ALL SAINTS MARGARET STREET

TRINITY 12, 2005

High Mass
All Saints, Margaret Street

Fr Alan Moses

“Then the disciples approached and said to him, ‘Do you not know that the Pharisees took offence when they heard what you said?’”

It is some reassurance to the preacher to know that people have been complaining about sermons since the beginning of Christianity, and that they began by complaining about Jesus. Sometimes people grumble about the length of sermons - too short or too long; or about the style - too many jokes, not enough humour, too boring or too theatrical; or even sometimes about the theology - too biblical, too conservative, too liberal, too radical, too pious, too worldly.

When the disciples come to tell Jesus that the Pharisees have taken offence at what he has been saying, they might well have thought that he had committed a serious gaffe. These were after all the seriously religious people. They weren’t the kind of back-sliding Jews who would pop into the Gentile café before work in the West End for the illicit pleasure of a full English, but very definitely non-kosher, breakfast when they were out of sight of the rabbi and their mother. No, these were the serious Jews, these were people who kept the Torah, who ran the synagogues, who tithed and more than tithed. These were the kind of people who extended the purity rules, including ritual washings, which were followed by the priests in the Temple to everyone. They were, if you like, proto-Protestants - they taught and practiced a priesthood of all believers. They were the kind of people you should want on your side if you were a rising new rabbi launching a renewal movement, or just trying to make a name for yourself. Yet he writes them off as “blind guides”. This is no way to win friends and influence people.

Peter and the rest of the disciples are puzzled: “Explain this parable to us.”
So Jesus explains to them that that it is not what people eat which makes them impure, but the thoughts and actions which spring from their hearts: “evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander” ; a list which echoes the Ten Commandments.

Jesus is doing two things here. First, he is radicalising the moral demands of the Law. It is not about the keeping of external rules. This does not mean that such rules might not have a part to play in helping to shape peoples’ lives.

Second, he is making an extraordinary claim for himself. When speaking to the Pharisees he had placed Scripture firmly above their traditions. Now he seems to be abolishing a considerable chunk of Scripture. He is placing himself above Scripture.
What Matthew is implying here is that, as John would say, Jesus is the Word of God, and so is superior to Scripture which is the written record of that Word.

Now, all these years later, we Christians can stand on the sidelines and applaud what Jesus says to the Pharisees about their traditions and practices. With the assistance of 20-20 hindsight - not to mention the teaching of our Lord, we can see how wrong they were. But we do not read the Gospels in order to make us feel superior to the spiritual descendants of the Pharisees, our neighbours at the synagogue in Great Portland Street. Too many Christians have done this -ignoring what St. Paul says in today’s passage from Romans about God not rejecting the people he foreknew - with tragic consequences, No, we read them so that we might be changed. Congregations who hear them read and preached should expect to be changed. Preachers should preach them expecting to be changed themselves.

It is easy for us to agree with Jesus in this case because we have no psychological or spiritual investment in the rules by which the Pharisees set such store. But the real question for us is: What are the “traditions of the elders” for us; the things which have the same function in our lives; which distract our attention from a heart-changing religion?

Preaching and teaching, especially when there is an element of conflict and tension involved, and when even your most devoted followers are a bit slow on the uptake, is hard and exhausting work. Jesus needs a break, a time of retreat. So he takes the disciples off into Lebanon - the district of Tyre and Sidon - this was Gentile territory; a place symbolic for Jews of the threat to the integrity of their religion posed by the paganism which surrounded them.

But Jesus cannot escape the demands generated by his ministry of healing and teaching; his reputation has spread even to this God-forsaken corner. A Canaanite woman, a pagan probably, asks for healing for her daughter. And she does not do it calmly and politely. She shouts out in her distress: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Pagan she may be, but she calls Jesus “Lord”. She recognises his divinity.

Now it is often said that the clergy should pattern their ministry after the example of our Lord, the Good Shepherd. But if we were to take this story as an example of pastoral practice, most of you would not be very impressed. If you heard me speaking to someone in need or distress in the way that Jesus responds at first to this poor woman, you would be at the very least embarrassed. You would be complaining to the Churchwardens and writing to the Bishop.

At first, Jesus ignores her altogether: “he did not answer her at all.” The disciples clearly feel embarrassed - but not by the silence of Jesus, but by the exhibition the woman is making. They had come here for a bit of peace and quiet, some quality time with the master - away from the demands of the crowds. “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.”

Jesus says to the woman; “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. No Gentiles need apply. But the woman refuses to be put off. She thinks only of her daughter and throws herself at his feet, saying, “Lord, help me.”

What Jesus says next has a sharpness, a rudeness even, which you would not expect to hear from the lips of the Vicar at the church gate or the Vicarage door: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Commentators sometimes try to take the edge off this by saying that Jesus was referring to housedogs which would be like the pets we dote on. But the reality is that this was an insult which Jews quite often used of Gentiles - part of the lexicon of xenophobia - the kind of things the resident population always say about the latest wave of newcomers. There is no mention of the disciples being horrified. Perhaps they were quietly applauding the fact that Jesus was finally getting round to doing something about this awful woman.

But this infuriating woman will not be put off. She turns Jesus’ words around, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
Matthew’s Gospel, which we are reading through at Mass on Sundays this year, is the most Jewish of the gospels. There are hints at the beginning of a universal scope for the Gospel of Jesus Christ - the presence in the genealogy of Jesus’ forbears of Gentile women like Rahab and Ruth - the arrival of the Wise Men from the East to worship the one “born, the king of the Jews”. And at the end, the risen Christ sends his disciples out into all the world. But in between, there is a clear priority, even an exclusive attention, given to the mission to the Jews, “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”.

When Jesus stonewalls the Canaanite woman, we might think, as some commentators have, that he is simply testing her perseverance, until he can say, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish”. But there is another way of looking at this exchange. In the Letter to the Hebrews we read that Jesus “learned obedience through suffering”, that this is how he was made perfect; that is how he came to achieve the purpose of God in the incarnation. It is a besetting temptation for those who worship Jesus to downplay the reality of his humanity, even though the gospels show us him wrestling with the nature of his calling - in the temptations in the wilderness before he begins his public ministry, and in the agony in the Garden of Gethsemane as he faces the passion and death to which that ministry has brought him.

If we take that learning process seriously as a part of the incarnation, can we not see that in this incident, the Canaanite woman and her suffering, her demand for help, her refusal to be put off, acts as the catalyst for Jesus recognising that the scope of his mission reaches far beyond the bounds of Israel, even if it has been limited to them at first?

As the Lord had said in Isaiah:

“…the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord,
to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord,
and to be his servants,
all who keep the Sabbath, and do not profane it,
and hold fast my covenant -
these will I bring to my holy mountain,
and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt-offerings and their sacrifices
will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer
for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord God,
who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
besides those already gathered.”

Such catalysts for a renewed expansion of the scope of the Gospel have been a recurring theme in the life of the Church ever since. In Matthew’s own Church, the influx of gentile converts into an originally Jewish community causes strains. So Matthew shows his readers how this is all part of the gospel; the way things are meant to be. Paul’s letters and the Acts of the Apostles show us the Church dealing with the same challenge.

In the 16th century a Spanish Dominican Friar called Bartolome de las Casas who had been sent to the Americas as a missionary, returned home to wage a theological struggle on behalf of the native populations suffering appallingly at the hands of the conquistadores who thought of them as less than human. They are human, said Las Casas, they are the children of God, made in the image of God, as much as any other human beings.

And lest we think that this is just the kind of thing that those dreadful Spaniards, who were trying to conquer us as well at the time, got up too, we will be reminded over the next couple of years of the long and finally successful campaign waged by William Wilberforce against the slave trade; a trade from which devout members of the Church of England profited, and indeed the Church itself.

Then in Nazi Germany, the Confessing Church had to protest against the relegation of Jews to the status of sub-humans by the government; a policy in which the majority of Christians lamely acquiesced.

In the 1960s the descendants of slaves in the United States, a century after their legal liberation, had to protest their appalling treatment at the hands of fellow-Christians, fellow-evangelicals, who would quote scripture in defence of an indefensible status-quo - just as the Dutch Reformed Church would in South Africa.

And in all of these cases, it has to be admitted, that the shouting of latter-day Canaanite women, shouting “Lord, help me”, was an embarrassment and offence to many of the disciples of Jesus, who just wanted them to go away. The time is not right. Well the time of judgement is never right for those being judged, and yet it is the only time we have.

And after all that history, what of us? How are we being challenged to expand our horizons? Who are the foreigners, the outsiders, the Canaanite women shouting after us, “Lord, help me”? Who are the women calling out to the Church today? Who are the outsiders, the foreigners? Can we be content here in London, this “world in a city” as the Bishop calls it, simply to be the Church of the East Saxons?
That passage from Isaiah omitted some verses, ‘For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name which shall not be cut off.”

Who might they be in the Anglican Communion just now?
Who are those saying to Jesus, “Send them away”.

The lesson of history and human fallibility is that such questions are unlikely to go away this side of heaven. Groups who were once excluded have an alarming tendency to become exclusive themselves once they have won inclusion. As Paul has to say to the Christians in Rome who were tempted to decide that God had excluded the Jews from his covenant. It is as if those of us who believe that we are saved can only cling on to that by thinking that someone else is not. Yet “There’s a wideness in God’s mercy…”