In a recent essay for The Atlantic, David Brooks, ponders the question “How America got mean.” He begins with a litany of examples: the restaurateur who tells him that he has to kick a customer out of his restaurant every week because of bad behavior; the hospital administrator who talks about staff leaving because of abusive patients. We could add to the list—road rage, minor disagreements that devolve into violence; vitriolic, dehumanizing political discourse. 

What Brooks doesn’t discuss is the institutional and structural mean-ness or violence that has been a part of our society since its beginning—the racism, misogyny and sexism, the genocide of Native Americans, the greed, rapaciousness, and exploitation of American capitalism. When wasn’t America mean? Genteel manners can conceal horrors.

That question, about mean-ness or cultural violence provides an interesting perspective from which to reflect on today’s gospel. It is certainly one of the strangest, perhaps most offensive stories in all of the gospels. It appears on the surface, at a cursory reading or listening, that this is a story of Jesus behaving badly. And in fact, I’m always amused when this story comes up, at the conversations or “discourse” as its often called, that it generates on social media. I’m also bemused that of all of my sermons that I’ve posted on my website, it’s the one that gets the most traffic, month after month, year after year. It’s a story that continues to confound and challenge preachers, ordinary Christians, and biblical scholars.

 To unpack this story, we need first of all to pay attention to geography. We’re told that Jesus and his disciples are in the region of Tyre and Sidon. We’re given no explanation for this, and given that we are reading this in mid-August, I’m always inclined to say something like: “Jesus and his disciples decided to go the beach.” 

Tyre and Sidon are ports on the Mediterranean. More significantly, they are far away from the area where Jesus has been exercising his ministry, Galilee, which in Jesus’ day was under the authority of the Tetrarchy of the Herods. Tyre and Sidon were in the Roman province of Syria. They were outside of the traditional territory that had been part of the monarchy, and outside of the region that was largely populated by Judeans. While Jesus had crossed over the Sea of Galilee to visit Gentile territory, this was his furthest and longest journey outside of Judean territory.

         There’s no explanation for his trip to the coast and from his response to the Canaanite woman, it’s pretty clear that he wasn’t on a Mission Trip, which another one of those summer pastimes many people undertake. He didn’t go there to preach or to heal, or to do any other things he had been accustomed to doing. Maybe he really was taking a vacation. He probably needed one. If that’s the case, Jesus seems to be behaving very much like the insensitive tourist, ridiculing the local population.

         There’s another fascinating and important detail in Matthew’s telling of the story that should help us make sense of it. That is his description of the woman as “Canaanite.” When the Gospel of Mark tells the story, the woman is described as “Syrophoenician,” which is more appropriate. We twenty-first century readers of the story might not find the reference to Canaanite here as strange. After all, the Canaanites appear regularly in the Hebrew Bible—they inhabit the land before the Israelites enter and resist the Israelite occupation. They persevere and over the centuries of the monarchy, Canaanite religion and culture continue to be a seductive alternative to worship of God and the kind of society that is laid out in the Mosaic law. 

The point is, that “Canaanite” here is wildly anachronistic. Canaanite culture had long since been subsumed by the Hellenistic culture of later centuries and Canaanites no longer existed as a separate ethnic, religious, or cultural identity. The best analogy I could come up with is when the British referred to their German enemies as “huns” in the first World War. They were assimilating German culture and military power to the 4^th century invaders who sacked Rome. There were no Huns in early 20^th century Europe, just as there were no Canaanites in 1^st century Palestine.

So why the term? It should be obvious. Matthew wants to depict the woman as wholly “other”—beneath respect and notice, a member of a group existentially distinct from Jews and their mortal enemies. And to top it off, she was a woman, doubly marginalized, non-Jew, a woman, who was transgressing every social and cultural taboo to approach Jesus.

This is the story, a woman breaking all of those boundaries to approach Jesus in desperation, to find healing for her daughter. Can you imagine how much courage she had to muster to confront Jesus? 

It’s this woman, by gender voiceless and powerless, by ethnicity and religion, totally other, to be avoided, it is this woman who comes to Jesus in search of help for her daughter, and Jesus first ignores her, then refers to her as a dog. I won’t use it, but you know what epithet in contemporary English would fit this situation. 

But she persists. Her need is so great, the love of her child so powerful, that she brushes off Jesus’ lack of concern and his verbal cruelty and offers a retort. “So you think I’m a dog, Jesus. Well, even dogs are given the scraps from the master’s table.” 

And with that response, she wins the argument, beating Jesus at his own game. Now, he is shocked out of his complacency, his eyes that were clouded by prejudice, his heart, cold because she wasn’t one of those he understood to be his mission area, opened to her need. Jesus is transformed by her words and her need and he heals her daughter.

It’s a challenging and uncomfortable story. It seems to depict a Jesus who is insensitive to the needs of someone. It also depicts a woman whose behavior might seem to be obnoxious, or at the very least, in appropriate. She doesn’t behave as she ought. She cajoles Jesus into helping her daughter. Where’s the good news here? 

As I was wrestling with this question and this story this week, I was also preparing for two memorial services; the one for Michael yesterday, and the service for Ada Deer that will take place here on Thursday. As I was riding into church this morning, I realized that both Michael and Ada were our Canaanite woman. Michael touched many lives, building community among people who have been marginalized and ostracized. He found sobriety in AA and over the decades accompanied many others on their journeys toward sobriety. He also supported the LGBT community, working with and caring for HIV/AIDS patients during the height of the epidemic. 

Ada spoke truth to power, advocating for justice for Native Americans, challenging our nation, our state, and we at Grace to confront Christianity’s history of mistreatment, oppression, and erasure of Native American religion and culture.

In part, this gospel reading is a story of the transformative power of advocacy. God hears the cries of the oppressed and the suffering. As followers of Jesus we are called to hear those cries and respond to them. They may challenge us; they may confront us with uncomfortable truths but we are called to listen to them.

We are also called to unite our voices with the voices of the suffering and the oppressed; to walk with them, support them. It also testifies to the power of those voices. We may grow disillusioned and disheartened by the lack of response, by the closed ears and closed minds of those to whom we cry. But our voices will be heard, our calls for justice answered. May we open our ears, our hearts, and our mouths; and may we join with those who are crying for justice.