Send her away

 This week's verses are Matthew 15:21-24:

Jesus went away from there, and withdrew into the region of Tyre and Sidon. And a Canaanite woman from that region came out and began to cry out, saying, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely demon-possessed.” But He did not answer her with even a word. And His disciples came up and urged Him, saying, “Send her away, because she keeps shouting at us!” But He answered and said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

 When people teach about these verses, they usually teach about the woman and her persistent faith that led to Jesus finally healing her daughter. But this week I want to focus on Jesus and how different and ugly his reaction and the reactions of his disciples would have seemed to our judgmental modern eyes.

We start with Jesus and his disciples working their way through Roman-occupied Palestine (Roman Judaea and Syria provinces). They had crossed 20-30 miles past what would become the border of modern Israel, through what would now be Lebanon, heading up the coast towards Beirut. And now, while Jesus is trying to minister to his fellow Jews, this aggressive Lebanese woman is making a loud spectacle and distracting everyone.

The disciples, like well-meaning ministry staff everywhere, were like "Can we please get rid of the crazy woman?" ("If she doesn't shut up, we can't put it on YouTube and use it to build our platform!") We would expect Jesus to have intervened, but up until that point, it seems like they had been ignoring her in the hopes that she would go away.

And not only does Jesus not intervene, but instead he says the first century equivalent of something like "Can't help you, lady. Whites only." And when she pushes the issue, when he answers her that one shouldn't give the children's food to a dog, that's a racial slur, in case you didn't notice. This is not the Jesus we are are expecting!

How would you react if you went to a church and saw the staff ignoring someone in desperate need, and then the pastor had an exchange with her like the one we read about? Would you be as emotionally detached in that room as you might be when reading these verses? We judge the Pharisees for condemning Jesus, but we are only able to avoid it ourselves because we read to the end of the book.

And the Old Testament is full of statements that would fit with Jesus' words about the superiority of Israel over their neighbors. There are even several documented cases in the Old Testament of divinely sanctioned genocide being carried out by Israel against their neighbors. It's difficult for us to relate to the cultural context in which those things took place.

And so we read these verses, and things like them, and we either block them out or we wonder where they could be coming from. But ultimately we have to admit that these are different people in a different time, and that a lot of what God does is not going to always line up perfectly with the moral fashions of our time, no matter how well rooted and noble they may seem to us.

The beautiful thing here, though, is what happens. Jesus uses the situation to show that righteousness doesn't always fall along ethnic lines. While the Jews may have had a covenant with God that gave them favored status, there were Gentiles in foreign territory who distinguished themselves without it. We have to wonder if that may have been his goal all along, and why he traveled this far north.

But would we have stuck with Jesus long enough to see the end of the story if we were there? If we took his exchange out of context, and didn't also think of his miracles with the Roman centurion, and the tender patience he invested in the Samaritan woman by the well, would our modern moral selves have stuck around if we were in that crowd?

And that's the sobering lesson from this week's verses: We have to be careful not to judge the cultures in the Bible and the mind of God by our own cultural context. We are outsiders in that sense. There will be times when we just won't understand. We have to accept that there will be some mystery to be found in what we read. It isn't a story written by us and for us.

So, when you read the Bible, read it all. Do what you can to place yourself in the moment in which these things happened, even if you can't manage it 100%. If you find that you're ignoring, condemning or dismissing what you read, ask yourself if you might also be doing that with God himself, or the people he has sent you to love.