Much grace. Very wow.

The Gospel reading for this Sunday was the one in which Jesus gets as close as he gets to being genuinely offensive.  He gets as close as he gets to being upsetting.  And normally, what we're used to is Jesus being offensive in a particular way, offensive to the Pharisees, calling them whitewashed tombs.  Offensive to the Chief Priests, calling them a brood of vipers.  Offensive to those who figured
that they had it all together, and that they had no real need for God even in their faith.  They figured that God had no place in their faith, which is where an awful lot of American Evangelical Christianity is headed, really. You know, when people say that the Bible is the most important book in the entire world, but have zero idea of its contents?  Yeah, that one.

And yet, in this case, Jesus talks to a nice Caananite woman who asks him for help.  And the disciples tell Jesus to send her away, to be done with her.  She's bugging them, she's in the way, she's loud, she's insistent, and she has real needs.  And the disciples say to Jesus - 'send her away!'  Get rid of this loud, yappy woman!  Send her away for she follows us and bothers us!

And so Jesus tells this woman that he has been sent to the lost sheep of Israel.  Simple statement, really.  He has not been sent to the Caananites, and tells her as much.  So she continues to pester him, continuing to say 'help me, Lord!'  And so Jesus replies that it is not right to take the children's bread, and throw it to the dogs.

Ouch.

You really can't read that a whole bunch of ways.  You can't read that and think, 'no, Jesus wasn't really calling this woman a dog.'  Wasn't he?  Are you sure?  We're part of a church that believes and confesses that, among other things 'is means is,' and yet dog doesn't mean dog?  Yes it does.  It really
does.  You can almost hear the air being sucked out of the room, when Jesus looks this woman full in the face, and tells her that she is a dog.  Oh wow.

Not nice, for a guy who is known as being meek and mild, is it?  Not nice at all.  And why oh why would he look at this woman and call her a dog?  Why would he look at her, straight at her, and call her a dog, and say, essentially, that she is unworthy of the good grace that Jesus would lavish on the people of Israel?

Well, maybe Jesus wasn't the first one that day to treat her like a dog.

Yes, our eyes stop traditionally at the words of Jesus there, saying to this woman that she is a dog, and rightly so.  But there is more to it than that, for the disciples who were there, who saw this Caananite woman, they used words and language that they would use for someone really unimportant.  Someone who was essentially beneath them.  Sort of like a yappy dog.  They told Jesus to send this woman away, tell this dog to get lost already!  Get her out of here, and quit wasting our time, quit taking up our space.   And the disciples have done this other times too, mainly with children, telling the parents of the children to get those kids out of there, and to quit cluttering up the savior.  And Jesus responds to the children in the same way as he does with the Caananite woman, which is by showing them as an example of faith to the dismissive disciples.

Isn't that crazy.  Jesus tells her that she's a dog, which she is, according to the disciples anyway, a yappy, insignificant presence that should be shooed away while the grownups are talking, and she replies with 'yes, yes I am a dog, and yes, all I can hope for is to eat the crumbs that fall on the floor.  Which is why I'm begging.'

Great is your faith, woman!  Great is your faith as someone who has been told that she is a dog, and she responds and says that she is, and is begging at the feet of the Lord.  And it is this that so many other people fail to understand.  For in reality, the only one who deserves the bread of God's grace, the bread of heaven, the bread of salvation, is Jesus Christ himself.  He is the only one, the only son of God, who has a seat at the table.  The rest of us don't have a seat at that table.  We don't get a spot.  And when we approach the throne of God's grace, when we approach the banquet hall and jump up on the table, it's as though we are dogs, leaping up to steal the bread off the table.  The yappy, pushy, drooly dogs who steal food from the children.  And most of us fall into that category, and so too did the disciples.  They fell into that category as well, and all of us would hate to be put into that camp. We wouldn't just be offended for the woman, but also for us.  We are all collectively offended on our own behalf with the reality that it isn't right that we would be seen as begging dogs.

But we are.  We all are. The sooner you get over that, the better it will be.  The sooner you get over the fact that you don't deserve the food at the table, the easier it will be to accept the food that is given to you.  For the Caananite woman, the disciples, the Pharisees, the Saducees, the Chief Priests, the scribes, and you, you're all begging at that table.  None of you are the children who deserve the bread.  And it is only through understanding that, that any bread is given.  Any dog, cat, any type of animal who believe that they deserve a seat at the table are perpetually chased away.  The more you force your
way to that table, the less likely it will be that you will be admitted.  The disciples seem to forget that quite often, believing that they deserve a spot, and that they are the children who deserve the seat at the table.  But they forgot their real status as beggars, in the same way as the Pharisees and chief Priests did.  That was their biggest problem, was that they were so into God that they had no need for him.  They had no need for his forgiveness and love, because they had earned their reward by themselves, at least in their own minds.

But the reality of the Christian church is that we are all beggars hoping for scraps.  We are all dogs beneath the table, none of us deserve God's grace, none of us get to walk straight up to the front and sit down at the best spot.  As Jesus says at another moment that when invited to a feast, you shouldn't take the best place of honor, because you will almost certainly be moved down the bench in shame.  Instead, you ought to take the seat of least honor, so you can be moved up.  And yes, the lowest of all places is on the floor.  Begging.

We all beg from God.  We all beg because we have no health in us, we are sinful by nature and cannot redeem ourselves.  We have erred and strayed by our own fault, by our own most greivous fault.  There is nothing we can hang onto of our own merits that will bring us up to that table. So we beg.  And God gives.

Through Christ, the riches of God are poured out upon us.  We are adopted as children through Baptism, given bread and wine at the table in communion, and given forgiveness of sins through the cross.  And, to quote the book of Romans:

 'For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.  

The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, 

so you live in fear again, rather the Spirit you received brought about your

 adoption to sonship.  And by him we cry 'Abba, Father.'  

The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.  

Now if we are children, then we are heirs.  Heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.'

Romans 8:14-17a

This is why we have a spot at that table.  Because we have been adopted into God's holy family through the suffering and death of Christ.  Any time that you feel as though you are offended if Jesus were to call you a beggar at the table, remember that that is exactly what you are.  A fed beggar, a satisfied beggar, an adopted beggar, but ruin comes upon you, the nation of Israel, the scribes the chief priests, the elders of the people, when they forget where they came from.  It's merit all right.  Christ's merit.

PJ.