Saying is Believing (Matthew 16:13-20)

      Historically, this has been one of the most contested passages in the Bible, and the reason isn’t hard to find: it’s because of this one verse: “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it.”  The controversy is over how Roman Catholics interpret this verse as opposed to Protestants.  Catholics see this as the basis for Apostolic succession—the doctrine that the authority of Christ is passed down through the Apostles, of whom Peter was the first.  Because they trace their Popes back—virtually at least—to Peter, they hold that they are the one, true Church.  Protestants, understandably, don’t buy this, and they argue that the church was founded on Peter’s confession, not his person, and anyway, they say, you can’t trace the Popes back that far, either literally or virtually.

And being Protestant, you can guess where I come down on this, and I imagine most of you hold the same opinion, or why else would you be here?  Why would anyone associate themselves with a church you consider not to be a valid part of the body of Christ?  It would seem to me to be a waste of time, resources and spirituality.  But there’s more to this passage than a church-authority controversy, so let’s forge ahead.

The Gospels can be read as explorations of the identity of Jesus, as attempts to come to grips with just who he is, and if that’s true, then at first glance this passage would seem to be at the center of that effort: after all, the verb “to be” appears six times in these scant eight verses.  But on closer inspection, it’s not so much about who Jesus is as who people say that he is.  After all, that is what he asks his disciples, “who do people say the Son of Man is?”  And he uses a theological title for himself, the meaning of which is still controversial, but he may be referring to his role as the final judge, whose coming is described in Daniel as “one like the Son of Man.”

At any rate, the disciples answer with what they’ve heard out and about, in the countryside: “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”  And notice that people have placed him in old categories, in categories they are familiar with. They’ve assumed he’s something they have seen before, and who can really blame them?  After all, how can a person describe something totally new?  People have to have a referent, something to compare something to, otherwise how can they describe it?  It’s like science fiction movies: why are all aliens kinda like human beings, with appendages and heads and the like?  Or at least, like something else in nature?  Because writers and special-effects people have the same problem: it’s impossible to describe something totally new, totally unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.  Heck, even the Blob looked like a big, hungry slime mold.

But maybe there’s something else at work here as well . . . last week we talked about Jesus’ teaching that it’s what comes out of the mouth that defiles, it's what people say . . . and here Jesus asks who people say that he is.  Are the two connected somehow?  Is this another example of defiling speech?

Well.  After the disciples answer his first question, he asks them another: “But who do you say that I am?”  And though he asks the disciples as a group—using the Greek plural “you”—it is Simon who answers, as often is the case: “You are the Messiah, Son of the living God.”  And I get the feeling that he kinda blurted it out, without thinking, impulsive, as he is often portrayed in the Gospels.  And that’s when it all happens: “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah,” Jesus says, “For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven.”  And notice that this is not a commendation, he’s not saying “good man, Peter, you got it right”.  Neither is Jesus blessing him: he’s (1) telling Peter he is blessed and (2) telling him what the blessing is.  You are blessed, Simon son of Jonah, for, and this is the same as saying “because,” because God has revealed that to you, not anyone human.  Peter is blessed, all right, and the blessing is having Jesus’ true nature given to him by God.

Now.  Following up on our earlier observation about defiling speech, remember that Jesus said that what comes from the mouth defiles because it comes from the heart, but what comes out of Peter is not from his heart, is it?  It’s not from his own consciousness, his own intellect, his own mind.  It’s from God, so it can’t be speech that defiles, can it?  And thinking back, maybe what came out off the Canaanite woman’s mouth was from God as well.  That would explain the apparent contradiction in last week’s lesson . . . If human speech, speech that comes from the heart defiles, no exception, then could what came out of the Canaanite woman’s mouth, like that which came out of Peter’s, be from God as well?

Well.  There’s a technical word for what happened to Peter, and that’s revelation.  Revelation.  God has revealed to Simon Peter just who Jesus is . . . And it certainly isn’t for any visible reason, it certainly isn’t because he is a tower of faith nor anything.  In fact, as portrayed in the Gospels, he’s the one who messes up the most.  But there’s another spin to be put on it as well . . . many scholars think Peter is used as an example by the Gospel writers, that he is supposed to represent the disciples as a group, to represent the average disciple.  If that’s the case, then the revelation is given to the disciples as a group, and the church is founded on the the Apostles as a group.  It’s worth noting that that’s apparently what Paul believed, that his status as Apostle, as the recipient of a revelation directly from God, authorized him to found churches.  In fact, he believed that Peter’s mission was to the Jews and his was to the Gentiles, and he acted on that belief by planting churches all across the Middle East.

And here’s the thing: if you take that view, then the church is not founded upon the person of Peter—whom Jesus calls Satan just a few verses after this--but neither is it founded on his testimony, as some have claimed.  And if you look at the witness of the entire New Testament, a good case can be made that the church is founded not on one person, but on a revelation from God.

But Pastor, you might ask, isn’t the church founded on Jesus the Christ?  After all, that’s what the hymn says, isn’t it?  “The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord?”  Well  . . . yes.  And what is Christ himself but a revelation from God, a revelation of what God is really like, what God’s concerns really are, what God wants us to do?  John doesn’t call him “the Word of God” for nothing . . .

And so the church, the ekklesia, in Greek, is established based upon a revelation from God, an intrusion of God in the world, an intervention, if you will.  And the church—in the person of the apostles, represented here by Peter—is given the keys to the kingdom, which the Roman Catholic Church has interpreted literally, as in you can only get to heaven through them, but it’s pretty clear that what Jesus is referring to is being able to decide what is bound and what is loosed.  And “binding and loosing” is rabbinical language which refers to doctrinal and disciplinary authority.  In other words, the apostles—with Peter as their chief representative—and the church they form are given the responsibility to decide what should become doctrine and what shouldn’t.

In other other words, the church is given the authority to interpret the will of God’s to the world.  And in Matthew’s Gospel, the manner in which Jesus pronounces what is “binding” and what is “loosed” becomes a model for how the church is to practice its task.  We saw it last week: Jesus declared centuries of Jewish doctrine, doctrine based on revelation from God, null and void when he said “. . . it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles."  Mark wasn’t just whistling Dixie when he said “thus he declared all foods clean.”  As Biblical scholar Mitchell G. Reddish writes “Scripture is not static; it must be reapplied to new situations. Just as Jesus applies the teachings of the Torah in fresh and creative ways, the church must be emboldened to interpret the teachings of Jesus in new and inspired ways, attempting both to be faithful to the teachings of Jesus . . . and to be open to the voice of Jesus that speaks through the church to new situations and problems.”

And right about now, it would be useful to look at how our denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), exercises its authority to bind and loose.  It’s particular interpretation of Scriptures is contained in its constitution, which has two parts: the Book of Order and the Book of Confessions.  Both contain theology, both contain our interpretation of the revelation of God that is contained in Scripture.  In other words, both parts contain what we have bound as our guiding doctrine.  The Book of Confessions holds our basic theology, our doctrine, as expressed in, well . . . confessions, historical statements of belief.  There are eleven of them, ranging from the Nicene and Apostle’s Creeds, both from before 350 AD, to the Brief Statement of Faith from 1983.  The Book of Order contains our ecclesiology, our theology of doing church, which is based on New Testament principles and the theology contained in the Book of Confessions.

The thing is, our theology, as contained in our constitution, is changeable, it is adaptable: our motto is “reformed and always being reformed according to the Word of God.”  Like Jesus, who set about overhauling the theology of his day, our charge—and notice that it is a charge, an obligation—our charge is to preside over the binding and loosing in our day.  Notice I said “preside over:” it is not our task to reform ourselves.  The motto is “reformed and being reformed,” and note the passive construction: we are being reformed, and the one doing the reforming is God.  Our job is to discern, to figure out how God wants us to change. It is to make space, to enable, the binding and loosing dictated by God.

As Presbyterians, we have a process—naturally—honed over the past five centuries, for the orderly way of letting the Holy Spirit, the Scripture, and God’s revelation in the world guide the reforming of the way we do business.  A problem is that until very recently, there were no such methods for reforming individual congregations.  Because each congregation has its own “theology,” its own way of doing things, within the broad bounds of our denomination’s way.  I believe that each congregation is called to be reformed and always reforming, lest they become irrelevant to the world.  After all, the vocation of each congregation is the same as the church as a whole: to proclaim the Gospel in thought, word and deed.

So I invite you, sisters and brothers, to join in a season of prayerful discernment, prayerful thinking and asking God how we are being called to that vocation.  We’ve gotten a start in our Sunday school class of last Spring, and I ask you to help think about it, pray about it, and keep this question in your heart: “How are we to witness to and serve our world?”  Amen.

Dog Days (Matthew 15:10-28)

The lectionary is a good thing . . . No, really!  Without the lectionary, some preachers might choose to skip difficult passages like this one altogether.  Even if you choose to preach on one of the other passages suggested for any given Sunday, just the fact that it comes up at all ensures that it at least gets considered.  But, what the lectionary giveth, the lectionary taketh away as well . . . in it’s zeal to chop things into bite-sized chunks, it sometimes cuts a bit too finely, leaving out portions that are important for understanding.  We saw that last week, in our consideration of the feeding of the 5,000: the preceding two stories influenced how we interpreted the one that followed.  And this week, though the main lectionary passage contains just the story of the Canaanite woman, the entire chapter preceding it gives a context for it’s meaning; any interpretation that fails to consider this is headed for trouble.

The whole thing is set off at the beginning of the chapter by a question from some of those Gospel fall-guys par excellence, scribes and Pharisees: “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders?” they ask, “For they do not wash their hands before they eat.”  And Jesus, knowing a teachable moment when he sees one, launches into a counter-argument.  He turns the whole thing around on them, accusing them of hypocrisy, of putting their traditions above the commandments of God: “. . . for the sake of your tradition,” he says, “you make void the word of God.”

Then, as the part we read begins, he calls “the crowd” over and begins to teach them.  And notice that the audience of these teachings has changed, from a very particular group—scribes and Pharisees, experts in the law and traditions—to a crowd, presumably of ordinary Jews, including of course his disciples.  As we will see, in the next sequence, his audience shifts once again.

Well.  He tells the crowd—made up of Jews, remember—that “it’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it’s what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”  And it’s almost as if he calculated this statement to rile folks up, and sure enough it does: those self-same Pharisees and scribes he just got finished arguing with.  And the reason isn’t hard to understand: it hinges upon the word “defiles.”  The Greek word we translate as “defiles”  is a technical word, and it means making a person ritually unclean, unacceptable for Jewish ceremony or ritual.  Non-Jews were by definition ritually unclean, as were menstruating women, people who had touched a corpse, and—this is what got the Pharisees mad—people who had eaten certain foods, like pork or shellfish.  So Jesus is apparently contradicting centuries of teaching here by saying nothing that goes into the mouth makes one unclean.  And in fact, over in Mark’s version of the story, the author says as much: “Thus he declared all foods clean.”.

After the disciples—no doubt as upset as the religious authorities—ask him what he means, he puts it more forcefully: “Don’t you see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?”  And he uses a Greek word here that’s much stronger than “sewer;” think “toilet” or one of its cruder slang terms, and he means that the food that goes into one’s body is of no ultimate consequence, it just goes into the sewer anyway.  But, he continues, “what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.”  And since “heart” is an ancient way of saying “soul” or “being” or “self,” Jesus is saying that it’s what comes from our innermost being that makes us morally suspect, that separates us from our creator God.  And is there a hint of another meaning here?  Another connotation of the word “defile,” one that is more broad than the strict, technical meaning?  Jesus may be using it in a broader sense, one more of “rightness with God.”  As we’ll see, perhaps that is the case.

So, now we go into the story of the Canaanite woman with a context: Jesus is teaching about the limits of tradition.  First he disses the tradition of the scribes and Pharisees, which is the tradition of the Hebrew religion.  Second, he declares that everything—everything—that comes out of the mouth, which presumably includes that tradition, defiles.  Then he heads off to the Northwest, to the Syrophoenician country of Sidon and Tyre, which was a virtual no-man’s land as far as Jews were concerned.  Although there were a few Jewish settlements, and Jesus may have been headed to one, it is for the most part Gentile country, a land of the ritually unclean.

Which meant, of course, that the Canaanite woman is ritually unclean as well, as the name Canaanite implies. In other words, when Jesus meets her, she is by definition defiled, in the first, technical sense—she is ritually unclean, unwelcome in Jewish households, at Jewish dinners and, especially, in their Temple and synagogues.  And when she shouts to get Jesus’ attention, that just makes it worse, she breaks several taboos . . . which, of course, are tradition embodied.  First, she is defiled, she is ritually unclean, and speaking to a Jewish man. Difference in ethnicity, heritage, and religion marginalize her as far as Judean tradition and social norms are concerned.  Second, she is a woman, and women were supposed to be reserved—we might say “demure”—especially around men.  They did not shout, especially at eminent teachers, which she obviously knows that Jesus is . . . after all, she calls him “Lord” and “Son of David,” although here the name “Lord” is merely a sign of respect.

But because social and religious affronts do not merit consideration, Jesus does what social norms require: he ignores her.  Bur she keeps shouting, and the disciples beg him to send her away.  When they do that, he says that his mission is only for “the lost sheep of Israel,” which is metaphorical language, but it’s also just repeating what he has said earlier in Matthew’s gospel: as he sends his followers out he tells them “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  His own understanding of his ministry is that it is directed at the Israelites, not Gentiles like the woman and her daughter.

 But she persists: she kneels before him and asks “Lord, help me,” using the same language Peter did when he asked to be rescued from the storm, which happens to come just a few verses before this one.  And when she does, Jesus utters the line that makes this story notorious: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” using a slang term for Gentiles that was in vogue at the time.  But at doesn’t phase the woman, she acknowledges her position as a Gentile, saying “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.”  And only then does Jesus grant her request, and he seems delighted to do so:  “Woman,” he exclaims, “great is your faith!  Let it be done for you as you wish.”  And her daughter is healed.

So.  Let’s recap: Jesus is teaching, in several venues, about the limits of tradition, saying—in essence—that human tradition, what comes out of human brains and mouths, must not trump the will and word of God.  Then, he heads up to one of the areas full of people declared by that tradition to be outside the Jewish pale, perhaps to visit one of the Jewish settlements up there, we really don’t know, but he encounters the stereotypical example of someone whom Jewish tradition has declared out of bounds, has declared defiled.  And, as if that weren’t enough, she behaves in a manner guaranteed to set good Jews’ teeth on edge, which it does for the disciples.  Jesus begins by acting the way tradition demands, by ignoring her, but by the end, he is so astounded by what she says—by what comes out of her mouth—that he grants her request, and the demon is driven from her child.

And just what is it that comes out of the woman’s mouth, what is it that Jesus hears that moves him to break his own missional rule, to give some of God’s grace to one not among the lost sheep of Israel?  “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs get the crumbs from the master’s table.”  When she hears his rationale—I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel—she changes her tack and uses the same words as one of those lost sheep, saying “Lord help me,” and falls on her knees, in the attitude of a supplicant, but also—and this is what Matthew’s audience would have picked up on—a member of the tribe, one who acknowledges Jesus as her Lord.  In fact, in her interaction with Jesus, especially from that point forward, she demonstrates her belief that the grace of God, as symbolized by the healing of her daughter, is for her as well, Gentile dog or no.

She doesn’t argue that she is not a dog—she understands that Jesus is using metaphorical language, unfortunate though it may be.  She acknowledges the barriers that separate her from the Israelites.  It is in her interaction with Jesus that she demonstrates her willingness to break through those barriers, her belief that she should receive the mercy of God’s ruling activity on Earth, and that is what Jesus calls faith.  Though what comes out of the mouth defiles, what has come out of the mouth of this woman—already defiled by human tradition—is faith.

And this is the key to what Jesus means—or doesn’t mean—by the word “defiles.”  Though it surely means what the Pharisees and scribes take it to mean, ritual purity, he is speaking in a broader sense as well.  He does not declare the woman “un-defiled,” he doesn’t call her ritually clean as far as the Jewish religion is concerned, nor does she expect him to.  What has come out of her mouth demonstrates that she has faith, and because of that, she is undefiled in the only sense that in the end matters: she is right with God.

She is like a living, breathing sermon illustration, a poster child for someone whom tradition has declared defiled, has declared unclean, and Jesus meets her right after he teaches about the subject (or at least, Matthew places the story there).  And of course, it isn’t a coincidence:  Jesus is shown enacting his teachings, demonstrating his lessons, something that has been shown before in Matthew’s Gospel, and will be again.  And Matthew weaves these threads together to foreshadow the end, when Jesus sends his followers out to all the nations: Canaanites, Greeks and Gentiles of every sort, on what we call the Great Commission.

And what about for us, what about us modern-day followers, us modern-day descendants of God’s chosen people?  We are the heirs of the great commission, the sons and daughters of that expanded ministry—beyond the lost sheep of Israel, that is.  Whatever Jesus learned from or however his ministry changed after his encounter with the Canaanite woman—and he doesn’t declare her ritually clean, and there’s no hint that his ministry was suddenly transformed—whatever Jesus did or didn’t learn or do as a result of the encounter, we know that in the end, God’s transformative mercy is available to us all.

And the first hint of it is here, in this story of the woman whom tradition has declared unclean, but who had the faith that God’s grace is for her, and by extension, for all people, of all races, all colors, all nationalities, genders, and sexualities.  God’s grace is for everyone, no exceptions.  Even middle class Presbyterians from Ohio.  Amen.