Throw it to the dogs

 There's a good chance that if you have a dog, it wants what you're eating.  By and large, those four legged garbage disposal systems will just sit by the table, and hope you drop something.  And most families who own dogs whose houses I go to will say 'now, please, don't feed Chester.  No matter how much he begs."  And Chester would sit there, with the literal puppy-dog eyes, waiting and begging for you to drop some hot dog, chicken breast, or bread slice.  They want it really bad, and they will set and beg for anything that you could possibly drop.  

Now, that's to do with things that you might possibly drop.  But can you imagine a world in which you would sit down at the table, the dog would beg, and instead of Chester waiting for you to drop a crumb of your roll, you instead got up, and tossed your kid's food on the floor, feeding Chester, but letting your child go hungry.  

Now, what would you say about that kind of parent?  Well, that's a fair question, and likely we would all come to the same conclusion - bad parent.  No doubt.  But the bad parenting would be based on bad priorities.  Not that the dog shouldn't be fed, of course, but you should probably feed the child the child's food, and the dog the dog's food.  After all, which one of you, if your child asks for an egg would give a scorpion, right?  Well, sure.  You get this, I'm sure.  It's not hard or complicated.  But where it gets complicated, I suppose, is if that priority doesn't exist where we think it should.

So, now, what to do with the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus asking for healing for her child? I have heard no end of agony this week from clergy who don't quite know what to make of this interaction.  Jesus ignores the woman, then when he is pressed by her, says 'it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.'  Now, you have already agreed to that thesis statement, so you don't disagree with his words in principle, but what do you do with them in any kind of practical sense? And what do you do with that proposition when Jesus levels it against a woman who is asking for help for her daughter, possessed by a demon?  

Well, this is why we get tied into knots.  And I was sad to read and to hear how many people in how many churches were going on record as saying that this was some kind of evidence of the humanity of Christ - that is, he was tired, he was overworked, and he snapped at her.  One sermon that I listened to said that 'we expect perfect Jesus to be nice all the time.' But hopefully that isn't true, because for an awful lot of the Bible, Jesus isn't nice at all.  Instead of being meek and mild, he is mean and wild.  He gets angry, he hurts people with his words, he causes them to weep at a look, that kind of thing.  And he can be hard as nails, not the nice kind of pushover the culture would tell us to expect. Unlike a lot of people, I don't need Jesus to be nice to be good, because those are frequently two different things.  It isn't nice to jail the prisoner, nor is it nice to drill the tooth.  But those things are good, and necessary if you want good to be done.  Frequently to be good means not being nice in the slightest, and few of us have the stomach for it.  Fewer of us still would have the approach that Jesus took with this woman, where he rudely reminds her that at the table, she is a dog begging for scraps. She is the Chester in this situation. 

We immediately rush to her defense, or at least want to.  But why? Why are we so quick to explain Christ away on this one? Why do we want to do what the Canaanite woman refuses to do, which is to be elevated beyond her station? Why are we so desperate to defend her honor here even if doing so besmirches the sinless character of Christ our Lord?  Well, a lot of that has to do with how we see ourselves.  

I'll explain.  Bound up in our desire to push back against Christ's words here is our understanding that we see ourselves in the scriptures, and we see ourselves pleading with Jesus for help.  And we for sure don't want him to dismiss us by saying that it isn't right to throw the children's bread to the dogs.  We want him to listen to us, hear us out, and essentially treat us as equals.  Or no, not even that.  We want to be in charge. We want him to work for us. We want to come to him, tell him what we need, and have him essentially hop to it, right?  And that has had an incredibly detrimental effect on our theology.

Just like it did with the Pharisees.

I want you to think about this, truly and genuinely.  I want you to think about the Pharisees, what their problem was, and why it was that Jesus was so hard on them.  They were the opposite of 'spiritual but not religious,' but were instead 'religious but not spiritual.'  That is, they were very hung up with the ritual, and with their ability to keep it. And their relationship with God became even more than transactional, their relationship with God became a matter of being able to say that God should be on their side just because they were themselves. They are children of Abraham, after all, and should deserve some sort of recognition, right?  Well, not really.  

That problem with the Pharisees is still a problem with us.  I know we want to fight for the honor of this Canaanite woman, sticking up for her against mean ol Jesus, but in reality, he has every right not only to talk down to her, but to all of us as well. There should be a chilling effect here, where we realize in this moment that Jesus Christ has every right to speak to all of us in like fashion.  It is not right to take the bread of heaven and toss it to the dogs, is it? Well, it's not? Effectively, we are all begging for scraps here, none of us has a space at the table just because we're us.  And this has led to all kind of clerical and theological abuses, where we have told people 'God loves you just the way you are, and you have nothing to change.  And in fact, God will change the entire fabric of core morality to fit what you feel like you want to do at any given moment.'  That's incredibly dangerous, and is so elastic that it would let absolutely anyone do absolutely anything and to have God back them up on it.  AND THEY DO.

But Christ tells this woman, and tells us as well, that he has been sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.  Not us. And that if we were to press him on it, he would say that it is not right to take the bread of heaven, the food of salvation, and to toss it away from the one who deserves it, and to toss it to us who definitely don't.  That's not the right thing to do, and we all agree with that statement.  But we don't like it when we are the undeserving ones.  We want to defend the woman here because to let Christ say what he says to her means that he has every right to say it to us too, which he can, and which he should.

And that's what Grace is, people.  

Grace is completely undeserved.  Grace is salvation that is unearned.  Grace is God giving us what Christ himself has earned, not what we are entitled to.  It is taking the bread of the son, and tossing it to those who have no right to eat it.  If you want to understand the story of the New Testament, you're going to have to understand Jesus, the son of God, the only one who deserves the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation, and having it being given instead to the dogs who have no right to it at all.  

The Canaanite woman's faith was expressed in a rare gift not just for now, but for then, too.  She lived it out in humility.  And that's a crazy thing, you know.  Humility is very rare these days, especially given how much time we all spend magnifying ourselves in private and in public, wanting to be seen, wanting to be noticed, wanting to be appreciated immensely for how grand and wonderful we are.  And it's very rare to find anyone, in the church or otherwise, who would let anyone even God himself talk down to them.  But he should.  The story of the scriptures is the story of Grace.  The story of the scriptures is the story of God's riches at Christ's expense.  It's the story of the one who deserves heaven and having it tossed to those who don't deserve it.

Is it fun to hear that you don't deserve it? Nah, not really. And it's not fun to hear that you're begging for scraps, either.  But you are, and so am I? None of us deserves a space at that table, which is why the good news is such good news. Because of Christ, the bread of heaven is given to those who for sure don't deserve it.  It's not right to do that, and it's not fair to do that.  But it is merciful.  And that's what the Canaanite woman wanted. Mercy. And we need to understand that we're asking for that too.  Not for justice, not for fairness, not for wages or pay, but for mercy. And that's what the Canaanite woman got, and that's what we get too.  You're not going to find it by insisting, by stomping your feet, by insisting, and by leaving when things don't go your way. You're going to find it by cleaving to the mercy of Jesus Christ, who takes what should be his by right, and gives it to you and me.

Eat up

There are crowds that follow Jesus Christ around all the time.  Here and there, traipsing around him all over the countryside, following wherever he may lead, and why not? He is there performing miracles, healing the sick, raising the dead, and restoring to health those who are compromised.  And the people following him all over the place do so with little regard for their own well-being, safety, or how they will look after themselves.  And after they have been wandering with Jesus for a while, we get to the reading that we have from Matthew for today, where they end up in a desolate place, where there was no food to be had.  Now, Jesus had actually been trying to get away from the crowds, but when he saw them, he dealt with their presence, healed their sick, and spend all day working with them.  When evening came, the disciples came to Jesus and said to him 'This is a remote place, and it is getting late.  Send the crowds home so they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.'

The conclusion, the reasonable conclusion that the disciples had reached was that Jesus should send these people home so they could tend to themselves.  They needed to take care of their own needs, according to the disciples.  And that makes sense.  Desolate place, no place to get food, no place to get resources, all of that.  And the disciples, knowing this, put the responsibility to Jesus, saying that he should tell them that they should go away, and feed themselves.  But Jesus puts the onus right back on them - "That isn't necessary.  You feed them."

That deft movement cuts through what the disciples had wanted Jesus to do.  And truly, it cuts through what the vast majority of preachers want Jesus to do, too.  For what the churches want Jesus to say is that the people who have needs, who have difficulties and hangups, who don't know what to do or how to navigate their lives, that Jesus should tell them to go and take care of themselves.  Wouldn't that be easy?  That would be so straightforward, but that's not what Jesus of Nazareth says or does.  We ask him to dismiss the people, but he responds by saying 'No.  You feed them.'  And that's where we all have the same response 'We have only five loaves of bread and two fish.'

We want Jesus to send people away. He puts the question back to us - You feed them.  And that's when we tell Jesus, straight up, that we are inadequate, and cannot get that job done.  Because we can't.  There is no way that we can get that job done, given the meager resources that we've got.  And that's a sobering thing.

Hopefully you've worked that out by now, though.  These unprecedented times should have shone a massive light on your inadequacies.  2020 is the year in which we all had to come to terms with the reality that we are incapable of getting that job done.  What job?  Gosh, any of them. Even the simplest jobs, the most straightforward jobs that we had assumed that we could do forever.  We figure that we could keep our families safe, buy food, get to markets and gather resources.  We figured that we could go to graduations, that we could come together with friends, go on vacation, all those things that we were absolutely sure that we could do.  And nothing.  This is the year where you are rudely confronted with the reality that you actually can't do what you planned to do, and that you can't accomplish what you had planned to accomplish.  People in the scriptures are confronted with this reality all the time, where they had been comfortable, happy, full of themselves, and then saw that they were miles off from where they wanted to be.  God was the only one who was able to accomplish what they wanted,  and they themselves were incapable.  When the disciples gather their resources, they pull together an amount of food that wouldn't have given each person who was there even a crumb.  

And so, yes, this story on its surface seems to be about holy tricks, you know, but in reality, it is, as they all are, also a story about you and Christ.  It's a story about you and me, and you and I, and Jesus Christ.  When people get needy, we want Jesus to send them away for us.  When their needs manifest themselves, we sort of want Jesus to dismiss them, and to give them a swift exit.  They should got and meet their needs themselves, right?  But Jesus doesn't do that.  He doesn't say to us that these people should meet their own needs.  Rather, he puts the question back to us: Why don't you feed them?  Impossible!  If we gave everything we had, at ever moment, in every way, we would never be able to satisfy all the needs of the world.

Normally, understanding that would lead us to despair, to give up, and to not bother.  But think on this for a moment: Think of how much food the disciples had even for themselves. They're not coming into things with massive resources for themselves either.  For the 12 of them (13 if you count Christ, which you'd better), they only had five loaves, and two fish. In another story, remember, that's about what one boy had for himself. Something you have to remember about this story is that the disciples didn't even have enough food to feed themselves. Forget sending everyone away to tend to their own needs, the disciples couldn't even handle their own needs.  Even if Christ sent everyone else to meet their own needs themselves, the disciples were going to go hungry, if you see what I mean.  When Jesus tells them that they should give the people food, and the disciples respond that it would be impossible, then they should think about their inability to feed themselves, much less anyone else.  

And that's when Christ steps in.  If the people can't satisfy themselves, and you can't feed them, then what is left?  It is the power of Christ to feed and to sustain.  Not just to give food for a moment, but satisfaction for eternity.  The bread of life, the bread of heaven, the food of salvation.  The water that you don't have to draw over and over again.  This power of Christ that we see at work in this reading is, as usual, a foretaste of the greater matter that we have to consider.  The final resolution of all scarcity and want.  The end of everything that is an immense lack and destruction.  Christ multiplies loaves and fish on that day, but it's always in service of a much bigger miracle - that of the restoration of the eternal kingdom to all of us.