The Importance of Being Wrong
[Proper 15, Year A: Is 56: 1, 6-8, Ps 67, Rom 11:1-2a, 29-32, Matt 15: 21-28]
Don’t you just hate it when Jesus is wrong?
In the Gospel for this week from the Common Lectionary, Jesus signally fails to say what we all know he ought to have said. Let me be clear: when he says to his disciples that he was sent "only to the lost sheep of Israel," and to the Canaanite woman that one should not take "the children’s food and give it to the dogs," surely this is wrong.
What I want him to have said, and maybe you will think similarly, is something like this: "I was sent not only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but to lost sheep—and dogs—everywhere. In me there is neither dog nor sheep, Canaanite nor Israelite, male nor female.” I want a Jesus who will uncompromisingly reject the barriers by which people oppress, exclude, marginalize. I want all to be children, or at least to be sheep—and for all to feast. Instead we have talk of dogs, and crumbs.
Jesus misses the golden opportunity for the unambiguous teaching moment that we could all have been using this past week regarding events in Ferguson, Missouri; earlier in the month regarding the crisis on Mt Sinjar; all year, regarding events in Gaza, and who knows where else for centuries before now. Hasn’t he even read Isaiah 56 (which we just heard) and the promise of God calling all nations to the holy mountain?
This group, leaning generally if not universally to the more progressive side of religion and/or politics (according to the latest scientific poll taken at coffee hour today), are not the only ones to have been disappointed by Jesus. The 20th Century German NT scholar Ernst Käsemann tells a story of a group of conservative Dutch Reformed elders who gathered on the eve of disastrous floods that in 1953 threatened to overwhelm the dykes that protected their homes from the threatening tides of the North Sea. Their theological dilemma was not one of persons but of time; the floods threatened to hit on a Sunday, and they were being called to reinforce the dykes on the “Sabbath” when Calvinist ethic demanded pious inactivity. The minister, seeking to enrich the conversation, pointed out that Jesus himself had asked about the forms Sabbath observance should take, and said it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath. One elder voiced the doubts others were feeling:
"I have been troubled, pastor, by something I have not been able to say in public. Now the time has come to say it. I have always had the feeling our Lord Jesus was just a bit of a liberal.”1
Truth be told, Jesus is often getting it wrong, making mistakes, disappointing us. He thinks Moses wrote the Pentateuch and David the Psalms—you’ve got about a week left to live with those fantasies, junior class. A little earlier on this journey, he wants a fruitless fig tree to yield out of season—no happy ending there. And a few verses after this story, it’s Peter who shows what it means to be right, saying Jesus is the Messianic savior of Israel; but instead of accepting and throwing off the yoke of Roman oppression, Jesus predicts his doom, calls a friend one who will turn out to betray him—and gets himself killed.
So failing to fix the anti-Canaanite dogs-and-crumbs problem isn’t so much a departure from the usual for Jesus, it’s characteristic. Being disappointed by Jesus’ failure isn’t so much an exception in the Gospels, it’s typical.
The good news is that this is what incarnation means. God’s encounter with us in Jesus is a sharing in our own limitations, even our mortality. A Gospel with no mistakes might not have mere crumbs for dogs, but it has no cross either. The Gospel has a cross, because it is a Gospel for a world that has crosses in it.
Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman isn’t perfect—that’s because the situation in which they meet is not perfect. Some commentators see the Canaanite woman as challenging and instructing Jesus, even changing his heart and mind. The text allows this conclusion. Yet in their encounter, each of these two speaks from the beginning in ways whose honesty is discomforting for us, because they do not avoid what is unmistakably real for them. The greater error is that of the disciples, who want to sent the woman and her need away—Jesus will not. Jesus joins in the difficult conversation. He does not however pretend at any point that Canaanites will no longer struggle for Israelite crumbs, when he has gone on his way from the region of Tyre and Sidon. But neither does he deny that a certain woman’s faith is great. And for all the verbal sparring, on that day more than crumbs was given, and a child—not a dog—was restored and healed.
At this table we commemorate and share with the real Jesus, who apparently makes mistakes; above all, the mistake of becoming a vulnerable person who has a body and blood to spill and share, not just fine fare that is all plenty and no pain. These, however, are crumbs worth gathering. The God he reveals likewise may not run the world the way we might prefer, but has entered into it fully and shared in our reality, with honesty and no qualms. Even God has let go of being “right” all the time.
God does not ask you to be right today, or in class, or when the first paper is handed in, or the first quiz completed; not to be right first, but to be here. So, come to this table, trusting not in your own right-ness, but in God’s many-fold and great mercy. God may not give you what you want first either, but here Jesus gives us what we need. God’s crumbs are worth begging for, but we will be fed more generously than that, with Jesus’ very presence. Thus, we may ever more dwell in him, and he in us.
Fed, empowered, embodied thus, we are called to travel into different and difficult places; to pursue God’s uncomfortable conversations about love and justice and healing and wholeness; and to be willing to be at least as wrong as he was.
Sermon from the Berkeley Divinity School Community Eucharist, Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School, during Before the Fall Orientation 2014
1. Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970) 16↩
Don’t you just hate it when Jesus is wrong?
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| Lastman, Christ and the Canaanite Woman (Web Gallery of Art) |
What I want him to have said, and maybe you will think similarly, is something like this: "I was sent not only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but to lost sheep—and dogs—everywhere. In me there is neither dog nor sheep, Canaanite nor Israelite, male nor female.” I want a Jesus who will uncompromisingly reject the barriers by which people oppress, exclude, marginalize. I want all to be children, or at least to be sheep—and for all to feast. Instead we have talk of dogs, and crumbs.
Jesus misses the golden opportunity for the unambiguous teaching moment that we could all have been using this past week regarding events in Ferguson, Missouri; earlier in the month regarding the crisis on Mt Sinjar; all year, regarding events in Gaza, and who knows where else for centuries before now. Hasn’t he even read Isaiah 56 (which we just heard) and the promise of God calling all nations to the holy mountain?
This group, leaning generally if not universally to the more progressive side of religion and/or politics (according to the latest scientific poll taken at coffee hour today), are not the only ones to have been disappointed by Jesus. The 20th Century German NT scholar Ernst Käsemann tells a story of a group of conservative Dutch Reformed elders who gathered on the eve of disastrous floods that in 1953 threatened to overwhelm the dykes that protected their homes from the threatening tides of the North Sea. Their theological dilemma was not one of persons but of time; the floods threatened to hit on a Sunday, and they were being called to reinforce the dykes on the “Sabbath” when Calvinist ethic demanded pious inactivity. The minister, seeking to enrich the conversation, pointed out that Jesus himself had asked about the forms Sabbath observance should take, and said it was lawful to do good on the Sabbath. One elder voiced the doubts others were feeling:
"I have been troubled, pastor, by something I have not been able to say in public. Now the time has come to say it. I have always had the feeling our Lord Jesus was just a bit of a liberal.”1
Truth be told, Jesus is often getting it wrong, making mistakes, disappointing us. He thinks Moses wrote the Pentateuch and David the Psalms—you’ve got about a week left to live with those fantasies, junior class. A little earlier on this journey, he wants a fruitless fig tree to yield out of season—no happy ending there. And a few verses after this story, it’s Peter who shows what it means to be right, saying Jesus is the Messianic savior of Israel; but instead of accepting and throwing off the yoke of Roman oppression, Jesus predicts his doom, calls a friend one who will turn out to betray him—and gets himself killed.
So failing to fix the anti-Canaanite dogs-and-crumbs problem isn’t so much a departure from the usual for Jesus, it’s characteristic. Being disappointed by Jesus’ failure isn’t so much an exception in the Gospels, it’s typical.
The good news is that this is what incarnation means. God’s encounter with us in Jesus is a sharing in our own limitations, even our mortality. A Gospel with no mistakes might not have mere crumbs for dogs, but it has no cross either. The Gospel has a cross, because it is a Gospel for a world that has crosses in it.
Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman isn’t perfect—that’s because the situation in which they meet is not perfect. Some commentators see the Canaanite woman as challenging and instructing Jesus, even changing his heart and mind. The text allows this conclusion. Yet in their encounter, each of these two speaks from the beginning in ways whose honesty is discomforting for us, because they do not avoid what is unmistakably real for them. The greater error is that of the disciples, who want to sent the woman and her need away—Jesus will not. Jesus joins in the difficult conversation. He does not however pretend at any point that Canaanites will no longer struggle for Israelite crumbs, when he has gone on his way from the region of Tyre and Sidon. But neither does he deny that a certain woman’s faith is great. And for all the verbal sparring, on that day more than crumbs was given, and a child—not a dog—was restored and healed.
At this table we commemorate and share with the real Jesus, who apparently makes mistakes; above all, the mistake of becoming a vulnerable person who has a body and blood to spill and share, not just fine fare that is all plenty and no pain. These, however, are crumbs worth gathering. The God he reveals likewise may not run the world the way we might prefer, but has entered into it fully and shared in our reality, with honesty and no qualms. Even God has let go of being “right” all the time.
God does not ask you to be right today, or in class, or when the first paper is handed in, or the first quiz completed; not to be right first, but to be here. So, come to this table, trusting not in your own right-ness, but in God’s many-fold and great mercy. God may not give you what you want first either, but here Jesus gives us what we need. God’s crumbs are worth begging for, but we will be fed more generously than that, with Jesus’ very presence. Thus, we may ever more dwell in him, and he in us.
Fed, empowered, embodied thus, we are called to travel into different and difficult places; to pursue God’s uncomfortable conversations about love and justice and healing and wholeness; and to be willing to be at least as wrong as he was.
Sermon from the Berkeley Divinity School Community Eucharist, Marquand Chapel, Yale Divinity School, during Before the Fall Orientation 2014
1. Jesus Means Freedom (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970) 16↩
Vintage McGowan!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for making your work and words available to the general public. A good friend shared this with me and I am very appreciative. Wonderful.
ReplyDeleteLast week, the Messianic Saviour. This week, the Messianic Savior.
ReplyDelete