Canaanites called to Christ

Pentecost 12, Proper 15

Fr. Tim Nunez

May my spoken word be true to God’s written word and bring us all closer to the living word, Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

 Words have roots which are buried in our language and culture.  Often, we may not know them, we forget, until we remember, but they are there just below the surface.  If we dig just a little, we find them.

In today’s Gospel Jesus and his disciples encounter a Canaanite woman. That doesn’t mean much to us. Have you ever met a Canaanite? But that’s a loaded term for them. What does Canaanite mean??

After the flood, in Genesis chapter 9, Noah plants a vineyard. The vineyard produces grapes. Grape juice quickly becomes wine. (There was no such thing as grape juice until Thomas Welch invented a pasteurization process in 1869.) Noah has too much wine and passes out drunk, his robes are all akimbo and he is – ahem – uncovered. Awkward!

His son Ham sees him and tells his brothers Shem and Japheth. They walk in backwards with a blanket and cover him. But Ham saw him. We might infer that Ham’s report to his brothers wasn’t gracious. Ham has a son named Canaan. Noah wakes up, sobers up, hears the tale and says:

‘Cursed be Canaan;

   lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.’

He also said,

‘Blessed by the Lord my God be Shem;

   and let Canaan be his slave.

May God make space for Japheth,

   and let him live in the tents of Shem;

   and let Canaan be his slave.’

So Canaan is Noah’s grandson.  But he’s not getting any dignity out of the family line because his father saw Noah all akimbo with the hem of his garment up way high. The region was known as the Land of Canaan and the people were Canaanites, which implies they weren’t the most faithful bunch.

The Jews supplanted the Canaanites when they inhabited the Promised Land 1500 years before Jesus. Jews in Jesus’ time thought of the Canaanites as distinctly beneath them. Jesus and his disciples have ventured out of the region of Galilee to the region of Tyre and Sidon (which was named for Canaan’s oldest son.)

This Canaanite woman should not be approaching a man at all, let alone a foreign man, let alone a Jew, let alone a Jewish rabbi. She is way out of line.  The disciples naturally want to shoo her away.

But Jesus uses her to make a very important point.  The currency of the Kingdom of God is not your blood line or your position in the community.  It is not your background or your resume.   It is not your ability to follow the laws and rules.  Those all have their place, but they are not the currency of the kingdom.

The currency of the Kingdom is faith. This is big news and it is good news.

From the moment that Abraham entered into the Covenant with God, the people of Israel were defined by their faith in the One God over and against all others who followed false gods.  As commanded by God, they’ve resisted merging and assimilating with neighboring cultures and religions, including the Canaanites. They must only follow the One true God. They have suffered again and again the consequences of falling away and chasing after false gods.  It hasn’t been pretty.

Yet that need to define and differentiate themselves was paradoxically in tension with the covenantal promise to Abraham.   “Through you I will bless all nations.”

That is what Jesus is showing his disciples and us. Our borders, conventions, customs, attitudes and rules become irrelevant when anyone, even one far outside the household of God, comes to the One true God. Those who sincerely seek the Lord’s mercy and grace will receive it.

This woman is not coming to Jesus with a great deal of knowledge.  She has not pored over the various religious texts of the ancient world, assessed their relative merits and come to a rational decision that Jesus is the way to go.  The cross and Resurrection have not even happened yet.  He’s a traveling rabbi.  He has a reputation of working miracles and that is all she knows.

This is an affair of the heart, of a mother’s love for her daughter and her desperate hope that this man can save her.  That faith is all she has and it is all she needs.  All she wants are crumbs from his table.  All she gets is her heart’s desire.

That is good news for us, assuming none of us started out as Palestinian Jews.

It challenges us. We all want this incredible grace. But we can also fall prey to our own categories. People new to Good Shepherd regularly ask me what they need to do to join our church. I wind up having to talk about directories, attending, participating and giving. I have to explain the Canons and Confirmation, when I hope our new bishop will visit, and so on.

All of that is necessary on one level. We are organizationally distinct from our brethren up the street. But it ultimately only matters to the extent that our structure leads to salvation by grace through faith in Jesus.

We rejoice all the more when one who was far off has come near, when someone who was completely outside the faith and even denying it comes to know Our Lord, when someone who fell away for whatever reasons reconnects to Jesus.  If that happens because of a crisis, so be it. If they join our church or another, fine. It just needs to happen.

He has called us, as broken, sinful & jaded as we are, to be his body and to serve as his hands in this broken world.  When people outside the faith come into crisis it is most often our physical representation of Jesus that will help them see him.

Praise the Lord that he answers the cries of his people, especially those who seem alien to him.  Praise the Lord that we who were once Canaanites are called to be his agents of Grace.

AMEN