Law Dog

Propers: The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 20), AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Jesus never broke with Judaism. He did not aim to found a new religion, nor to discard one people in order to take up another. By His own account, Jesus came not to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them, to complete them, to accomplish their purpose. The religious debates recorded in the Gospels must not be read as anti-Jewish but as intra-Jewish. Faithful people disagree on how to serve the Lord.

By the traditional count, there are 613 commandments found throughout the length and breadth of the Hebrew Scriptures. Most of these are properly understood as case law, applying the principles of the Ten Commandments to specific, real-world circumstances. Not all commandments are created equal. Jesus stood in solidarity with the great rabbinical schools of His day when He proclaimed that the two greatest commandments are to love the Lord your God with all you are and all you have, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Of those 613, mind you, only seven were considered to apply to non-Jewish peoples. These were the Noahide Laws, intended for all humankind. And they are as follows: Do not worship idols; Do not curse God; Do not murder; Do not commit sexual immorality; Do not steal; Don’t be cruel to animals, and; Establish courts of justice. If we must insist on placing commandments in front of courthouses, that ought to be our list.

The fifteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, from which we read this morning, begins with a debate between Jesus and certain of the scribes and Pharisees. Now, Christians have a troubled history of painting Pharisees as the bad guys of the gospels. But they were considered the moral majority of their day. They weren’t hereditary priests or Sadducees born to power. They were the scrupulously religious middle class, if that term’s not too terribly anachronistic. They strove for the spiritual purity of Israel.

And what they want to know is why Jesus, as a rabbi and wonderworker of some renown, does not teach His disciples to follow what they term “the traditions of the elders.” These traditions were oral laws intended to protect the written laws. For example: The Hebrew Bible commands Israelites not to cook a kid—that is, a young goat—in its own mother’s milk. That’s weirdly specific; let’s be honest. But it’s almost certainly because the Canaanites around Israel were doing exactly that. It was some sort of religious or dietary observance from which Israel was to keep apart.

The tradition that grew up around this commandment was to prohibit the mixing of any meat and milk within a meal. Flesh and dairy were strictly separated, and remain so to this day in observant kosher households. This was done out of zeal for God’s Law. Jesus, however, appears concerned about our human tendency to miss the forest for the trees. The traditions we practice to honor the Law can end up obfuscating the Law.

“It isn’t what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles him,” Jesus says, “but rather what comes out. Food isn’t evil. But wicked intentions—theft, murder, lies, slander, immorality—that’s the stuff that matters. That’s where we should focus.” And again, He isn’t abolishing the Law. Jesus kept the Law, scrupulously. But He is reminding us that the letter exists to support the spirit, and not the other way around. We don’t keep rules just to keep the rules. The Law is for our good, and for our neighbor’s good.

Whenever we lose sight of that, whenever we resort to legalisms and loopholes to justify what we ought to know to be wrong, that’s when we honor God with our lips while our hearts are far from Him. And Christians are as bad at this as anyone, maybe worse, since we’re supposed to know better. Our boss was pretty adamant on this. Jesus’ biggest issue—His white whale, His bête noire—was what He called hypocrisy, play-acting, people using the trappings of religion to exploit and oppress the poor. That’ll get His dander up seven days a week and twice on Sunday.

The bottom line, and He was very clear on this, is that the Law of God is love. To ignore the Law of love—or worse, to use the Law in order to oppose love, to hinder it, defy it—is blasphemy, devil’s work. Don’t you dare. Don’t any of us dare.

But then we come to the Canaanite woman, the Syrophoenician woman, and Jesus appears anything but loving. He comes across, in fact, as almost cruel. And this leads, not unsurprisingly, to a fair amount of hand-wringing amongst preachers such as myself who feel the need to explain His actions in a faithful and cogent manner.

Jesus leaves for Tyre and Sidon, the two most important cities of Phoenicia. And Phoenicians, mind you, are basically seafaring Canaanites. They founded Carthage, got rich off of purple dye, and fought three wars with Rome. But why? Why go there? There’s no indication in our narrative that He had to. Jesus wasn’t pursued into Tyre and Sidon. He chose to go there, which is a weird choice. Observant Judeans would consider such Gentile areas ritually unclean, as any good rabbi would know.

More than this, the Canaanites were the ancient and original enemies of Israel. Before the Romans, the Greeks, the Persians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, Israel fought Canaan to claim the Promised Land. Never mind that they were closely related. The only indication we have concerning why Jesus would go to the cities of His people’s ancient enemy would be to teach a lesson, to preach in word and deed. This incident with the Canaanite woman is not separate from the debate with the Pharisees; they are of a piece.

She comes to Him in need, having heard His reputation. “Have mercy on me,” she cries out, “Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented!” Here we have a mother begging for her child; abasing herself, in fact, calling Jesus Son of David, Canaan’s ancient foe. And what does He say? “I have been sent to naught but the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Uffda. That’s harsh. Some might even call it racist. There is a slight softening in the Greek that’s none too clear in English: He speaks of little dogs, puppies really. Yet even so. To her everlasting credit, the woman ripostes, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs may lap the crumbs that fall down from the table.” And this clearly pleases Him, because He praises her: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done as you wish!” And her daughter was instantly healed.

So what’s going on here, really? Has the woman taught Jesus a lesson? Has she cured Him of the sin of His prejudice? I should certainly say not. The notion of Jesus needing to be taught by us, of Jesus sinning and being corrected, throws a monkey-wrench in the works. But even just literarily, narratively, it would be completely out of character. The only way that this makes sense is if Jesus is living out His own teachings, demonstrating His Gospel.

By the letter of the Law, she is His enemy. By the letter of the Law, she has no right to claim the promises given unto Israel. At the very least she ought to wait her turn: The Christ comes first to Israel, and only then unto the nations. But what mother could wait? What parent could wait? Jesus didn’t come to Canaan to rub their noses in the dirt. He came to bring them healing, forgiveness, liberation, and life. He came to live the Law of love. And He demonstrated this in the most visceral way possible: with a faithful, frightened woman from an ancient hated foe. If God loves Canaan, then God must love us all.

That is the only lesson we can take from this: that love knows no boundaries, love knows no limits, love knows no Law save the Law of love, the Law of God. Everything else is just human tradition—and there’s nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. I certainly love traditions; don’t you? They can be helpful. But do not get them in God’s way. Any tradition, any practice, any barrier that we place in between God and the children whom He loves will be done away with, will be trampled underfoot.

Even the greatest impediments, sin and death and hell, cannot keep Christ from the ones He’s come to save. And believe you me, that’s everybody. He will not leave one sheep behind—nor, it seems, a single dog.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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