“And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered her not a word…”
In the life and teaching of our Lord there were moments when something enormous occurred and it was acknowledged, but then it took years and even centuries for the force of the event or teaching to be realized in the life of the Church. Take, for example, the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. It was the year 325 when the 1st Ecumenical Council of Nicaea established that the utterance we have translated as “the Word” in the phrase “the Word became flesh” meant that the One identified as “Word” was not merely god-like, or even divine in some sense, but that the “Word” was fully and completely God the Creator. Today we made a collective journey back to that council when we recited the Nicene Creed as part of our Eucharist affirmation, making Christian Orthodoxy binding upon us. Furthermore it was not till 451 when the 4th Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon established that the utterance “became flesh” meant our Lord’s humanity was just as real and just as complete as his divinity. That means that there was a period of 300-400 years between our Lord’s resurrection and the Church’s settled and precise statement that Jesus was one person who was truly God and truly man.
Now let me tell you what I don’t mean. I do not mean that the truth of the Incarnation was up in the air for 400 years. The first Christians, including the Apostles and prophets, were orthodox; but over time challenges to orthodoxy required intellectual precision in the formation of doctrine. The Nicene Creed claims to affirm nothing new, but only that which has always and in all places been believed by all Christians to be the truth. Once it dawned upon the Bishops that a significant number of teachers were deviating from orthodoxy they had to explain what Christians had for the most part taken for granted for centuries but without making precise truth statements. And I am speaking here only of the intellectual horizon of the Church. It took even longer for the Church to understand, affirm and then act in accord with what she believes about the Person of Christ. Understanding, affirming and especially taking responsibility for acting in accord with orthodoxy involves her moral horizon. For example, there was the wide spread opinion for centuries that women were the source of uncleanness and sin. Why? Because the Church grew up in cultures, especially Jewish, Greek and Roman cultures that frequently viewed and treated women as non-persons. It is remarkable that the orthodox theologians and Churchmen we call the Church Fathers, both east and west, as well as Christian laity, who would and frequently did die for the truth of the Incarnation, habitually held to the most degrading opinions concerning women – without which no Incarnation would have been possible. A major reason for that inconsistency is that their intellectual and ethical horizons owed so much to opinions that came not from Jesus, but from the Rabbis, from Athens and from Rome.
The Te Deum, written around 387 and credited to St. Ambrose rejoices in the truth of the Incarnation:
“When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man: thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.”
The point is that even though Ambrose affirmed in hymnody, in the most vivid manner, the truth of the Incarnation, he still held beliefs about women that were not congruent with his theology. Of course, not only our attitude toward women, but also our attitudes toward the human body and in fact all creation is being reshaped and renewed by the Incarnation. It took a long time for the truth of the Incarnation to begin to push incongruent beliefs and practices out of the personal and shared horizons of Christians and it still does. But the good news is that the pushing continues.
Let me offer one more example. Mark 7 presents another account of the Gospel that we have today from Matthew and like Matthew it is set in the context of our Lord’s mission to Gentiles. Therefore the question of what is clean and what is unclean with regard to the Law of Moses is dealt with deliberately. An event occurs: A delegation from Jerusalem approached Jesus over what had become a major irritant for the Pharisees:
“Why do your disciples transgress the traditions of the elders?
For they do not wash their hands when they eat.”
This was not a disagreement over etiquette; it had to do with the worship of God. Every meal is a meal of thanksgiving; an act of worship, and the Pharisees taught that to forsake ritual purification was tantamount to disrespecting God. Jesus spoke directly to the delegation and swept their concerns aside with his judgment that “you all are hypocrites.” Though this account is found both in Matthew and Mark, it is Mark’s Gospel that records that Jesus went on to unload a bombshell:
“Not that which goes into the mouth defiles a man; but that
which cometh out of the mouth defiles a man.”
What makes that a bombshell? Mark interprets this saying of Jesus for us in verse 19 – this is the bombshell:
“Thus he declared all foods clean!”
See? You thought that happened at the Jerusalem Conference recorded in the Acts, but it was way before then. Mark, who was Peter’s amanuensis, drew the radical and correct conclusion that Jesus did away with the Law in Leviticus 11-15 regarding unclean foods. Peter, like Paul, understood that, from then on, no food is unclean. And yet it took close to two centuries for the Church to understand this and to work it out practically – but here it is, plain as day, in the first written Gospel.
What is my point in all this? My point is that even though we have the Word of God, the Church of God must interpret its meaning and she must make her life congruent with the Word and that work takes time, sometimes quite a lot of time. Time to understand the truth and time to fit our lives to the truth.
“And, behold, a woman of Canaan came out of the same coasts, and cried unto him, saying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered her not a word…”
As disturbing as this scene is, it gets worse before it gets better. Imagine that: Jesus “answered her not a word.” And when it became clear to everyone that she was not about to go away the King of Love spoke:
“It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and throw it to dogs.”
For sometime now I have told you that one of my chief aims as your priest is to encourage your personal belief and confidence in the Catholic Faith, and that means to deepen your trust in the Bible. I want you to discover the wholeness, the connectedness, as well as the sometimes embarrassing and strange nature of the New Testament narratives. I said then that I want us to get over the picture of Jesus as the tamed teacher of wisdom living one day at a time cheerfully accepting everyone just as they are and having a real knack of bringing the best out of one and all. That is simply absurd and if there is any passage that reveals that romantic picture of Jesus to be a complete fraud this is the one to do it. And for that I am grateful. But I’m afraid I will have to admit right now that I do not have much to say that will lessen the harshness of his initial words and behavior toward this woman.
To understand what is going on here and to find some application to our common life, if any exist, we need to attend to the context and that context is the one I have already mentioned, the event when Jesus argued with the delegation from Jerusalem and ended the matter by “declaring all foods clean” and then Jesus traveled to Gentile territory for some rest and private teaching time with his chosen band.
She was a Gentile. “Heal my daughter, please!” she pleaded. Jesus snubbed her. But she would not give up. She was desperate and she believed with all her heart that Jesus could and would heal her daughter – she would not take “no” for an answer.
Jesus’ disciples wanted him to heal her daughter to get rid of her. Jesus answers his disciples:
“I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
The woman then fell on her knees and worshipped him:“
“Lord, help me.”
Jesus responds:
“It is not right to take the children’s bread, and throw it to dogs.”
Then the woman, on her knees, said:
“True, Lord. But even the dogs eat of the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Jesus concludes the event by addressing the woman directly:
“O Woman!”
Now this is important and his use of this phrase, “O Woman,” is noteworthy simply as it stands because it is the word he used to address his Mother, title of respect. It is the word he used to address her at the Wedding Feast at Cana and it is the word he used to address her as he died on the cross.
“O Woman! Great is your faith! Your daughter is made whole!”
I am absolutely convinced that this happened just the way it is described in Mark and Matthew. And as I pointed out last year, there are some who say that the story was made up by the early Church to justify the Gentile mission. But I say that if the Church were going to make up stories, she could have done a better job. For starters, remove that detail about Jesus calling a Gentile woman a dog. You don’t need a degree in public relations to know that calling someone a dog is not going to win their hearts. No one made this up. We have entered into an authentic apostolic memory of life with Jesus – odd, weird, and disturbing as it is. This is the genuine article!
This still does not soften what Jesus said. Here is what we know from the text: Jesus did not address the woman directly till the end. Earlier, he directly addressed the delegation from Jerusalem: “You are all hypocrites!” He did not address this woman in that manner. He did not say, “You are a dog.” He is certainly stating (to his disciples?) that there are two categories in Israel’s horizon: the children (Israel) and dogs (Gentiles). The statement to the Pharisees is unmistakably personalized. The statement to the woman is abstract, generalized. Why?
Jesus is in Gentile territory. Can you recall any occasion when a crowd of Gentiles came to Jesus seeking to worship him? No? There is one occasion in the New Testament. All the other crowds, in the wilderness, pouring out of the little villages of Galilee, filling the highway to Jerusalem – all those crowds are Jews. All but one at the very end. After his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, only hours before his arrest and passion St. John records this:
“Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. They came to Philip: “Sir, we would to see Jesus.” Philip told Jesus. And Jesus answered, “Now the hour has come for the Son of man to be glorified…”
He did not receive the Greeks. He was crucified instead. What is my point? Timing has a lot to do with this. Had Gentiles come to him earlier, in Gentile territory, like Tyre and had he received Gentiles as a group, his identity as Israel’s Messiah would be in doubt. His first duty was to keep God’s covenantal promise to the Israel.
Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, said that when he was rejected by Israel and nailed to the cross, he would draw the whole world to himself. At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the resurrected Lord of Life commissioned his Church to go into the whole world and make disciples. Gentiles were given a share in the children’ bread, but it is even better than that. We are into the Children of Abraham whose break is mentioned in the Gospel. It is much better than that; much better because the unthinkable has occurred – we are now the Children of God, the siblings of Jesus Christ our Savior.