Changed by Compassion

 Matthew 15:21-28    

August 20, 2023

The Crumby Dog
Ally Barrett

 

There’s a comedy sketch or a cartoon

or something that I remember

it’s in a restaurant and a man is having a heart attack

and another diner yells to the waitress, “Call a doctor!"

and she says, “Sorry, that’s not my table.”

 

Now, it’s just a joke, but jokes always have a bit of truth

to them and the truth brings up anger in me. 

Someone was in need and the waitress wouldn’t put aside

her work protocol to help him.

We get that way when a bureaucracy of company

or a government office stands in the way of helping people.

I don’t think I’m alone in this.

 

Businesses and institutions and people should put their

protocol and traditions aside to help someone, right?

That waitress should just help that man,

it’s kind of inexcusable that she wouldn’t.

We wouldn’t like a person who did that.

 

In the same way, I have to say that I don’t

really like Jesus at the beginning of this story.

I have a hard time with the way he acts.

Jesus is in the Gentile area of the country, Tyre and Sidon,

the non-Jewish area and a woman,

who Matthew points out as a Canaanite, someone who isn’t Jewish.

A woman comes up to him because her daughter is in trouble

and she begs Jesus to help her.

But he says that the food he has is for the children,

meaning the people of Israel.

He says it’s not fair to feed her before all the children are fed.

He even kind of calls her a dog in the process.

  

Faced with this person in need,

Jesus tries to turn her away because of protocol or bureaucracy.

Now that is against everything else that I’ve understood about Jesus.

 

Some people want to save Jesus here

and say that he was teasing her so she could show her faith.

Or that he was using her to teach his disciples a lesson.

But I don’t know if any of those reasons make

me feel much better than my first impression

and I think that it’s reading more into the story than what’s there.

And what’s there is that at first, Jesus tells this woman

that he can’t help her. That’s not my table.

 

I think people try and make up noble reasons for Jesus behavior

because people are uncomfortable with Jesus

having any negative attitude or emotion.

We don’t ever want Jesus to be dismissive as

he was here with this woman.

 

But I think what people are most uncomfortable with is that

Jesus could change his mind on something.

We feel like Jesus is supposed to know everything all at once.

He’s supposed to never let what he

sees or hears change his mind about anything.

 

We don’t want Jesus to be changed.

We want Jesus to have all the right answers all at once.

We want him to be all knowing right at the beginning.

Jesus doesn’t learn, he IS.

 

We say that Jesus is fully human,

but we don’t want him to be too human.

We don’t want the reality of the world have

an effect on Jesus ideology or his theology

or what he believes God wants him to do.

We don’t want him to be changed by things like

compassion or sadness, or pleas of a desperate mother.

We don’t want Jesus’ heart to change Jesus mind.

Now Martin Luther didn’t see Jesus like that.

Here’s what he had to say about this gospel story

in a sermon he gave in 1534:

“What a superb and wonderful object lesson this is,

therefore, to teach us what a mighty, powerful,

all-availing thing faith is.

Faith takes Christ captive in his word,

when he’s angriest, and makes out of his cruel words

 a comforting inversion, as we see here….

she catches Christ with his own words,

and he is happy to be caught.”

Martin Luther was comfortable with Jesus changing

his mind and his heart.

 

Regardless of what you think he is doing here,

Jesus ­is reflecting what was believed for thousands of years of history

and scripture and tradition by the Jewish people.

That Yahweh was the God of the Israelites.

God’s covenant was for the Israelites.

The Gentile nations might be blessed through the Israelites

But the promise was for the Israelites.

The messiah was sent for them, and consequently,

and the messiah’s Salvation was meant for the Jewish people.

 

Scholars try to remind us over and over that

the way of Jesus, Christianity, started as a movement inside Judaism.

Jesus was a Jewish man, he talked about Jewish customs,

his disciples were Jewish, most all of the early followers were Jewish.

           

And Matthew’s community, the community this story for

was a Jewish community that followed Jesus.

The way Jesus acted at the beginning of this story

was probably normal for the writer of the story.

The way Jesus acted, was probably a reflection of the

thoughts of most of the people who would have been

following Jesus at that time.

  

But when Gentile people heard about Jesus Way,

As the Holy Spirit got a hold of them

they wanted to be a part of the promise too,

they wanted to worship, to be preachers and teachers and leaders,

they wanted to be a full part of the community.

 

This was a struggle that shows up in a lot of Paul’s letters.

This struggle of who is in and who is not was

probably the main topic of conversation in the first 50 or so

years of Christianity. It just took a while for the people

to catch up to the Holy Spirit and to God’s plan.

 

So when the early church heard Jesus say to the woman,

“It isn’t fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”

Most of them probably weren’t shocked by it.

They would have heard it before.

And a few of them probably would have said, “yes. I agree with that.”

 “The promise was not meant for the gentiles.”

 

And the woman in the story understands the tradition too.

She doesn’t argue with its fairness or justice

but she appeals to Jesus compassion:

“Jesus, wasn’t it you who fed 5000 people (plus women and children)

with two barley loaves and five fish?

Wasn’t it the God of Israel who fed everyone

indiscriminately without regard for who they were?

Jesus, didn’t you teach your disciples that God was abundant?

Didn’t you tell them that there was enough for everyone?

Don’t the dogs under the table at least get the crumbs?”

 

And if I didn’t like Jesus in the beginning of the story,

Jesus impresses me three times as much in the second part.

 

Jesus does something that is so amazing and so humbling and

I have to admit is so hard for me to do at times:

Jesus changes his position. He goes in a different direction.

He lets his compassion change his ideology, his theology,

He lets his heart change his mind.

Through the persistence of that one gentile woman,

In one act of openness and welcome and love

- Jesus heals this woman’s daughter of the demons AND,

- Jesus  opens the promises and covenants of Yahweh

to the, Gentiles, to the rest of the world,

to most of us who wouldn’t have received it before.

- And in the process, he changes thousands of years of scripture and tradition.

That can’t have gone over gently in every early 

Jewish/ Christian community. But thank God it happened.

 

In this week’s gospel, and throughout the scriptures, really

we see Jesus bending and breaking and changing laws, 

or the traditional interpretation of laws for the sake of compassion.

Jesus eats with sinners, touches lepers,

talks to women, heals on the sabbath.

All laws of his religion, all deeply held beliefs in his time.

Some accused Jesus of ignoring the law or disposing of it,

but Jesus doesn’t dispose of the laws, he actually makes another law.

A law that more accurately reflects the nature of the God of Israel.

A law that is possibly harder to keep than all the rest.

And that is: when laws and rules and tradition and scripture

conflict with the love of neighbor, the love of neighbor wins.

 

Meaning that, as Christians,

we can’t hide behind a rules or laws or doctrine or tradition

in order to ignore our neighbor.

That’s what it means when we say we should follow

the spirit of the law and not just the letter of the law.

We can’t be like that waitress and claim “that’s not our table”.     

Jesus expects that as his followers, we won’t embed

ourselves in our tradition, or even in scripture so far that we can’t

be moved by the plight of another person.

 

As Christians the dilemma comes when we ask ourselves

when the rules need to be changed,

and when should they stay the same?

 

-This was an issue during Paul’s time when some

people believed that circumcision

needed to be a requirement for being Christian.

-This was an issue in the US during the 1800's when most people

of faith in the South AND THE NORTH believed that the bible

condoned and supported slavery.

- This was an issue in the 1970's when Lutherans

and other denominations were debating the ordination of women.

-And this is an issue in the Christian church now

when we talk about issues of sexuality and gender identity.

-And there will be another issue down the line, I’m sure.

 

These days, for some reason,

people see changing your mind is something bad.

In politics they’ve called it things like flip flopping or being wimpy.

For religious people some see it as

compromising our faith to the culture around us.

 

Coming to another conclusion is seen as an indicator of weakness.

Especially, for some reason, Christians seem to highly value

sticking to every tradition and everything

that we’ve ever been taught or believed is seen as

faithful, steadfast, true.

 

But Jesus has shown us another way.

Jesus showed us that compassion wins over tradition and rules.

Sometimes we end up realizing that

what our parents believed does not work for us now.

Or what we believe doesn’t work anymore,

or what our whole denomination or

church believed at one point needs to change.

Sometimes drastic change is the most faithful thing to do.

 

God is on the move.

God is revealing the scope and wideness

of God’s grace to us every day.

Bit by bit, as we are moved by our compassion,

and we turn it into practice.

Jesus showed us how to do this

as his compassion for one Canaanite woman

changed the whole course of his mission to the world.

And Jesus is still showing us how to do this today.

 

How wide is God’s mercy and compassion?

I am hoping that our minds and convictions

are always stressed and strained and

moved as we discover the answers to that.

I hope that we are always surprised and changed

by the vastness of God’s love.