says Matthew, he left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and
Sidon. Well, that’s quite a walk[2],
north into foreign territory… as though Jesus needed to distance himself from
Judaism and its scribes and pharisees.
Today the district of Tyre and Sidon is coastal Lebanon. Back then it was part of Philistia. It was inhabited by Canaanites, Philistines, Phoenicians…
Palestinians. And, says Matthew, a
Canaanite woman came and started shouting.
She was desperate for her daughter, tormented by a demon. Jesus’s first reaction is to ignore the woman. She pesters them, the disciples
urge Jesus to send her away. Jesus seems
to agree – I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The modern way of saying that would be, “Not
my territory… not my problem”. It sounds
to me as though he is still feeling conflicted.
On the one hand he has this foreign woman looking for his help – on the
other hand his own people are being led elsewhere by blind guides. Lost sheep, he calls the Jews of Jerusalem. The woman persists. Jesus then says, cruelly, I can’t take the
children’s food and throw it to the dogs.
But she replies, Even the dogs can have the crumbs that fall from the
master’s table.
Here
is Jesus himself being shown the way forward, God’s way, by a woman… foreign and
pagan, sunk in superstition, who knows nothing but her love of her sick
daughter. Back in Jerusalem they are
bothered about ritual ablutions – Matthew has Jesus saying in another place[3],
The pharisees do all their deeds to be seen by others; for they make their
phylacteries broad and their fringes long…
Blind guides, he says yet again, you strain out gnats but
swallow camels. But now Jesus is remembering
the wideness of mercy… that love and truth may be found, as it were in foreign
lands, beyond the safe walls of the church… even as far away from righteousness
as the district of Tyre and Sidon… Missionaries
of another era liked to say, patronisingly, that they were in partibus
infidelium – in the lands of the infidels, the unbelievers, the land of
unknowing. But those who were paying
attention there learned wisdom they didn’t learn in church. And when you think about it, that is more or
less where we are in stillness and silence, living in a time and culture
of unbelief and confusion… waiting for God without requirements or
preconditions, but open to be taught.
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