Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost (Proper 15)
August 14, 2005
Year A
Title: The Conversion of Jesus
When I was in college, my degree program, or, I should say the flexibility
of my particular degree program at the University of Alabama, allowed
me to explore a lot of different thinkers, especially in the realm of
philosophy and religion. I spent a year with the writings of Friedrich
Nietzsche, exploring his world, his beliefs, and then later, I had the
opportunity to spend a semester with the thought of Kierkegaard, the
philosopher and Christian theologian. I was very lucky in being able to
do this, but one of the more interesting figures from that time in my life
was a more modern philosopher by the name of Ludwig Wittgenstein,
who was a contemporary of Bertrand Russell, the well-known British
philosopher who was also famous for his very public atheism.
Wittgenstein was born in 1889, the youngest of 8 children, to a wealthy
Prussian family, though it was troubled family–three of his four brothers
eventually committed suicide. He essentially trained himself as a
philosopher after World War I, inherited his family fortune, and
subsequently gave it all away. He wrote one or two major books,
became an elementary school teacher, and then eventually taught at
Cambridge in England. Though he was given a Catholic baptism and
burial, he never practiced his faith, but the language of faith always
fascinated him. He believed that it was important to pay attention to our
language, to the way we humans use words and the way those very
words create worlds—emotional, spiritual, and philosophical worlds. To
pay attention to language, and to the human "language games" we
participate in, as Wittgenstein called it, is to pay attention to the world
itself, for the logic within the language creates the world as each of us
knows it and experiences it. One of his more familiar and famous
sayings is this: “the limits of my language means the limits of my world”
and that if we want to understand the world, we must come to understand
the power of language as we humans use it to create meaning for
ourselves.
It has always struck me as true, this understanding of the power of
language, though I am pretty sure I’ve not always understood or been as
self-aware as Wittgenstein was regarding the meaning-making power of
language. But it seems true, and our text from the Gospel of Matthew
today seems to hint at that truth, that the words we use carry great
power—in fact, the language we use carries the power to change us, to
transform us, and maybe, maybe, even the power to transform God. I’ll
get to what I mean by this in a second, but I want us to look at these two
texts before us this morning, one that specifically talks about the power
of language and words, and the other where we see words being
exchanged between two human beings, and the transformation that
happens for both Jesus and this strong-willed, powerful Canaanite
woman.
In the narrative right before he begins speaking here, Jesus has taken
on the religious elders around him for being selective in the way they
apply the religious law they have been given by God, and he uses the
example of how parents are treated by some of these people, calling
them out for being, essentially, hypocrites. And yet, there seems to be a
sense throughout his criticisms of the religious elders throughout the
Gospels that he doesn’t want to eradicate the religious laws that formed
much of Jewish life, as much as he hopes to remind people that the point
of following the rules is to transform the heart, not to simply follow the
rules. Jesus criticisms here is nothing new, and certainly was not
extraordinary in the sense that Jewish thinkers during Jesus’ time and
subsequent centuries have always called people to the heart of the
matter, which is not the rules themselves, the religious law given by and
through Moses, but the truth behind the rules, what the rule itself hints
at, the life lived out in the following of the religious rules.
And yet here, Jesus seems to be challenging all of the tradition, by
saying that it is not what we put into our mouths that makes us unclean,
that makes us spiritually dirty, a belief that directly challenges the dietary
laws of his own tradition. Instead, he says, it is what comes out of our
mouths, the language and the words, that really expose our hearts, that
exposes that world within each of us, that place full of shadow light, full of
mixed motives and good intentions, that makes us unclean. And, as I
hinted at earlier, Jesus seems to be all over the map when it comes to
religious laws of his day, but here he is clear: the words we use, the
language we employ to tell our stories, or even to tell the stories of
others, they reveal more about us than even our actions in this world,
what we eat, what rules we do follow and don’t follow. Words expose our
hearts, they reveal our insecurities, they make known what we really
think, what we really believe, beyond the niceties and appropriateness of
our actions—words, language, they reveal an inner world, maybe the
only world that really matters, where both human goodness and human
evil dance together. The complexity of our lives, and even the
complexity of our motives, they get eventually get “outed” by our words,
our language, how we say what we say about ourselves, and about
others, even about the larger universe.
And that is a problem, isn’t it, this challenge to listen ourselves, to really
listen to the stories we are telling, so that we can see the world we are
creating with our words, to see the world inner world reflected in the
words we speak out into the universe. I remember a couple of years
ago, I had a story I used to tell anyone who would listen to it—you know
the story, we all tell them about ourselves, the stories of what has been
to us, of the many injustices we have endured at the hands of the cruel
and unfair world. I was the hero of my story, of course, as we all are, in
the telling of our personal histories. I had been telling this particular
story for years, it had become a part of my shtick, to be honest, but
about 6-7 years ago, I kept noticing that it became harder and harder to
tell, until one day, in yet another chance to tell this same story with
someone else, I just sort of started trailing off in the middle of it, until I
just stopped, and said something to the effect, “Never mind, I don’t want
to tell that story anymore.”
I don’t know what happened, to be honest, but I just think I came to the
point of just realizing what the continuous telling of that particular story
had done to me—it had made me mostly bitter, mostly mistrustful of the
world and institutions and of people. That old story had come to fail me
at that point, because the bitterness from that earlier experience was, for
the most part, now gone. The story didn’t work for me anymore,
because, of course, my story had gone on, it had continued, my life had
gone on, and yet I remained telling the same old story, stuck in time, and
the story I had been telling all those years had tended to stop at a place I
was no longer at—I mean, life had gone on, something good had come
out of it, resurrection had happened, but I had gotten stuck on telling a
story of crucifixion. Now, don’t get me wrong, crucifixion is as real as
resurrection, and I’m not diminishing my own pain over the past—but the
story didn’t work anymore and because I got stuck telling that story,
using a “language game,” to use Wittgenstein’s words, that not only
didn't work anymore, it had continued to hold me captive to the past,
event though while I was living here in this moment, reaping some of the
wisdom and goodness that had come out of that difficult experience.
Now, to be honest, I got a new story now, though I suspect I will be
unpacking that one that soon enough, and, not surprisingly, I am STILL
the hero of my own story, as I suspect we all are, but I think I am more
aware of what Jesus’ seems to be saying here—that words matter, that
language heals or hurts, and how we use it either helps us or hinders us,
it either enriches us, or, as Jesus says here, it defiles us, it dirties
emotionally and spiritually.
And after Jesus words on the power of language, we have this story
before us, a story of a woman who uses language well—in fact, she uses
so powerfully that it changes every one around her, including this Jesus
of Nazareth, this itinerant preacher who has now found himself in her
neck of the woods. She is a Canaanite woman—in the Gospel of Mark
she is named as the Syrophoenician women, which automatically makes
her an outsider to the Jewish people, Jesus’ people. The narrator says
she has come to out of the crowd, after this piece where Jesus talks
about the power of words, she comes out of the crowd shouting—and
that is right word here—she screams, she begs for the healing of her
daughter, tortured, she believes, by a demon, by something outside of
herself. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David,” are her words—these
words are familiar to us because they have been used for centuries in
the church’s Mass, to appeal to God for mercy and presence. She is
bold beyond her status—she is a woman, she has no right to speak to a
man directly in this culture, but this does not stop her—she does not
whisper her request, her demand is loud and annoying, her voice, her
words, her language trembling with desperation and emotion.
But more stunning than the loudness of the pleas is the silence that
comes from Jesus—he ignores her, and the narrator makes it obvious
that he ignores her because the disciples have to finally ask him to tell
her to go away—“if you’re not going to do anything, then get rid of her,”
they seem to be saying to Jesus. I mean, the picture of Jesus here in
this passage is disturbing, and yes, Jesus gives us a reason moments
later for ignoring her—his mission is first to the people of Israel, and then
everyone else, the Gentiles, an argument you see echoed in the later
writings of the New Testament, especially Paul’s letter to the church at
Rome. Still, there is something distressing here about seeing our picture
of the gentle, loving Jesus challenged by what we see here in this story,
the seeming coldness of his reaction to this woman’s request of him to
heal her daughter.
But she will not be ignored, she will not stop speaking, her voice and the
needs of her daughter will not be ignored, and she responds by kneeling
before him, begging him for his mercy—but, again, Jesus responds by
pointing out that his mission is to his people first, that to be fair, the best
is to go to those whom he has been first sent to share the good news
with, the Jewish people—and the term he uses here to describe the non-
Jews, the Gentiles here, the word “dog” is actually stronger, more
insulting than in the original language than the English translation here
conveys. But she won’t give up—she responds with her own words, her
own language—she fiercely believes in the possibility of what this one
from Nazareth can do for her daughter—and she makes her case that
even the dogs deserve the scraps from the table. She challenges Jesus,
she seeks to change his mind, she argues her case, she uses language
to change her world, and maybe shift the world of this man from
Nazareth, whose passion for his own people has perhaps blinded him to
the need of others, people who are in as much need of good news and
healings as the people who are his own. It’s a startling moment, really,
this conversation between Jesus and this Canaanite woman because it
reminds us of the power of language, and how powerful it may really be
in this world, in this universe.
Let me explain myself, if that is really possible. Generally, in the
Christian tradition, it is believed that some sort of revelation happened in
the life of this Jesus of Nazareth, and though we Christians for centuries
have disagreed about what that revelation is and was—certainly, that
diversity is reflected right here in this place, at FCC, in the many ways we
understand the life and meaning of this One we follow. But I’ve often
wondered if the revelation that has come to us through this Jesus didn’t
go both ways? I mean, what if we humans revealed as much to God as
God revealed to us through this Jesus, some two thousands of years
ago? What if God learned as much about us humans as we learned
about God in and through the life of this Jesus? To have a relationship
implies the possibility of change, for both sides of the relationship—in
fact, there must be that openness to change for anything to go forward
in any relationship, because life is change, good and bad, and usually
both. And if that is the case, what does this moment mean, this
exchange between Jesus and the Canaanite woman? I think it might
mean many things, but I do think, for me, it means this first and foremost:
that language has the power change the world, and most certainly it has
the power to change our lives, and it may even have the power to
change God. Because this woman will not let go, because she knows
and believes that the gift of what this Jewish preacher brings includes
her, she has shifted the world, the universe, for herself, and maybe even
the one she kneels before—perhaps he too has been converted. “In the
beginning was the Word,” John writes at the beginning of his Gospel,
and out of the Word came all of creation—great power to create, to
renew, to transform.
In the passage, this powerful woman, this outsider is credited by Jesus
as having great faith—her passionate words, her conversation with him
has convinced him that she has something he has rarely seen in his
travels, and that is faith—but here’s the kicker: is this what faith looks
like—persistent, demanding, relentless in the face of silence? In her
conversation with Jesus, in the words she has used and the world she
has created by that persistent demand to be in dialogue, to be in
conversation with God, she is named as faithful—not the disciples, she is
the one named having the kind of faith that can move mountains—
maybe she even moved God. I don’t know, but I think all of this should
remind us that our words, and the lives we create by the words we use,
they need our attention. Language, words, this is powerful stuff, it is the
building block of creation, and if so, we ought to pay attention to the
world each of us creating through own words. Amen.
