The gospel lesson appointed for yesterday in the Revised Common Lectionary is probably the toughest one we hear in church. There is a woman, desperate for her sick daughter to get better, and she begs and pleads with Jesus to heal her. We're used to hearing that Jesus took pity on the sick or had compassion for the people, so he heals them. This time, it's different. The apostles complain about how annoying this woman is. She keeps following us and yelling at us. Get rid of her, Jesus! And Jesus tries, with perhaps the most astonishing words in all four gospels: It's not right to take the children's food and give it to the dogs.
That's right: he essentially called this woman and her daughter dogs. Lower than Jewish people, lower than himself. Not worthy of God's love or healing grace. Not even worthy of his attention. I don't know about you, but this is not the Jesus I prefer to worship!
But at the same time, there is room for hope here. Sometimes it's hard to remember that Jesus is both fully divine and fully human, so we stumble when the gospels show us Jesus being human. See, humans have bad days. We get hot and tired and cranky. We're sometimes rude, and we sometimes say snarky things so we can avoid what we know we should do. And look, even Jesus himself was rude and snarky to this desperate woman!
I have to tell you that this comes as a huge relief to me. If even Jesus himself could slip up and be mean like this... well, at least I know that I'm in good company. No, I shouldn't be snarky and rude to people, and I shouldn't refuse to help someone because she is not Christian or from another country or even because she's annoying. That's not love. When the woman challenged Jesus on his bad behavior, he realized this, and he acted with love.
Last time this story came up in the lectionary, back in 2008, I wrote a re-imagining of it. As I read through the story and allowed it to roll around in my mind and heart, I found myself experiencing the story from different perspectives. What did it feel like to be Jesus in this story? To be Peter? To be the woman? This imaginative type of scripture reading was the only way I could grapple with my utter astonishment at -- and strong wish to deny the truth of! -- Jesus' response. The 2008 blog post takes the words out of Jesus' mouth, because on that day, it's what felt right. It was only in later reflections that I considered the full humanity of Jesus, the ability to make his own choices, even -- or especially -- bad ones.
We don't know what literally, factually happened on that day in the marketplace. Thanks be to God that the Truth is so much more interesting, engaging, and powerful!
