Sunday, August 20, 2017 | 8:00, 9:30, and 11:00 a.m.

Fully Human and Fully God

Shannon J. Kershner
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 133
Isaiah 56:1, 6–8
Matthew 15:21–28

In a broken and fearful world
the Spirit gives us courage
to pray without ceasing,
to witness among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior,
to unmask idolatries in church and culture,
to hear the voices of peoples long silenced,
and to work with others for justice, freedom, and peace.

A Brief Statement of Faith
Presbyterian Church USA

Friends, I know that I’ve been committed to preaching our way through Genesis this summer and today’s sermon was to be the last one in that Genesis series. However—it is a big however—after seeing the hate that paraded through Charlottesville last weekend and hearing numerous reports of the violence that emerged and reading many reflections of clergy colleagues who were actually there; after being immersed in all of that, plus after the terror attacks in Barcelona and in Finland, well, I decided I needed some Jesus. And I figured if I needed some Jesus, perhaps a few of you did too.

Therefore I turned to the Gospel lesson assigned by the lectionary for this morning, this text from Matthew 15. But after reading through it, I thought to myself, maybe sticking with Genesis would not be so bad after all, because this Jesus in Matthew 15 is not exactly the Jesus I am looking for today. Dr. Jacqui Lewis, the senior pastor of Middle Collegiate Church in Manhattan, feels the same way about this particular text. She has claimed that if she had been Jesus’ public relations expert, this encounter with the Canaanite woman would have never been written down.

To use her words, Jesus does not look good here (Jacqui Lewis, OnScripture.com,reflection for 20 August 2017). He had just finished telling the Pharisees and the scribes that what defiles a person is less about what they put into their mouths and more about what comes out of their mouths. But then what does he do when this Canaanite woman arrives and begs for him to heal her daughter? First, he ignores her and does not even acknowledge she exists. But then, when she refuses to go away, he employs a metaphor that is, at best, insulting and, at worst, racially charged: “Gentile dog.” As Dr. Lewis stated so matter-of-factly, Jesus does not look good here. He does not act the way we always expect Jesus to act. So what on earth is going on?

In order to gain some insight, let’s widen our frame a bit to notice that in this story, Jesus is on the border in every possible way. The most obvious instance is that Jesus is literally on the border, since he and his disciples had walked into the region of Tyre and Sidon. Now to most of Matthew’s original readers, that was the equivalent of saying that Jesus had walked right into pagan-land, or if you were my late Southern Baptist grandfather, it was like they had walked right into the Presbyterian church.

By going into Tyre and Sidon, Jesus and the disciples were now outside of any recognizably religious area to them. And it is easy to imagine the disciples were quite nervous about being there since they were in the minority, outside their literal and figurative spaces of familiarity. And yet that is where Jesus took them, right into that space of discomfort, where they all felt like clear outsiders. I’ve always wondered if Jesus was just trying to get away—trying to go somewhere for just a minute where he might be anonymous for a while. But the disciples probably wondered if Jesus was purposefully looking for trouble.

Regardless of his motivation, trouble was exactly what Jesus got. All of the sudden, this Canaanite woman shows up. Now, “Canaanite” is an important identifier, because that signals to us that for Jesus and those disciples, she was part of a “those people” group. For Jesus and the disciples, she was an “other,” one unlike them, a member of an ethnic group with whom they had had conflict since the time of Noah.

Even though their histories had intertwined since after the Exodus, on the whole the Jewish people and the Canaanite people did not spend time together. They did not hang out together. They did not live in the same neighborhoods or go to the same places of worship or share meals around a kitchen table. At this point in their history, the Jewish people and the Canaanite people shared little in common but a mutual dislike, a mutual hostility about the other group. Yet there she stood, screaming and pleading for Jesus’ help.

But as I mentioned earlier, her cries were met only by Jesus’ stony silence. He did not respond to her at all. As much as his reaction troubles me, as much as his reaction would make a modern-day PR person sweat, the truth is that Jesus was acting the only way he knew to act. Remember, Jesus was on the border that day: the border not only of pagan countryside, but also the border of what his own faith and culture said was appropriate behavior. He was responding to that woman the way he had been taught to respond: with silence.

Incredibly enough, the woman did not let Jesus’ unresponsiveness stop her. She had expected it. In addition to that, though, she had also prepared for it. I make that claim, because when we listen carefully to her words, we realize she had figured out more about who Jesus was than even the disciples had figured out by that point. Do you remember her first words? “Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David.”

Her recognition of Jesus ought to give us pause. For in Matthew’s Gospel, other than the voices of demons, this foreign woman, this “other,” this one of “those people,” is the first one to truly recognize Jesus for who he was. How did this woman know who Jesus was? Perhaps as he sat there silently Jesus asked himself the same thing. Why was she so sure that he was called to be her Lord, her daughter’s Lord, too?

As those questions rattled around in his mind, Jesus tried again to ignore her, even when she knelt at his feet in an act of worship. Yet when it became clear that she believed that her life mattered to God, that her daughter’s life mattered to God; indeed, when it became clear that this “other” person truly believed that all Canaanite lives mattered to God just as much as Jewish lives did and therefore she was not about to allow Jesus to ignore her; when her tenacity to hold tightly onto her own self worth and the worth of all her people became clear to Jesus, he finally responded, guided again by orthodoxy though, guided again by what he had been so carefully taught.

Jesus told her that he could not take the food of his ministry and throw it to dogs like her. Frankly, at that point I would have gotten up and walked out. But this woman was the mother of a very sick child. She would do whatever she had to do to make him hear her—or, rather, to help him hear the one speaking through her. So she met his verbal challenge and reframed it. “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs get the crumbs,” she responded. “Yes, Lord, you are sent to Israel, but we Gentiles also need you.”

Although the text does not explain it, something in Jesus was triggered by her words. Through this uncomfortable, even confrontational encounter with someone who, up until that point in this Gospel, Jesus only knew as “other,” as someone with whom he did not share food or time or worship or friendship—through that particular encounter, Jesus heard the voice of the one he called Abba, Father. He heard God’s voice shouting at him through the voice of the Canaanite woman. From what happens next, it seems that the voice Jesus heard challenged him. It challenged him to check his own bias, his unintentional prejudice against this Canaanite woman.

“My Lord,” she pleaded, “help me.” And because of her resistance to being ignored, her persistence in claiming Jesus as her Lord too, Jesus’ heart and his mind changed. He acknowledged her personhood: “Woman,” he responded. Then he affirmed the holy truth he began to recognize: that his ministry was to extend to even more people than he had ever imagined before. “Great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” Because of this encounter between Jesus and the one he previously only saw as “other,” he grew even more faithful in his ability to be God-with-Us. He grew even more dedicated to live as radical love made flesh. Through the Canaanite woman’s resistant and persistent voice, God brought Jesus into an even fuller knowledge of what being Savior of the world was to mean.

Now, let’s stop for a moment and ask ourselves if that interpretation makes any of us nervous. Does the proclamation that even Jesus wrestled with the implicit biases of his own world and his own time—that even Jesus struggled with his own learned prejudices about people who seemed to be different than he was—does that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up? If so, you are not alone. Theologians throughout the ages have fought that conclusion, doing all kinds of interpretative gymnastics to save Jesus from showing us his full humanity.

But friends, I claim that is exactly what this is: this is a story that shines a light on Jesus’ full humanity. I know Jesus’ full humanity is something with which we are usually uncomfortable. We tend to focus more on the “Fully God” part of Jesus than we do on the “Fully Human” part. But I’ve been wondering if we do that because then we are let off the hook a bit from trying to honestly imitate Jesus’ way of life. “What would Jesus do is an interesting question,” we could claim, “but whatever he would do, we can’t do it. After all, he was God, and we aren’t.”

When we think of Jesus primarily as the Holy just pretending to be one of us rather than the Holy actually becoming one of us, then we don’t have to alter our human behavior as much. We don’t have to wrestle with why “Canaanite Lives Matter” has to be said out loud and in public. We don’t have to take an honest inventory of those with whom we spend most of our time, our meals, our worship, our energy, and our genuine friendship. When we focus more on Jesus’ divinity rather than his humanity, then it becomes more acceptable for us to keep ignoring whomever we call “other,” discounting her personhood and pretending not to see his struggle.

Yet this particular story in Matthew 15 just about makes it impossible for us to gloss over Jesus’ humanity, for in this encounter with his “other,” Jesus’ humanity is front and center as he struggles in a very human way with his growing comprehension of his God-given mission and ministry. Through her voice, through this encounter, Jesus felt himself being prodded, reshaped, and brought by God into a new and deeper understanding of his call as Savior/Brother/ Lord. Through her voice of resistance and persistence, Jesus heard the voice of the one he called Abba, Father.

Then the Jesus we really need showed up and, by showing up, showed us how one is to respond, how we are to respond to experiences of new learning from one previously only known to us as “other.” He responded with even larger and more mature, more inclusive, more wide-ranging faith than before. “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.”

Another thing this scripture can reveal for us is that it took this kind of close, uncomfortable encounter with the one he thought of as “other” to really change Jesus’ heart and mind. Turning again to Dr. Lewis, this encounter helped Jesus understand even more deeply that until the lives of the least of the people matter, no life actually does. He listened to her, and God used her to help him grow. That truth, my friends, means we are not let off the hook, because if our Savior can learn more about God’s radical love and inclusion of the world; if he can come face-to-face with his own bias and learned prejudice and refuse to stay stuck in them; if he can push hard against the existing boundaries of his own day and time, then so can we. But not only can we, we must. Again, Dr. Lewis: “We who follow Jesus in the Way have to seek ways to racially and culturally diversify our communities and our lives, so we know the ‘other’ and can be changed by the ‘other’” like Jesus was, whoever that “other” is in your life.

This call is why we at Fourth Church helped to organize and host an interfaith vigil this past Thursday in response to the violence of Charlottesville and in our nation. This call is why we at Fourth Church are sponsoring our second anti-racism training for anyone who wants to come. This call is why we at Fourth Church have a group of folks working on issues of honest hospitality for all people. This call is why you at Fourth Church will keep hearing your preachers speak out against the insidious evil of white supremacy, trying to not run from our own complicity in it and for the way it shows up even in the structures of church—all the while hoping that the Jesus we need will not tire of us and will keep showing up as we keep trying to follow in his steps, allowing ourselves and our church to be changed.

But let me say it plain: we do these things and more not because of some desire to be politically correct or because we are following a partisan script or because we are driven by our own personal political perspectives. No, we do these things because as Christians, disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called, invited, prodded into following his way, his truth, and his life. And if Jesus, our brother and Savior, can have a change of mind, a change of heart, a change of life because of his willingness to hear God’s voice through the voice of someone he had previously assumed had nothing in common with him, then who are we to act any differently? As Maya Angelou said, “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” That’s what Jesus did. Let us follow his lead. Amen.