Mercy is for the Dogs

The Rev. Paddy Cavanaugh, 12th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 15, 8/20/23

Readings: Gen. 45:1-15 (Reconciliation of Joseph and Benjamin), Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 (God is merciful to all), Matt. 15:(10-20)-21-28 (Jesus and the Canaanite Woman)

In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, amen.

This week I have been busy preparing so that everything is in order once I return from my wedding in two weeks. As I sat down to begin working on my sermon for this Sunday, I was hoping that the lectionary would throw me a soft ball that would help me in this task. Something nice and pleasant that I could maybe tie into love or nuptials, or going back to school, or these lovely days of late summer.

However, as we have just heard from the lips of our Lord, this optimistic wish of mine was not granted. Instead we receive today one of the most difficult and baffling passages in all of the Gospels. Let’s quickly revisit what was just proclaimed.

In the first section of the Gospel, St. Matthew recounts an episode in which Jesus rebukes certain Pharisees who are overly scrupulous about maintaining dietary laws with the pithy response “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” (Matt. 15:11). This part is simple enough. Jesus is saying that the way we treat others around us is a more accurate reflection of the state of our soul than how pious we act.

But then, in the episode that immediately follows, Jesus is hounded by a Canaanite woman who wants him to heal her possessed daughter and he responds by first, ignoring her, second, by telling her that God’s blessings are not for mangy mutts such as herself, and then finally healing her, only after she doubles down on her desperate pleas.

In summary, the Gospel today tells us that Jesus, after having just lectured the Pharisees on watching the words that come out of their mouths, turns around and calls this poor woman a dog! This woman whose daughter is possessed and who knows that Jesus, the Son of God and physician of souls, is her only hope for deliverance.

Now I have heard a number of interpretations and apologies for Jesus’s behavior this passage. The defense I find most amusing is that Jesus, in calling the Canaanite woman a dog, really means something diminutive and endearing; that he is referring to her as a little puppy dog, like a beloved family pet. As sweet as this would be if it were true, I’m not inclined to believe it. There are certainly some technical grammatical challenges in translating this passage, but I don’t think one needs an advanced degree in Biblical Greek to understand that calling someone a dog has maintained an impressively consistent meaning across time and culture. In fact, I’m willing to bet that anyone who has survived high school could understand its meaning very clearly. That’s all to say, it’s not a very nice thing for anyone, let alone the Son of God, to call someone a dog.

So why? Why would Jesus, who at this point in his ministry had healed countless others before her, suddenly change course and respond to this desperate woman with such apparent hostility?

I’ll tell you what I think. Let’s first refresh ourselves on some of the social and religious nuances of the time. In 1st Century Roman Palestine, the Jewish community, of which Jesus and his disciples belonged, were living under the occupation of the Roman empire, where they routinely experienced the cultural degradation that always comes with being colonized, particularly by a military state such as Rome, which brought with it a national mythos of Roman social and cultural supremacy. Under this regime of Roman supremacy, the Jews were deliberately made to feel like an underclass within their own land.

Now, the Jews of 1st Century Palestine, of course carried their own prejudices, just like every ethnic group has since the dawn of creation, including, of course, ourselves. And for the 1st Century Jewish community, the primary group which they treated as an inferior class of people, were the Canaanites. The Canaanites, as you may know, were a Semitic ethnic and religious group who shared a common genetic and spiritual lineage with the Jewish people themselves.

These Canaanites were loathed by the Jewish people in a way that often happens when one oppressed class encounters another group even more vulnerable than themselves. It was as if the Jews, after having been picked on by a schoolyard bully, went home and kicked their poor dog because it was the only thing they could exert any power over. And speaking of dogs, it was commonplace for Jews to refer disparagingly to Gentiles, such as Canaanites, as dogs with the Greek word kúōn or kunarion, which is the exact word which Jesus applied to the Canaanite woman.

This is a curious use of this word in light of the preceding passage in which Jesus dressed down the Pharisees for being overly concerned with excluding people for failing to maintain extremely rigorous standards of ritual purity. Some Pharisees at the time kept extensive lists of dietary and religious prohibitions which, if violated, could cause you to be banished to the outskirts of town, cut off entirely from the community, and presumably cut off from the mercy of God. So you see, to call someone a dog was insulting because it carried the particular bite – pardon the pun – of meaning something that was ritually unclean. An outcast scavenger not welcome in civilized society.

And for this reason, I believe Jesus using this word, dog, was a stroke of brilliant wit, on his part and on that of the Canaanite woman, because of the exchange that followed. You see, Jesus would have known that his disciples were hanging on to every word exchanged between him and the Canaanite woman. The fact that they were even talking – a ritually unclean Canaanite woman and a male Jewish rabbi-figure, was remarkable. And Jesus at first plays into how the disciples would have expected this conversation to go. When she pleads for mercy from him, he utters the infamous words that “it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” the children here of course being God’s chosen people, the pure and clean Israelites. (Matt. 15:26)

Then the woman, in an act of defiant wit, counters Jesus’s canine characterization of her, and says “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” (Matt. 15:27). To which he responds “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish. And her daughter was healed instantly.” (Matt. 15:28).

This is incredible. The clever back-and-forth volley between them is not only an impressive piece of verbal sparring, it actually reveals to the attentively listening disciples, and to us, a stunning reversal of what they expected to be true about who God’s mercy. Because mercy is what the woman was asking Jesus for in the first place, the mercy to spare her daughter from undue suffering.

And to this heartfelt request that any parent can sympathize with, Jesus responds first by presenting the status quo of exclusion that the disciples expected. The woman is a dog and unclean dogs do not deserve God’s mercy. Only then to promptly and publically overturn it. Jesus overturns the law of exclusion with the law of love, thus affirming the words of the prophet Hosea that God “desires mercy, not sacrifice” (Hos. 6:6, Matt. 9:13).

The important part of the story is that Jesus intentionally does just the opposite of what was socially and religious expected, and thereby redraws, or perhaps, erases entirely, the arbitrary boundaries we place on the extent of God’s love for us. I believe that Jesus, knowing the heart of this poor, downtrodden woman even before he engaged her, allowed her steadfast love and advocacy for her daughter to be a lesson to his disciples and to us about who exactly is worthy of God’s love and mercy.

In this way I count the Canaanite woman among the saints of God whose persistent faith is worthy of our admiration and imitation. The words and deeds of our Lord attest that those who are treated as dogs are those whose faith we often have the most to benefit from. The persistent widow who pleads for justice, the man begging in the heat for hours at a crowded intersection, the children pestering our governments for relief from climate inaction. Jesus points them out as our teachers and is willing to risk his own perceived cleanliness to consort with them. May we too be so bold as to be called dogged for Christ. Dogged for mercy, and for love. Amen.