Out of Africa was a 1980’s movie loosely based on the life of Karen von Blixen.  By the end of the movie, she had known much loss. She emigrated from Europe to South Africa to join her husband in running a coffee plantation.  She suffered illness and infertility resulting from her husband’s infidelity.  The harvested coffee crop, which was her last chance to save the farm, was destroyed in a fire.  She has formed a bond with the Kikuyu people who provide most of the labor for the plantation.  When it appears that they may lose the chance to continue to live on the land, Karen goes to petition the new governor, at a reception being held in his honor.  When she is introduced, she kneels at his feet to beg land for the Kikuyu.  The governor is mortified with embarrassment.  He urges her to stand while the sedate British crowd looks on, appalled at her behavior.  But she is desperate and continues to plead from her place on the ground. [1]  As the governor sees it, Karen von Blixen does not know her place. She is an aristocratic lady.  Ladies don’t grovel.  They don’t kneel to beg on behalf of the peasantry.  They don’t make scenes.

 

The woman in this morning’s text has a few things in common with Karen von Blixen.  She begs on behalf of someone else. She makes a scene, and she doesn’t seem to know her place either.  First off, she doesn’t know her place as a woman.  In her day and in ours, women in the Middle East do not speak to unknown men.  But the Canaanite woman not only speaks to Jesus, she yells at him and keeps yelling after him when he walks on. 

 

Secondly, she doesn’t know her place as a Gentile.  Jews and Gentiles didn’t generally associate with each other.  Matthew uses very pointed language to highlight that she is not Jewish.  He calls her a Canaanite.  Canaanite is a word that is out of date in Matthew’s time.  It’s like if you met someone from Norway and you called her a Viking.  Or instead of calling someone a German, you called him a Nazi.  Or if you called someone from Alabama a Confederate.  It’s a word that reminds us of old boundaries and battle lines, of old enemies. 

 

This woman lives in a land that was called Canaan a thousand years earlier.  It’s not called that any more, but Matthew calls her a Canaanite, to punch up the story.  He’s making it very clear that she and her people are the long-time enemies of Jesus’ people.  She is an enemy of Israel, an enemy of God.   And yet, here she is, pleading for mercy.    

 

She doesn’t know her place as a woman.  She doesn’t know her place as a Gentile.  And thirdly, like Karen von Blixen, she doesn’t know her place in the social hierarchy.  In Mark’s version of this story, there are some very subtle clues which suggest that she is likely upper-class, urban and well-educated.  One example is the word for the bed that her daughter is laying on when she returns home.  It is not the usual word for a straw pallet, but the word for a couch, a piece of permanent furniture.  She comes from the region of Tyre and Sidon.  Tyre was a wealthy coastal city, but it imported food from Galilee.  Folks in Tyre could afford to buy food that the poorer population of Galilee often could not.   So, in a sense, this woman represents the oppressor, one of the sources of economic injustice faced by Jesus’ people.[2]  She is a person of privilege urgently seeking the aid of a peasant-class rabbi. 

 

Jim and I both served stints as hospital chaplains.  We worked at a large hospital in Louisville that served as the trauma center for its region.  That meant that people were often brought in long distances by helicopter.  I remember being with families from the hills of Eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest areas in our nation.  There I was, a young student chaplain, with my college degree and my middle-class clothing and mannerisms. And there was the family of someone in medical crisis who desperately needed someone to provide comfort and solace in ways that they could understand.   We were citizens of the same country, speaking the same language, but our vocabulary and worldviews were radically different.   Sometimes I was rejected because a woman preacher was a contradiction in terms for them.   Sometimes I was ineffective because I couldn’t find a way across the many barriers between us.  Sometimes, by the grace of God, we were able to connect.  Jim once established a relationship by demonstrating that he knew the words to the song “Delta Dawn.”  What usually worked for me was Psalm 23 or the Lord’s Prayer, in the King James Version. 

 

When all else fails, sometimes, the language of scripture and prayer might work.  That’s what the Canaanite woman tries.  She calls Jesus “Son of David”.  It’s a Jewish title, a phrase from Scripture. And she says, “Have mercy on me” which echoes many of the psalms, prayers where someone pleads with God. 

 

As human beings, we are most comfortable when people stay in their proper places, when they act in familiar, expected ways.   But it’s also true that when people cross boundaries, when they emigrate to other countries, when they try on new roles, when they challenge the notion of being in an assigned place – that’s when life gets interesting and complex.  Less comfortable maybe, but definitely more interesting. 

 

If the woman doesn’t know her place, it seems that in this story, that Jesus might not know his.  This story is not like any other story we have about Jesus.  A woman comes to him pleading for help and his response is to ignore her.  That was probably the appropriate response for a man in his culture, but it’s a bit surprising from Jesus.  She keeps yelling and the disciples say,  “Send her away.” “Get rid of her.”   Then Jesus says that his mission is to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, implying that he won’t help her because she’s not Jewish. And when she comes and kneels in front of him begging for help, he calls her a dog.   I summarized the story pretty much like that once while talking to a person who rarely attended church.  This person said, “That doesn’t sound like him.”  Right.  Even an unchurched person realizes that this doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know from the rest of the gospels.   

 

So what is going on?  Why is Jesus so unlike himself in this story?  Any answers we develop are speculative.  We just can’t know what was in his mind that day, but as I said, it’s when people act in unexpected ways that life gets interesting. 

 

Our drama this morning suggested that there was non-verbal communication that we don’t see in the text, that Jesus’ tone of voice or something in his manner communicated to the woman that he wasn’t serious or that he was testing her.  Personally I find that one hard to buy.  In other places, the gospel writers provide parenthetical interpretations to the readers.  They translate Aramaic words or they speak as an aside, (now he did this to show such and such).  This behavior is such a departure for Jesus that I believe that if Jesus was winking at the woman while he called her a dog, Matthew would have let us know.  To be fair though, I have to say that many scholars do accept this explanation or the similar explanation that Jesus was quoting a well-known proverb and not necessarily endorsing it. 

 

Other possibilities:  Jesus may be angry -- maybe at her for infringing on his vacation, maybe still at Herod for killing John, maybe at his disciples for not taking care of her themselves.   Or maybe he is still defining his ministry.  No one can do everything and his primary purpose is to reach Jewish people.   And besides Jesus’ very own Bible tells him not to show mercy to her people. 

 

For reasons unknown to us, Jesus just seems to blow it.  He speaks harshly and with derision.  His words seem mean and racist. 

 

Fortunately, before the story ends, Jesus changes his mind and agrees to heal her daughter. He doesn’t attempt to excuse his behavior or to save face.  Instead he says, “Woman, great is your faith.”

 

How has she demonstrated her faith?  By her persistence,

by making a scene,

by forgetting her place, 

by her quick wit,

by refusing to be cowed by Jesus – all of this demonstrates a bedrock belief inside of her that Jesus can heal her daughter,  and that she, a Gentile, is as worthy of God’s attention as anyone else.  As she turns to go home, I would not be surprised to see on her ox-cart the first version of the bumper sticker “Well-behaved women rarely make history.” 

 

This is not perhaps the usual picture of a model disciple.  Sometimes I think we have a domesticated version of discipleship.  We confuse being loving with being nice.  We think that Christians are all gentle people who never make waves, never make a scene, never raise their voices. 

 

In this text, Jesus seems to re-think some of the ideas he has been taught.  He repents of his prejudice.  If he can do it, so can we.  We can remember that there are no boundaries on God’s love and so should not be on ours.

 

Or perhaps what we need to re-think is our understanding of self-denial and self-assertion.  Some of us have been taught a great deal about obedience, but not enough about questioning tradition.  That’s what the woman did.  Some of us have been taught that calling attention to ourselves is inappropriate even when we’re calling attention to a larger problem, to issues of suffering and oppression.

 

In contrast, Jesus praises her not for being meek and mild, but for asserting herself and her daughter in the name of love and justice.  Do we hear this?  This woman’s faith is most evident when she forgets or forsakes her place, when she violates other people’s expectations, when she makes other people, including Jesus, uncomfortable with her demands.  Some of us in this room are already self-assertive.  I am not encouraging us to become pushier. But some of us need to know that finding the courage to speak up, to stand up, can be one of the most faith-filled things we can do. 

 

I wonder if sometimes, we don’t assert ourselves because we don’t believe in ourselves enough.  We don’t have the faith of the Canaanite woman who believed that she was worthy of God’s attention.  Sisters and brothers, we are made in the image of God and we are loved by God.   We are worthy of God’s attention because God says we are. 

 

And sometimes, I wonder if it’s not faith in ourselves that we lack, but faith in God.  There would have been no point in being persistent and yelling and making a scene if she hadn’t believed that Jesus had the power to help.  Is it possible that we don’t do that because we no longer believe that God can help us? 

 

This woman uses the language of the psalms when she petitions Jesus for help. What she does is like prayer. Except that she prays with vigor.  She screams at Jesus and when he doesn’t respond, she does it again and again.   When he offers an unsatisfactory response, she makes a counter offer. How many of us pray like that?

 

Walter Bruggemann is a well-respected Old Testament scholar.  Writing about Jacob who wrestled with God, Bruggemann says, “I propose that too much conventional church prayer is excessively soft and accommodating, and has lost the defiant edge that belongs to petitionary prayer. Such prayers are softened in our common usage, on the one hand, by defeatist piety too much shaped by moralism. That is, prayer assumes that in our condition we have no rights to press or insist upon vis-à-vis God.” (In the case of the Canaanite woman, it is precisely that persistence, that insistence, which Jesus ultimately finds commendable.)

 

Bruggemann continues, “On the other hand, such softened prayer is influenced by modernist secularism which does not ask much, because God has become a stable object but no active subject. I.e., we do not pray vigorously because we do not imagine a God who could respond vigorously or effectively. Our sense of self is too humiliated and our sense of God is too emptied to pray with the nerve and robustness that father Jacob readily utters."[3]  I think this description of Jacob applies just as well to the Canaanite woman.

 

We do not pray vigorously because we do not imagine a God who could respond vigorously or effectively?  If that resonates with you, see what you can learn from this woman. 

 

The woman inspired Jesus.  She changed his heart and probably helped him see that God’s purpose for him was larger than he had ever imagined.  May she do the same for us.  Let us be bold in following her example of feisty faith, courageous in speaking up, standing up, for all God’s children. And may we hear Jesus saying to us, “Great is your faith!”  Amen.