Pentecost 12 – 2026
Matthew 15:10-28
Marian Free
In the name of God who is both unchanging and yet dynamic, who listens to the greatest as to the least and whose desire is to bring all people into the kingdom. Amen.
I hope that you are not surprised to learn that Christianity is not a monolithic, static set of creeds and dogmas. Faith is not something that once set in stone, is fixed forever. Rather, faith is a relationship with the living God. It is vital, dynamic and alive which gives it a somewhat disturbing, fluid nature. This for many people (often good, faithful people) can be a very confronting notion. There are many Christians who are more comfortable with a belief system that is black and white, one which sets out clearly what to believe and how to behave, one that provides well-defined criteria against which to measure one’s place before God and one which describes a clear path to salvation.
There are a number of problems with this view. These include a) that it is not biblical, b) that it doesn’t take into account a maturing of our understanding as to what it means to be a Christian and c) that an ever-changing society requires a certain amount of flexibility and adaptation, a re-interpretation of scripture in the light of new insights and developments. This doesn’t mean that God is fickle or that God changes God’s expectations of us on a whim. It means that our understanding of God is necessarily limited and finite, whereas God is boundless and infinite. Our understanding of God grows and expands as our faith and maturity grows and expands. Like Abraham we can argue with God; like Jacob we can wrestle with God all night and, like Jesus, we can challenge long established religious practices and interpretations of the scripture and still be in relationship with God.
Jesus upset the conventional view of faith observance and of the regulations that governed the practice of faith. On occasions he emphasised the original intention of the law – challenging, for example, the strict censure against working on the Sabbath. At other times he defied or simply ignored existing regulations by mixing with the unclean – the lepers, the tax-collectors, prostitutes and women. In today’s gospel we see examples of both – Jesus revising what it meant to be faithful in the first century.
The context of Jesus’ teaching today is a dispute between himself and the Pharisees regarding the purity laws. The Pharisees and scribes had observed that Jesus’ disciples did not wash before they ate, thereby breaking “the tradition of the elders”. Jesus’ response was to point out that washing was simply an outward display of ritual purity, but that washing alone did not and could not change a person’s inward state of being. Jesus drew the attention of the crowds to the real intention behind the practice of washing – which was to signify the cleansing of the heart and soul. He made it clear that the routine observance of the law did not achieve the purpose for which it was intended. External washing alone did not render a person clean.
This exchange is followed by another quite different but related discussion. The topic is still one of ritual purity, but Jesus’ interlocutor is poles apart from the Pharisees and scribes. For unknown reasons, but perhaps for narrative effect, Matthew tells us that Jesus leaves Genesserat on the shore of the Galilee and heads towards the coast. This takes him into Gentile country which by definition is impure. On his way Jesus is accosted by a woman who is triply unclean – she is a woman, she is a Gentile and she is closely related to a person who is demon-possessed. According to Jewish law, contact with her would make Jesus unclean on any one of these grounds.
Surprisingly, to the reader, it is as if his conversation with the Pharisees had never occurred. It would appear that despite what he has just said, Jesus has not yet generalised his views on internal versus external cleanliness. His initial reaction to the woman is that she is unclean as defined, not by the state of her heart, but by her outward characteristics. Jesus’ reaction the woman is shocking, and not at all consistent with the Jesus we have come to know. Jesus ignores her shouting and he doesn’t censure the disciples who demand that he send her away. To add insult to injury, when Jesus finally does respond, it is to refuse the woman’s request. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” This would not be unexpected from the Jesus who had earlier sent out the disciples with the instruction: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt 10:5,6) but it makes no sense in the current context – especially given that Jesus put himself among the Gentiles!
Clearly, up until this point in his ministry (at least as the evangelists have recorded), Jesus has perceived his mission to be that of reforming the people of Israel. He has challenged their rule-bound behaviour and confronted their hypocrisy. He has broken their rules, and gone beyond their boundaries to demonstrate God’s inclusive, forgiving love. He is also a person of his time and in his mind Gentiles are not part of the programme. (This despite the fact that Naaman, a Gentile warrior was healed in the river Jordan at the urging of Jewish prophet. 2 Kings 5)
Significantly, the woman is desperate for her daughter to be healed and sufficiently confident of her place in the world, that she refuses to go away and refuses to be silenced. Jesus has no choice but to engage with her, even if to our ears he is more than a little rude. The woman’s argument is compelling. She has a comeback for each of Jesus’ points . In the end, Jesus reverses his position and lets go of his faith-informed prejudice and heals the daughter. The woman’s arguments have shown him that there is a different way to be and to act.
Whether Jesus’ encounter with the woman went exactly as the evangelist has recorded it, or whether it is being used in the gospels to demonstrate that it was always Jesus’ intention that Gentiles be included in the reformed people of God, this story warns us against the temptation to believe that what we hold to be true today, will be held to be true for eternity. Throughout history the Christian church has accommodated itself to the community around it and much of what we believe, and practice is not original to Jesus . The dates on which we observe Christmas and Easter come from the pagan world in which the early church found itself and our attitudes to slavery, to people of colour, to homosexuality, to children and to divorce have all undergone reversals as we have responded to societal and scientific developments and have better understood God’s compassion and all-embracing love.
“Even the dogs eat the crumbs”. Who are the people whom we ignore, denigrate and exclude and are we willing to accept that they have an equal place in the kingdom and that they might even have something to teach us?
Tags: a faith that is fluid, arguing with Jesus, Canaanite woman, changing Jesus' mind
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