ISAIAH 56:1-7

PSALM 67

ROMANS 11:13-15, 29-32

MATTHEW 15:21-25

Sermon – August 14, 2005 – 8:30 a.m. service

“The Children’s Food”

On the surface, today’s scriptures are about the inclusion of anyone from any country in the community of believers in Israel’s God as long as they become believers. An anonymous prophet whose words are included in the Book of Isaiah stresses that “foreigners” can “join themselves to the Lord” and worship in the temple, for God says that “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all people.” This prophet, writing in the late 6^th Century B.C. after the return of the Israelites from exile in Babylon, joins with the authors of the books of Ruth and Jonah in stressing God’s inclusive love for foreigners and even an evangelical calling for the people of Israel, in contrast to Ezra and Nehemiah who promoted Jewish exclusiveness based on genetics and genealogy as well as on religious behavior.

Paul in Romans II, describes himself as “an apostle to the Gentiles,” meaning everyone in the world except Jews. Most dramatically, Jesus heals the daughter of a Canaanite woman when he is visiting “the district of Tyre and Sidon” – a non-Jewish family in a non-Jewish area in what is now modern-day Lebanon.

God’s mercy on and love for the Gentiles would certainly have been the theme of a sermon preached on these Scriptures anytime up to 100 A.D. Today, however, we need to take a two-fold look at these Scriptures because of what all three of these biblical authors took for granted but which some modern-day Christians do not fully recognize: God’s mercy on and love for the Jews!

God first established God’s covenant with Abraham nearly two thousand years before the birth of Jesus. As Genesis 12 begins, there is absolutely no one in the entire world who knows the one true God. Then comes Abraham. God unilaterally makes extravagant promises to a childless semi-nomad: descendents as many as the stars of heaven and a homeland – a homeland the boundaries of which have been variously defined over the millennia and which are the subject of great controversy even as we sit here this morning.

One of the descendents of Abraham was Joseph and another was Mary, the adoptive parents of the one who we Christians call the Savior of the World – and who the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel addresses as “Lord, Son of David.” Jesus was 100% Jewish, as were all of his closest followers, male and female, and probably all of the human authors of New Testament books, with the probable exception of Luke.

Jesus was proclaimed by the earliest preachers about him after his death, resurrection and ascension into heaven as the fulfillment of Jewish yearning for a Messiah. The term “Christian” appears nowhere in the Gospels and only surfaces for the first time in Chapter 11 of Acts. Jesus’ resurrection, the vast majority of those who believed in him as Messiah had been born Jewish and continued to think of themselves as Jewish. Only after the Jewish nationalistic revolt against the Romans and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Roman Army did an irrevocable split begin, when Jewish Christians had to choose between being Jewish and being Christian.

By that time, the late 1^st Century, “the Gentile mission” epitomized by St. Paul but carried on by others had been, unexpectedly, spectacularly successful. Gentiles who previously had found Judaism appealing due to its high code of morality, belief in one God and two thousand years of history found they could embrace all that without having to swallow dietary laws and ritual circumcision as well if they became believers in Jesus as Messiah. This was possible because the infant Christian church had re-defined what it meant to be a member of the community of believers in Adonai, the God who had revealed himself to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and many others.

Gentiles in fact flooded into the church in such numbers that the biggest heresy of the Second Century was Marcionism, which declared that the Hebrew Scriptures were not Scripture at all and God as revealed in Jesus had nothing to do with the God of Israel. The church leaders drew the line and anathematized Marcion and his followers, affirmed that Jesus was Jewish, was the Jewish Messiah, and that specified ancient Hebrew writings were authoritative, divinely-inspired Scripture for Christians. Scripture, of course, which needed to be interpreted and applied freshly to new circumstances.

And one of the new circumstances was, a large and steadily growing body of believers in a Jew named Jesus who were now theologically disconnected with all of the other believers in the faith of Jesus himself.

The split between Christians and Jews was painful and bitter, all of which is reflected in some New Testament writings – especially the “most Jewish” Gospels, Matthew and John. (Any reader of John, for example, needs to know that the phrase “the Jews” in John’s Gospel refers to Jewish opponents of Jesus in his lifetime, since Jesus and his followers were all Jews. When John was written down late in the 1^st Century, the split which existed in that time period was “read back” into Jesus’ own lifetime.)

In Matthew, the Gospel we read from most during this current liturgical year, Jesus has repeated pointed arguments with the Pharisees – the Jewish sect which actually was the closest theologically to him (they believed in the resurrection, for example) and to Jews of our own century. Matthew’s Gospel is “very Jewish” in that he quotes the Hebrew Scriptures more than any other Gospel written – “This took place to fulfill what was spoken by the prophet” is a formula he uses often when quoting what we call the Old Testament.

Matthew is also more easily used in an anti-Semitic way than Mark or Luke, most notably because he alone portrays Pontius Pilate literally “washing his hands” of responsibility for Jesus’ crucifixion (even though Pilate really had full responsibility, legally and practically), while Matthew quotes the (Jewish) crowds as shouting “His blood be upon us and upon our children.”

That would be a phrase which would inspire countless Christian persecutions of Jews over the centuries, programs supposedly aimed at “Christ killers” (an odious phrase), murders of Jesus’ blood relatives by people who called themselves followers of the Prince of Peace.

It is therefore all the more striking to hear Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel passage from Matthew, declining (at first) to heal the daughter of the Canaanite woman by saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel.”

If Jesus had stuck with that plan, how many of us would be sitting in this church today?

Even more stunning, Jesus says to the woman, as she kneels before him, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Personally, I find this to be the hardest saying of Jesus to swallow – his calling a vast group of people “dogs,” not a compliment. How offensive! And then I remember that one of the “dogs” who he allowed “to eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” is me as a Gentile; that’s where I stand – in this story. This woman’s persistence and humility “opened the table” of God’s healing grace for her daughter. One “crumb” was all it took to make her well.

Which leads me back to the focus of this sermon: “The children” in Jesus’ saying, who get fed first from his table, are Jesus’ fellow Jews.

Matthew could have edited out this story; none of the Gospels include all the stories about Jesus (as the end of John’s Gospel reminds us). Matthew left this story in, with its anti-Gentile slur and pro-Jewish basis. I think he left the story in partly to remind his readers who God’s first children were – and are. We Gentiles have been “adopted” as God’s children. While we are far more numerous than those who preceded us we need to remember that God already had “a family” before we were invited in.

And in fact, as Paul declares in his anguished writings in Romans, Chapters 9-11, since some Jews in his time did not accept Jesus as the Messiah, that actually may have hastened and strengthened the inclusion of Gentiles in the Christian church. (If, for example, 70 or 80% of First Century Jews had embraced Jesus as the Messiah, belief in Jesus probably would simply have become the dominant form of Judaism, probably without changing the membership requirements for Judaism, and without adding very many Gentile converts.)

So, Paul says, Jewish “rejection [of Jesus] is the reconciliation of the world” – enabling Gentiles to turn to God and be saved. Eventually, Paul declares the Jews will be included among those served by God because “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.” I read this as meaning, “Don’t worry, God will take care of God’s own elect in God’s time and God’s way, so Christians should not systematically evangelize – never mind persecute – Jews.” There are plenty of unbelievers to reach, as well as Christians who rarely or never go to church!

So, let us give thanks for our “elder brothers and sisters” in the family of God, the Jewish people – and for that persistent and humble Palestine woman who opened a door which so many people have walked though since!

The Rev. Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, New Jersey