Matthew 15.21-28

A Canaanite woman approaches Jesus Christ begging for mercy for herself and asking that he help her daughter. This is a complicated passage and has been known for great theological arguments. Jesus Christ does not answer the Canaanite woman in a way we would expect Jesus Christ to behave.

First, he doesn’t answer her. Second, when he does respond, we struggle to interpret what he says in a manner befitting of Jesus Christ. Stating he was only sent to help the people of Israel and then inferring the Canaanite woman is a dog doesn’t seem like very Christ-like words, regardless of whether we look at a dog being a beloved and useful household pet or a wild animal. Third, it feels like there’s a sudden turnaround when he proclaims her daughter is healed because of her faith.

Biblical interpretation is often challenging.  If you think it’s easy, you might not be digging deep enough. Sometimes we get bogged down in details; sometimes we don’t pay enough attention to them. Sometimes we focus on one figure’s behaviors and responses when we’re really meant to be focusing on another’s. And… interpretation changes through time.

In the Middle Ages, this passage was interpreted by a 4th-century bishop and theologian, Hilary of Poitiers, as the Canaanite woman was a proselyte, a Jewish convert, pleading for the salvation of the Gentiles. Augustine would hop on this theological train by saying that the situation represents that salvation is achieved not through encountering Jesus but through his word. The dogs are Gentiles; the children are Israel. The bread is the Gospel and doctrine.

The basis for this theological rationale is that the woman calls Jesus Christ the Son of David. Medieval theologians believed that this passage was about humility and how we should be so humble as to place ourselves below the lowest of the low in order to be saved. Faith was understood primarily as a virtue along with humility, modesty, perseverance, reverence, prudence, and trust.  You might not be fully aware of this, but humble submission is no longer regarded as a virtue. A woman’s salvation is not determined by her willingness to submit fully to her husband.

Protestants in their protests challenged blind obedience to authority. Luther’s thesis against the sale of indulgences and papal immunity challenged the notion that faith was humble submission. Faith for Luther became not submission but action. Let us not forget that Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, an escaped nun. A woman very reminiscent of the Canaanite woman in this pericope.

For Protestants to label the Canaanite woman as a Jewish convert because she greets Jesus Christ as the Son of David, a Jewish title, not the Son of God, is to ignore the reference to her as a Canaanite, used synonymously with the word Gentile, as well as to ignore verse 24 when Jesus says he was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. We view her as an outcast both because of her gender and her nationality.

We view her cries for help in support of our petitionary prayer theology that needs teach us to pray. We pray because it is our heart’s way of lamenting to the Lord, our God. We pray not because God doesn’t know or already has a plan but because our being in need strengthens our relationship and communication with God. When we experience great need, our soul cries out to its owner in prayer.

In the interest of historically changing theological interpretations, I feel obligated to tell you that the disciples’ response to the woman’s cries: the Greek word apoluó  (ah-po-LOO-oh), that Protestant Bibles interpret as “send her away.” Has multiple meanings, including “To release, to set free, to dismiss, to send away, or to divorce.”

Medieval theologians chose to interpret apoluó as “to set free” and then even more loosely into English as “do what she asks” as if they are pleading on behalf of the woman. This, by painting the disciples in a better light, ultimately led to the petitioning of saints for the things people wanted and supporting the ideal that if you ask God long enough, hard enough, and with enough faith, and if you donate enough money to the church, you’ll get what you want.

Protestants disagree with this interpretation because the exact form of this verb in this sentence is also used in reference to divorce, when Jesus “sends the crowd away, and in Joseph’s plans to “send Mary away when he finds out she’s pregnant. In none of these other instances where this particular verb apoluó is used does “set free” seem like the right contextual interpretation.

Now, I’m not prone to a lot of educational sermons. I find them boring. But for this passage, I was enamored with the history. I believe that quite often what makes us sink beneath the waves after taking a leap of faith isn’t God. It’s us and our unwillingness to challenge the way we think, as the disciples in this passage, who took a gigantic leap of faith to follow Jesus, sank when confronted with saving the Gentiles as well as the Jews. Their point of view was too narrow. Like our Medieval theologians, they altered the logical interpretation of the situation in favor of their preexisting belief system.

Every Biblical passage we read is interpreted. We interpret what we are reading based upon our current emotional state, our level of education, our preexisting knowledge and traditions, the barriers of the written word, and the expansiveness of our vocabulary among a billion other things. When I was studying to take the Graduate Record Examination, a national test to get into a Masters or Doctoral program, I had to stretch my vocabulary. I came across a sample vocabulary test question that asked how a mountain climber felt at a high altitude that might cause them to fall. None of the answers made sense to me at all, and I thought that I knew what all of them meant. The answer turned out to be giddy. As I had only ever heard the word giddy used to describe a feeling of elation associated with happiness, it never occurred to me that the actual word might mean something different. Quite simply, it means dizzy or light-headed regardless of context; our modern language, or at least the local vernacular to which I am accustomed, just only uses it in certain places.

In this particular example, for the disciples to say “free her from our presence for she cries out to us” while technically correct, our emotional interpretation of using the words “free her” is different than the emotion evoked by the words “dismiss her.” Just as “giddy” seemed illogical to me because the mountain climber was not laughing hysterically at the situation, as there is nothing funny about falling from a great height, the disciples were not feeling inclined to help the woman, so freeing her is not the logical word choice unless I personally don’t want to see the disciples as the kind of people who would turn away a woman in need.

But the disciples aren’t the only ones behaving in a way I don’t want to see in this situation are they?

Jesus is about to declare that dogs and children are of the same stature, but we believe that Gentiles and Jews are both worthy of salvation. I want you to think now for a moment about our Protestant concept of salvation. The Medieval concept was that you suffer in this life nonstop. You were born a lowly, miserable peasant; you will die a miserable peasant. Only in death will you be free from your lowly, miserable existence. Protestants, however, believe that Jesus Christ tore open the veil between heaven and earth and that on this earth, because of his death, we can now experience a sampling of heaven while we are still alive. The crumbs you see are falling down. While we cannot experience the entirety of heaven while here, we can receive a sampling of it through our faith and determination. Like the story of the loaves and fishes we talked about a couple of weeks ago, while God’s love and promise of salvation may at first appear it will only feed a few, the truth of the matter is that not only is there enough for everyone but there will be plenty leftover.

While here on this earth, our faith will let us walk on water, but we will also sink and be raised up. The sinking does not negate our ability to walk on water, only our ability to permanently stay afloat. In heaven, we will not sink. There will be no need to be pulled back up again. On this earth, we will suffer, but there will also be crumbs which fall from heaven to sustain us in this journey. Our faith will heal us. Our trust that those crumbs will fall.

Is it fair that those who do not spend their entire lives devoted solely to worshipping and glorifying God will be saved alongside the ones who live a life of sin and then beg for forgiveness in the end? I don’t know. Maybe I sin more than I care to admit to even though I stand in a pulpit many Sundays, read my Bible regularly, pray constantly, and trust my God in both word and actions… more often than not anyway. Maybe God’s unfairness is something that works more in my favor than against me.

Do I deserve, do you deserve, more than just a few crumbs from heaven? Absolutely not. If we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t even deserve that much a lot of the time. Through great and multiple periods of our lives we turned away from God, we doubted, we sank, we begged, but also, here we are, Canaanites seeking out Jesus to heal ourselves or someone else through our faith, in a church on a Sunday, crying out for healing we have done nothing to deserve, learning to pray through our needs because when we get what we want we have a tendency to forget to pray. Trying against our will to change. Trying to see that we can’t make God fit our personal perception of the way things should be and making a little bit more progress toward that goal.

If you’ve read your Bible, read it again. If you haven’t read it before, read a little bit today. Every time you pick it up you should see a story differently, feel the emotions the writer invokes differently, with every experience we have, every new thing we learn, the way we relate to and view our God changes ever so slightly.

No longer are we blindly humbly submissive to human authority. We are bold. This Canaanite woman challenged the status quo of faith. She didn’t petition her husband or a male relative to intercede for her; she went herself. Her faith gave her courage, strength, and dignity. By going against most of the traditional virtues’ humility, modesty, and prudence- this woman was healed by faith. She was prideful, not humble. Courageous, not modest. Strong, not prudent. She embraced her own virtues of faith. She enacted her own demonstrations of what perseverance, reverence, and trust looked like to her.

We are lost sheep of Israel. Jesus Christ was sent for us. We are those who do not fit in. Those who do not walk in traditional ways. We are those who protest injustice and inequality. We are those who believe we are children of God. Yet even the lowest of us all receive crumbs from our masters’ table in heaven because from God’s table, salvation is available to all, the worthy and the unworthy, the Jew and the Gentile, the doubter and the steadfast, man, woman, children, and dog. All who believe shall be saved. All who eat even the smallest crumb from heaven shall be saved.