Homily
for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost
20 August 2017
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
But Jesus did not answer
the woman at all. Matthew 15:23
April
21, 1945. Nuremberg, Germany.
The brute, laurel-wreathed swastika that capped the Nuremberg Stadium, centerpiece
for Hitler’s infamous, staged rallies in the run-up to his reign of terror
across Europe. That gargantuan swastika — monument to the Triumph of the Nazi
Will — in a flash, blown to smithereens by Allied troops in the drive to
consign Hitler’s “Thousand-Year Reich” to the dustbin of history.
That swastika.
It’s demolition. A grainy-newsreel icon of Allied resolve. Who among us would
not have pushed the plunger?
In the
rumble and rubble, had there been voices of protest — “You can’t do that. That swastika:
It’s part of our history. It’s our heritage. It’s our culture. It’s such a beautiful swastika!” — had we heard
voices of protest, what would we think of them?
Because
now — today — superseding the nostalgia of newsreels, turn on your TV, log-in
to the internet, check your iPhone. All we hear are protests: “That Robert E.
Lee Memorial … that Stonewall Jackson statue (and the horse he rode in on) … that
monument to saintly Jefferson Davis in the very heart of the Lost Cause. You can’t
tear them down. They’re our heritage, our culture!”
C'mon. That’s being disingenuous, because, as pundit Charles P. Pierce notes, most of
the monuments we’re talking about “were erected either during the high-tide of
lynching in the South in the early 20thcentury or during the 1950s,
when mass-resistance to racial desegregation was gathering steam in the old
Confederacy. These were not put up as tribute to heritage or history,” Pierce
says. “They were put up as reminders to African-American citizens as to who really
was in charge.”
Nevertheless,
if you want to hang on to the monuments — “They’re so beautiful,” a tweeting
racist gushes — or side with those who do, how did you feel about blowing
up the Nuremberg swastika? Because if you salivate at the prospect of pushing
the plunger in Nuremberg, but balk at pulling down columned, granite-hewn, and gilded
and bronzed memorials to Confederate treason and its oppression of black people,
you’ve got a problem.
It’s
called hypocrisy. And hypocrisy always calls for resolution, if we are to be
morally-balanced and morally-consistent persons.
Can Jesus
help?
Well,
of course, he can. He’d be the first to lead the charge in hauling down those
statues, any symbol that glorifies not treating black persons — anyone — as
neighbor.
If that’s
your take, you’re in for a rude awakening. Ask a desperate Canaanite mother …
because in the first moments of her encounter with Jesus, she’s left asking, “Is Jesus a bigot?”
Picture this: Jesus is exhausted after working his familiar
Jewish-populated neighborhoods. He needs a break and opts for a little R&R ─ incognito ─ in non-Jewish (read: gentile)
territory.
Before he can even plunk down his bags, one of the locals
─ a woman not his kind, not of Jesus’ own race and
culture — and yet a woman obviously aware of Jesus’ celebrity — accosts him.
Why? Her daughter is in dire straits, suffering from what we might call mental
illness. Jesus is her last resort. Will he cure her daughter? Yes or no?
No. No, Jesus refuses. And Matthew records, for my
money, the most chilling words in all of Scripture: “He did not answer her at
all.”
Worse than if he had said what everyone else was
thinking: “Woman, you’ve got the wrong DNA. It’s our heritage, our culture: Jesus,
Inc. is open for Jewish business only.”
Now, under the circumstances, Jesus’ silence would
be bad enough. But then he hurls an ethnic slur-of-choice her way. Right to her
face, he calls her a “dog.” And we’re not talking here Lassie or Rin-Tin-Tin. Not even
Scooby Doo. Ruh-roh.
It would be unconscionable, Jesus says, to cure the
woman’s daughter. “Do you take food out of the mouths of kids and toss it to dogs?”
Translation: His gifts — the banquet God has prepared from the foundation of
the world — are for his own kind — exclusively for Jews, not gentile “dogs.”
Problem is: This doesn’t sound like the “Jesus
loves the little children, all the children of the world” Jesus we’ve come to
know and love. But there it is, in revolting — and revealing — black-and-white:
“Heal a gentile, even a gentile child? What alternate universe are you
living in, lady!?!”
Is Jesus, then, a bigot? Is Jesus the sort of bigot
who would let stand the Confederate monuments, leave the “stars and bars”
banner flying high?
You can try to argue “no.” You can argue, and many do,
that Jesus — a teacher par excellence — is testing the woman, pushing
her to greater faith.
If that’s your approach, then the woman gets an A.
That’s because she counters the “dog” slur with consummate cleverness. “Even
the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.” Meaning: “Surely, Jesus,
there’s enough of your God’s unlimited goodness to go around!”
If you buy the “test” argument, news flash. You’re
skating on thin ice … because, who in their right mind would worship with
abandon — let alone obey and follow — a God who withholds common compassion as fallout
from a failed test, a God who punishes you if you’re not sufficiently clever?
Or you could take the save-the-Confederate monuments
route. You could attempt to acquit Jesus of the charge of bigotry by appealing
to his heritage and culture. You could suggest that Jesus’ cold and surly
treatment of the gentile woman is the norm (to us, a scandalizing norm) for
someone born into an adversarial, Jew vs gentile culture.
We do know, for example, that in his daily prayers,
Jesus would have been reared to give thanks that he was born a Jew, not a gentile
… that he was born a man and not a woman. Like thanking God you were born a white
person and not an African-American. Or straight and not gay.
Not surprising, then, that Jesus’ knee-jerk
reaction not only is to give the woman the cold shoulder, but to insult her
without so much as a second thought.
Problem here is: If this is your argument, is Jesus
all that different from segregation-era racists … perhaps a kinder, gentler
racist … a racist minus the fire bombs, water cannons, and baseball bats?
And then, is the outsider woman any different from
African-American Freedom Riders who were arrested in the summer of 1961 — and many ultimately beaten
and abused — for entering a whites-only waiting room in a Jackson, Mississippi
bus terminal?
If you look at it that way, can you in all honesty absolve
Jesus by association? Can you give him a pass by saying that he’s just a product
of his culture?
Bottomline: There’s no way around it. Jesus initially
responds to the encounter from a position of bigotry … a heritage and culture
of bigotry.
And yet, it’s not his only response. In what
amounts to a defining moment for Jesus, the woman pries open — for Jesus himself
to see, perhaps to his own shock — his own bias. How? In essence, the woman’s request
to heal her child morphs into a question: Jesus, who are you for?
It’s a
question that pushes Jesus to make a choice: Will he widen his charity and his moral
imagination? Or will he reject the equality the woman needs only to preserve
the status of the preferred, the special, the entitled by birth, custom, and
law?
He chooses
— not begrudgingly, but without hesitation — to heal the child. It’s almost
like whiplash.
Bottomline:
Just as the Confederate monument
controversy is a proxy for racism, Jesus recognizes that his own heritage and
culture have been a proxy for bigotry. And by finally answering the woman and
going beyond (to heal the child), Jesus chooses to blast his way through the constraints
of his inbred DNA.
In the same way, Charlottesville, the sallow-white-supremacist
rally in Boston Saturday, and any other bigot-attracting events on the horizon don’t
just raise the question: “Who is America for?” Because …
Just as the insidious Robert E. Lee monuments and
their ilk were erected as reminders to African-Americans that white folk were
in charge and they were not.
Just
as that ham-fisted swastika in Nuremberg showed that an Aryan super race was in
charge and that Jews, gay people, and other “undesirables” were not.
Just
as Jesus’ initial refusal to heal the gentile woman’s child put the woman on
notice that “Chosen People” were in charge and that she and her people were not
…
… so that
prickly encounter in a neighborhood outside the buffers of Jesus’ own neighborhood
raises defining-moment questions for each
of us:
Who are we for?
Who are we as followers of Jesus for?
And what are we going to do about it … no
hesitation … now … so that no one need ever again hear a riff on those horrifying words: “And
he did not answer her at all.”
Amen.
