We anglicans are, on the whole, a well mannered lot. We know when to say ‘please’ and thank you’ and, mostly, we’re polite to people. For people of my generation and older, there has always been a particular expectation that women are well behaved – an ill-mannered woman is a particular disgrace. Men and boys could always get away with more. We are all bound by social expectations that dictate our behaviour and our manners.
In today’s gospel reading we encounter an extremely ill-mannered woman. Her manners were quite atrocious! She approached a man, Jesus, in the street and started talking to him: this simply was not done. Worse than this she was shouting out and making a spectacle of herself. Even now, 2000 years later, in a time when manners are much more relaxed, shouting in the street gets us ‘tut-tutting’, again, perhaps especially in the case of women. ‘
It gets worse – she throws herself in front of him, in the dust and dirt and implores Jesus to act. His response is surprising – we expect Jesus to respond out of love. Instead he dismissed the woman’s plea and tells her she’s the wrong race, the wrong religion, to receive his help. We know all about Samaritans being looked down upon by the Jews of Jesus’ time. Jesus even told a story about a Good Samaritan, which was designed to ruffle people’s feathers and get them thinking. In that story Jesus was trying to get across the idea that it’s what you do, not what you believe, that really counts.
The Good Samaritan, however, appears only in Luke’s Gospel. We don’t know where it would have fitted into the sequence of events had Matthew included it – but just maybe this woman enabled Jesus to tell the story of the story of the Good Samaritan as told by Luke: who knows.
Anyway, if Samaritans were looked down on and despised, Canaanites were worse. The Canaanites were not monotheists – they worshipped many Gods. They were one of the tribes which Israel was told it could destroy as it came to inhabit the Promised Land after 40 years in the wilderness. Jesus’ whole culture would have taught him to ignore a Canaanite woman – he should have nothing to do with her. And this is his starting point – a refusal. Notice he isn’t rude to the woman – rather, he talks about himself, his own understanding of what he is called to do – ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’. A polite way of saying ‘No – you’re not in my job description’.
We then get the bit about dogs eating crumbs under the table. We don’t really understand what it is about the woman saying this which changed his mind but maybe it is best simply to take it at face value – the woman is saying ‘OK, I’m nothing in your eyes, but please let me use the scraps left over when you’ve finished with those who are your main concern’. This rude woman understood that even a little of Jesus’ power would do the trick – her daughter would be healed. And Jesus was amazed at her perception – she saw him for who he was.
This is hard for us to grasp – we’re so used to the belief that Jesus was God in human skin and bones that we forget just how challenging this was for Jesus’ contemporaries. Imagine how it would have been for those first followers – as we considered last week in the story of Jesus walking on water which we worked on together last week – that dawning realisation that Jesus was much more than a good man or a prophet or a healer – he was God in human flesh. If this were now, what would you think? What would it take for you to realise that you were meeting God face to face if you had to decide for yourself rather than having a tradition to follow.
Jesus understood that this woman understood, despite the cultural gulf between them. What a woman – someone who thought for herself, made herself heard and changed Jesus’ self understanding – never mind us having revelations: here is Jesus having a revelation! And a very important one too – that he was here for all of humanity, not just for his own people. For us – the gentiles. For us!
It’s hard for us believe in Jesus changing his mind, isn’t it! Surely he knew everything? Surely he didn’t need to learn. Surely he had nothing to learn from us? Well, the gospel story suggests that he did have to learn, that, like all humans in whose life he shared, he grew in self-understanding and knowledge. I wonder if his horizons had been narrowed during his time of temptation in the wilderness when Satan showed him all the kingdoms of the earth that could be his? Maybe it was modesty that had limited Jesus’ journey and made his focus narrower than had been his Father’s intention. We don’t really know, but what we can know for certain is that the nature of this growth in self-understanding is very important for us humans in our own time: what Jesus learned was an openness to other races, cultures, religions – he found truth and faith in someone very different from himself. His horizons expanded and his mission came to encompass all the kingdoms of the earth.
When has humanity ever needed to learn this more than now – in 2017 – in a time when we are being destroyed by narrowness and intolerance? NOw is the time when all of humanity needs to listen to the voice of people other than themselves, from cultures and faith other than their own. Now is the time to learn to serve and love the other. Maybe now is also the time for us to be impolite and persistent as we beg for healing for ourselves and our children. Amen