The Conquering of Conquest

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost, August 16, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty.

One of the powerful things about the relationship between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament is that the latter often contains a creative reworking of the former in light of the love and mercy revealed in the person of Jesus. Jesus himself doesn’t just quote, or recite scripture, he interprets it creatively in light of his intimate relationship with the Father; he improvises with it like a jazz musician playing a standard. You might recall at the beginning of Luke’s gospel, for example, where Jesus stands up in the synagogue and reads those famous mission-defining lines from Isaiah, 

…[T]he scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor  (Luke 4: 16-19).

It sounds like Jesus is just being a good Sunday lector at first--faithfully reading from the scroll of Isaiah chapter 61. But if we go back and read Isaiah 61 we find that while the text is nearly identical, Jesus does a little creative omission. Jesus stops reading at the proclamation of the Lord’s favor. And what does he leave out? The second  half of verse 2 in Isaiah 61 reads, “and the day of vengeance of our God.”

What’s Jesus up to here? He’s pruning away our human-all-too-human projections onto God--judgment, vengeance, punishment and the once-and-for-all settling of accounts for those we have deemed beyond the pale of God’s mercy--so that the true nature of God’s love can be clearly seen. Jesus’ carefully calculated omission of that last half of the verse is meant to make us aware of the way in which, in the words of Fr. Robert Capon, “... [T]he world is full of fools who won’t believe a good thing when they hear it. Free grace, love, and unqualified acceptance might as well be a fifteen-foot crocodile, the way we respond to it. We will sooner accept a God we will be fed to that one we will be fed by…”

Something similar is going on with the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Now the first thing to see is that the term “Canaanite” is wildly anachronistic. Mark, you remember, uses the more contemporary term, “Syro-Phonecian.” Matthew, however, uses a term that Paul Nuechterlein likens to calling a 21st century resident of Oslo a “Viking.” It’s that odd. But in the context of the broader sweep of Holy Scripture, “Canaanite” has very definite, very loaded, connotations.  In Deuteronomy, as the people of Israel stand swords in hand and ready to conquer the land, their leader, Moses, says to them:

When the LORD your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations — the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you — and when the LORD your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy. Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, for they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods. (Deut 7:1-5)

So Matthew is using a term that in the story of the people of Israel is indicative of nothing short of genocidal violence. Indeed, the Canaanites in many respects were considered the worst of the worst--enemies not just of Israel, but of God in Godself. It’s this so-called God-sanctioned slaughter that Matthew’s Jesus comes to undo, overturn, and recast in the light of mercy, abundance, feeding, and healing. And he does this in the figure of the Canaanite woman who represents a fourfold threat due to her gender, her ethnicity, her historical associations as an enemy of God, and the mother of a demon-possessed child. It doesn’t get much more marginal than that. 

Now to get a real sense of what exactly Jesus is up to in this encounter, we have to look backwards and forwards in Matthew’s Gospel to the two feeding miracles and specifically to the bread that’s left over (the crumbs!) in each story. In the first feeding miracle in Matthew 14 we read that there were “twelve baskets full.” This is often read as symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel being reconstituted in the person of Jesus--that he is the new manna leading them through their contemporary wilderness as the bread of life. Immediately after our reading for today, we get another feeding miracle where we have “Seven [loaves], and a few small fish” (15:34). Why seven? Well, go back to that list of genocide victims from Deuteronomy. We have the “Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, seven nations larger and stronger than you.”

So what starts to emerge here is an entirely different kind of conquest. It’s a conquest of mercy rather than the sword--for God desires mercy and not sacrifice (Hosea 6:6). Conquest is conquered. The entire spirit of sacrifice and cyclical violence is conquered. All notions of exclusion--those who are in and those who are out, those on the top and those on the bottom, clean and unclean, Jew, Gentile, or Canaanite--are conquered. Brian McLaren writes,

If Jesus’ first feeding miracle and its twelve-basket surplus suggest a reconstitution of the twelve tribes being led through the wilderness with a new kind of manna, then this second feeding miracle suggests a new kind of conquest — not with swords and spears, but with bread and fish; not to destroy, but to serve and heal. Jesus seizes the old narrative, shakes it, turns it inside out, and offers a new story that reframes a future radically different from the past. 

But how does this transformation from swords and spears to bread and fish, from destroyers to healers take place? What’s the engine of this radical reframing?

The Canaanite woman! It’s through her barbed repartee with Jesus that Jesus’ own, arguably exclusivist, notions of the scope of his mission are enlarged. It shifts from being, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” to a boundaryless mission to all peoples without exception. It’s fair to say that Jesus’ whole understanding of himself and his mission changes as a result of this plucky, clever, exchange. The Canaanite woman knows Jesus better than he knows himself! She sees the boundary-crossing mercy that is at the heart of Jesus’ true identity, buried under prejudices and preconceptions about “Canaanites as dogs” that Jesus inherited from his 1st century Galilean cultural background. 

That’s why you can say that it is really the Canaanite woman who conquers Jesus. It’s a total reversal of the story from Deuteronomy where Israel lays waste to her foes. The Canaanite woman overturns Jesus’ too-narrow vision of mercy. Yes, she and her daughter are healed in the encounter--her daughter from her illness and the Canaanite woman from the faceless hell of living as a mere label in the eyes of others--but Jesus is also healed. Healing goes both ways.The woman is healed and her daughter is exorcised of her demon, but Jesus is also suddenly made aware of the demon of hatred of the Canaanites that characterized his cultural upbringing and is healed. Brian McLaren continues,

Matthew’s version of this story makes a confession: Our ancestors, led by Moses and Joshua, believed God sent them into the world in conquest, to show no mercy to their enemies, to defeat and kill them. But now, following Christ, we hear God giving us a higher mission. Now we believe God sends us into the world in compassion, to show mercy, to heal, to feed to nurture and protect life rather than take it.

Growing in awareness of who this Jesus we follow after and call, “Lord” really is, we are made to see how we as members of an historically white privileged mainline denomination have been possessed by demons of conquest. Too often we’ve seen Canaanites where there are only children of God. For too long Sunday has remained the most segregated day of the week.

Importantly, this weaning from conquest, this recasting of conquest as bread, fish, mercy and healing oil to everyone without exception, comes through encounter with the despised other, the one thought previously to be our enemy. What a powerful message for a country trying to face it’s own history of conquest through systemic racism and structural inequality. It’s through listening to the other, seeing them for who they are beyond mere prejudices and preconceptions, listening to their stories, engaging them in dialogue, and being willing to stay at the table with each other that healing can take place. The Canaanite woman’s pluck, courage, and perseverance are indeed a sign for us as well. She stays put just as we need to stay at the table with our brothers and sisters with open ears and open hearts. 

It’s through this kind of charged, spirit-led, and yes let it be said, difficult engagement with one another that our demons and can be seen, named, exorcised, and released that something more like bread, and fish, and mercy, healing oil might come forth. Together, as one body, as members of each other, let conquest be conquered that we might exclaim with the psalmist, “Oh, how good and pleasant it is, when brethren live together in unity.”