The Other

The Other
Matthew 15:10-28

Christian Community Presbyterian Church, Bowie, Maryland
16 August 2020


Let’s be blunt from the outset. Today’s gospel reading offends hearers. The first part offended the Pharisees. While the Pharisees seethe, we cheer because Jesus puts them – the bad guys – in their place by his actions or words. Then we get shocked at Jesus’ attitude and language toward the Canaanite woman and the Pharisees say, “Aha!” as nice Jesus gets dressed down by the Canaanite woman and is taught a lesson about inclusiveness and love.
    In a passage in Romans 11, which I will use later as the call to congregational confession, Paul goes after his own people for their obstinacy and disobedience. He says that God has benched them while the second team – the Gentiles – get their chance to play God’s game of gracious life.
    In the same vein, Isaiah, years before either Jesus or Paul, in the words we used as this morning’s call to worship, says that maintaining justice and doing right will expedite the arrival of God’s salvation and the revealing of God’s deliverance. Foreigners, aliens, and Gentiles will be drawn to Jerusalem, which will be called “a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:6-8).

Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman at first suggests a closed immigration policy for God’s kingdom. Paul says that his own people have forfeited their birthright to God’s special grace and that the very people they despised – “them” – will walk away with the prize of God’s love. Unfortunately Paul’s words have been used to fuel Christian-espoused anti-Semitism. Yet Isaiah says that God will gather people and then gather some more. That sounds like Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet: “[The king] said to his slaves, ‘The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet’” (Matthew 22:8-9). God’s love will not be thwarted.
    Matthew carefully crafted his narrative to bring the gospel to his readers by placing of these two stories back to back. The first story is about people who are socially accepted and who push aside grace and mercy, emphasize external differences, and miss matters of the heart. In the second story a woman who is socially unacceptable – someone who is an “Other” –  breaks through external differences to claim God’s mercy. In the first situation Jesus has all the right words to teach his hearers about God’s grace, but in the second, it is the woman who has the right words which appear to alter the way Jesus responds to her need.

Preachers dither about how Jesus responds to the woman. Is Jesus being insensitive or demeaning towards her? On other occasions he is quite gracious to men and women who are not Jewish. He recognizes the dignity of the Samaritan woman at the well, the faith of a Roman military officer, and the thankfulness of the Gentile leper who returns after his healing. But in this scene he comes across as petty and abusive.
    Another possibility is that Jesus is staying on task. When he sent the disciples out earlier he told them not to go to the Gentiles. He reaffirms that task as he initially rebuffs the woman’s persistent request, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” This story is not the start of a missionary campaign to the Gentiles, but it is a story about a Gentile woman taking the initiative to encounter Jesus, much like the woman with the hemorrhage who seeks to touch his coattails in order to be healed. If Jesus isn’t being snotty with the woman, then he comes off as inept or wrong, something which is also contrary to our usual picture of Jesus.
    A third possibility is that Jesus is allowing the woman to play him in order to get the point across that God’s grace and love knows no boundaries. Jesus is the consummate teacher. He is always in teaching mode. These two incidents, the reaction to the behavior of the Pharisees and the request of the Gentile woman, are in that mold.
    “Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?” The sewer carries away all the things that we put into our bodies that may not be very good for them. Or in the case of the meticulously observant Jews of Jesus’s day, any foods that are thought to be ritually unclean. Or, heaven forbid, failing to wash their hands before eating. You and I know what happens that when we eat things that disagree with us. Just forward our mail to the necessary room. In time everything gets flushed and we get back to being normal.
    Unfortunately the stuff that comes out of our mouths and our lives has a very different result. Our careless, spiteful, hate-filled words, our lies, and our abusive behavior towards other human beings are harmful and cannot be flushed away.
    A popular children’s worship moment about this story has the leader emptying a tube of toothpaste on a plate and asking the children if they can get the paste back in the tube. An even messier demonstration is to rip open a feather pillow in a breeze and have them try to get all the feathers back. It’s not going to happen.
    It is easy to get caught up with the behavior that Jesus speaks about. Listen to the words of his disciples: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” In other words, she isn’t worth the aggravation.

The woman represents the “Other,” someone who is different from us in a way that irrationally we find disagreeable. The social barrier between the Jews of Jesus’ day and anyone who was not a Jew is no different from the cliques that existed in high school, or the single negative vote that deprives someone admission to an exclusive organization, or the ostracism of a worker in an office or factory, or the red-lining of neighborhoods, or countless other ways in which a majority imposes itself on a minority.
    We all have an “Other” – someone to whom we would only give the crumbs of life (and think of ourselves as being generous). Who are the “Others”? Here are some options; pick your “Other”:
     •    The elderly
     •    The rich
     •    The disabled
     •    Know-it-alls
     •    Teens
     •    Democrats
     •    The unemployed
     •    Republicans
     •    Braggarts
     •    People who speak English poorly or not at all
     •    Wearers of fleece pajama bottoms in public
     •    People who are svelte or obese
     •    Immigrants
     •    People with long hair
     •    Losers
     •    Snobs
I could go on for the rest of the worship hour naming categories of “otherness” and I know that I would get nods of agreement, including from myself. The “Other” is anyone who is not us or who does not fit into our picture of who we are. Psychologists tell us that the criteria we use to define “Others” are often things in ourselves that conflict with the self-identity we present to the world. We project onto an “Other” something that we find disagreeable in ourselves.

Jesus uses the encounter with the Gentile woman as a teachable moment. He does so not by lecturing but by giving us an example of learning, a laboratory experience of growing in faith. His encounters with the religious establishment frequently ended with the spiritual know-it-alls reprimanding Jesus for attempting to tell them about God. As Jesus encounters the Gentile woman seeking mercy and healing for her daughter, Jesus models the grace of learning, the grace of experiencing that God’s will is always bigger than we want to allow it to be.
    The woman shouted, “Have mercy on me.” In our English “mercy” is a noun. But in Matthew’s Greek “mercy” is a verb, the same verb that describes the mercy that the merciful receive in the Beatitudes. She seeks to benefit from the breadth of God’s presence. Added to that, when she pleads, “Help me,” she echoes Peter’s plea when he was sinking in his attempt to walk on water. Both the woman and Peter want to experience the reality of God’s presence in Jesus’ actions.
    The woman violates all the social boundaries of those days – ethnicity, gender, heritage, religion. In the grand scheme of Matthew’s approach to telling the good news of Jesus Christ, the woman believes that she and her daughter are people who should benefit from the in-breaking of God’s kingdom in and through the personal presence – the Incarnation – of Jesus. So she is willing to ignore social protocol. Miss Manners be damned. In doing so, she dramatically reveals the depth of her faith. She is very much like the Roman military officer who saw faith in terms of chain of command.
    The woman believes that she and her daughter should receive mercy from the active engagement of God with creation. This is what Jesus calls faith. Jesus elicits this faith from her in the same way that a well-trained teacher enables a student to think out the problem-solving steps and arrive at the solution. Jesus models good faith formation practice as he encourages the woman to speak her faith. Matthew’s Jesus is big enough not to appear to be ashamed to learn.

Learning is a struggle. And it gets harder all the time. We are sometimes hampered by declining eyesight, hearing, or dexterity. Sometimes the thought processes don’t react as fast as they once did. And sometimes, like some of the Pharisees that Jesus encountered, we don’t want to have opinions challenged by facts or by new information. Yet Jesus models for us the reality that we must always be ready to enlarge our vision of God’s activity. Any time we think that God can’t or won’t do something, we set ourselves up for a rude awakening. Any time we think that someone is an “Other” who does not belong in God’s realm, we deny the image of God in that person, obscure the image of God in us, and try to overrule God who made room for us in the realm of eternal life.
    That’s an aspect to “Otherness” that we don’t think about. We are used to being the centers of our worlds. We are used to having agency, being the star actors in our personal dramas. Yet we are the “Other” for someone else. Our very being ticks off the boxes of “Otherness” and makes us a “them” for someone else. In their eyes we fit into a category I named earlier. We are an offense to them, we are an object of scorn and exclusion.
    According to the righteousness of God, we are an “Other.” Paul told the Roman believers, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” But Paul doesn’t leave it there. He continues, “They are now justified by [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Romans 3:23-24). God does not begrudge us crumbs of grace. God in Christ was “reconciling the world to [God’s self]” (2 Corinthians 5:19). We are invited to the kingdom banquet. Who would have expected that?
    In the matter of faith, it takes all of our spiritual capacity as a community of believers to consider the breadth and depth of God’s activity. More than likely, God’s activity won’t be in mundane and everyday goings-on. It will be in the oddball, off-the-wall activity of people – the “Others” – who are at the margins of life, who live beyond the pale of what so many of us think as acceptable. This is because God is always trying to teach us that God’s grace knows no bounds. God’s graciousness is wholly God’s business, not ours.
    Jesus invites us to have a faith big enough to be constantly learning beyond the edges of our faith. There are no “Others” in God’s realm. Only “All of us.”