The other week, as Alli and I were caravanning out here, I listened straight through to all nine episodes of the WYNC Studios podcast “Dolly Parton’s America.” They powered me through our first day driving, all the way from Osage City, Kansas to Cookeville, Tennessee. It’s a brilliant podcast that explores Dolly Parton’s legacy as a beloved musician and cultural icon.
This week as I sat with the Canaanite woman in our Matthew text – my mind kept thinking about Dolly. Dolly is a figure who is almost universally respected but has also been lampooned, she’s been described as the “great equalizer” yet she is difficult to pin down on political issues. Who is she behind the thousands of songs written and the rhinestone outfits and wigs? Dolly, as a person and and a musician, raises fascinating questions about class, geography, justice and oppression.
The podcast’s opening episode analyzes Dolly’s earliest songwriting. Dolly reinvents the traditional Appalachian murder ballad – where a male voice sings lonesome and grisly songs about violence against a woman. Instead, Dolly upends how the story is told, singing from a woman’s point of view, she tells stories of the pain and violence faced by women and how they’ve creatively confronted it.
So often the sort of story we’re used to encountering in the Gospels is one where Jesus is the protagonist, the good guy making the point. Usually Jesus does some kind of symbolic action – he heals, he eats with people – a discussion ensues and it goes back and forth – until at the end – Jesus has a creative punch line. His conversation partner or the watching crowd grows silent, and we the reader, can’t deny the truth of what he has said and done.
Our gospel text is not that type of story.
It is more of a Dolly Parton, female-protagonizing, archetype-altering, back-and-forth duet song. It raises lots and lots of questions – about Jesus, about the woman, and about our own relationship to faith.
We glimpse here how faith can mean the tenacity to hold God accountable to be God.
Faith in this text sounds like a voice shouting in public, feels like knees dusty on the ground, and aches with relentless persistence demanding dignity and justice.
The woman in our text is described as by Matthew in two ways – as a Canaanite and as a mother, the mother of a demon-possessed daughter. To call this woman a Canaanite is strong language. Mark’s version of the story names her as a Syropheonician Greek, a Gentile. To call her a Canaanite is give her the label of Israel’s enemies who had inhabited the promised land.
There are no “Canaanites” in Jesus’ time and to call this woman a “Canaanite” is to anticipate the struggle that Jesus might face as a Jewish man engaging her. They meet in the district of Tyre and Sidon, placing Jesus at the far-edge of his ministry, on the on the northern edge of Israel. And where Mark puts their exchange inside a house, today’s text in Matthew ratchets up the public drama, placing the scene in open air.
At this point in his ministry Jesus is stretched thin by demands of others for wisdom and wonders. So hen the raw words of this woman land on his ears – “Have mercy have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon” his response, which is none at all, may reflect as much his own weariness as it does, bitterness, towards her.
Yet just earlier when great crowds swarmed him, he had compassion for them and cured their sick and blessed and broke bread for them and when his friend and disciple Peter was sinking in the white-capped waters of Galilee, crying, “Lord, save me!” Jesus reached out his hand.
But for this woman and her cry for mercy – Jesus offers no outstretched hand, no word of blessing.
All we hear is a silence we know all too well. It’s reaching out for help and receiving no response or being treated as a nuisance. It’s the fear that you were dismissed not for what you said or did but for who you are. It’s a prayer to God that seems to gets no answer.
But this woman’s faith is noisy. It cries in a hoarse voice with a public obnoxiousness we’d prefer to tune out and turn our eyes away from. Jesus’ disciples want her gone. “Send her away,” they say, “for she keeps shouting after us.”
Maybe they want her shooed off the porch like the neighbors’ mangy dog. Maybe they’re want Jesus to heal her daughter simply to get her to be quiet. Either way – she is not treated as an equal conversation partner or as human in need of compassion and wholeness.
After his own silence and his disciples’ dismissal, Jesus goes on to justify himself, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
The gospel of Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ Jewishness and his identity as Jewish Messiah. And we can sympathize with the importance of having a clear mission. Jesus is rooted in the land of Israel and his heart aches for the struggles of his people.
Yet Jesus finds himself again confronted by this non-Jewish woman. If Jesus wanted to avoid this moment in silence or turn away and head back down south to lands and people he knows better, this woman comes in boldness and kneels in truth before him, saying, “Lord, help me!”
She models a Psalm of lament. In her back and forth confrontational dialogue she asks for mercy and help. She names who she is speaking to – calling Jesus Lord and Son of David. And she does not obscure the horror of her daughter’s demon possession.
To lament is to cry out God with the dial of honesty cranked all the up. It is to show up and demand that God be God in the midst of our life and our world even when we struggle to feel or know or experience God’s presence.
Jesus himself knows what it is to live with a raw heart of faith in God. Yet to her second prayerful plea, he responds, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
This line defies our attempts to make sense of.
Sure, we can understand Jesus’ initial silence as an exhausted leader trying to what’s going on with this women and we can grasp his theological rationalization of being sent on a specific mission to God’s people Israel…. but this is offensive.
Why is Jesus comparing her and her people to dogs? What brings him to say that she’s not worth his time any more than anymore than a mutt staring up at the table with hungry eyes?
I’m not sure what do do with Jesus in this moment.
Kneeling in the dirt, is the woman cowering before Jesus or confronting him? Will her worship free her or is it just entrenching the same systems of patriarchy she’s struggled against her whole life? Must she beg God in the flesh to get the wholeness and healing she needs?
One last time the women speaks, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” This is the final verse of her poignant ballad, her punch line, and Jesus finally seems to see. He sees her and addresses her directly, “Woman. Great is your faith!”
We do not know how her story continued to unfold. We are told that her daughter was instantly healed and she is lauded by Jesus for her great faith. I wonder how her daughter would be changed by her this healing and her mother’s intense encounter.
Can we view this story of the Canaanite woman as a momentary lapse of compassion for Jesus? Or is it an instructive dialogue that shows how the fledgling Jesus movement included women and Gentiles in its ranks? Is this a story that shows us what faith looks like – a faith that’s loud, prayerful in pain, and struggles compassionately, demanding that God be abundant and good and loving? Should we ever have to demand that from God?
Though this woman is named as Canaanite, she embodies the wisdom of the Psalms. Like today’s Psalm 133, unity between people is not a hard won gritting of your teeth across difference, but God’s gift of blessing that lands like soft dew in the north and also waters the South. It’s like anointing oil dripping all over the priest. In the end, God’s blessing settles on this women like dew.
In the struggle of her faith, she reminded Jesus to return to that goodness he was first called to. There is more than enough goodness and blessing and faith for us too. God is at work spreading tables of abundance, healing those under the powers of domination.
Last night, I biked a few blocks over to a neighbor who built a stage in his backyard, opening it up for an evening concert series. It was a beautiful expression of generosity.
Each day here so far I’ve gotten to get to know some knew place – a coffee shop, a grocery story, a new bike path, park, or business. I was recently blown away going to the Scrap Exchange – what a colorful, patchwork, multi-textured vision of repurposing the immense wastefulness of our world and fostering creativity!
And this past Tuesday, my first official day as your pastor, as I was working to organize my home office and line my digital ducks home up in a row… and that afternoon the power went out, as many of you experienced. High winds caused tons of damage across this area. A big pine tree snapped in half and crashed through my next door neighbors roof. In the calm afterwards lots of people were outside and I met my neighbors. They were offering tarps and phone chargers and drinks and warmly wanted to connect and see if everyone was OK. Everybody was not OK, but this checking-in was a gift to witness.
Great is the faith that chooses to make music together. Great is the faith that sees potential art in debris destined for the dumpster. Great is the faith that reaches out when the storms of life disrupt us from rhythms of isolation.
We all have moments in our lives when our compassion falters and we do not glimpse the fullness of God in the folks we encounter. When we look in the mirror and struggle to see a child of God there. Yet great is the faith that holds onto God and God’s promises even when hard to grasp. The gift of this type of tenacity is God working through us. God was working through this Canaanite woman who reminded him of who he was. She asked God to be God.
I’m struck that even though Jesus initially treats this woman coldly, in the very next scene in Matthew he seems reoriented to his calling. He heals many and he feeds the four thousand and is described as “having compassion for the crowd” because they haven’t had anything to eat. It was the Canaanite woman who reminded him that even a table set in the clenches of scarcity has crumbs fall from it. How much more abundant is the feast when tables are built wide and long and set in gratitude and thanksgiving and love?
In this hour of worship and in this coming week of work – may we be people of great faith.
May we be like the Christ we seek to follow, who by our story’s end recognizes this woman’s faith in God, faith in the life-giving Spirit at work in the world, a faith that would stop at nothing to see healing for her daughter.
May we be like this unnamed yet undeterred woman, who boldly embodied what it means to pray and petition. Like this woman…. and like Dolly Parton… may we refuse to accept silence or rationalizations and instead sing the kinds of laments that bring forth resistance and healing.
May we have great faith in the God of abundance who gives all good things. This God waters the mountains of Hermon and Zion, brings even Gentiles as guests into the house of Israel… And may this God’s grace and goodness continue to fall here in Chapel Hill and Durham today and every day to come .
Give us faith, O Lord, to taste the abundant life that you have prepared for all your children. Amen.