From the Heart
Proper 15
August 16, 2026
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
I have an older brother and three younger sisters, which could be chaotic at times and that included meals. My mum came up with a rule to cope with us having differing food tastes and preferences. We were each allowed to choose one food that we did not have to eat. Anything else, we had to eat what was on our plate.
That put me into a quandary because there were three foods I could not stand: liver, beets and Brussels sprouts. That list has changed over the years. Thanks to different recipes and shifting taste buds, I now like Brussels sprouts and I’ve made my peace with beets. No one has ever tried to coax me into eating liver. But, being English, that’s why I call her mum, she never exposed me to okra. So now I’m down to two - that I know of.
We all have our preferences. We also make choices for dietary purposes or convictions. But never in my whole life have I chosen to not eat a food because God said “No.” That is a very foreign idea to Christians, even though we hear about Jews or Muslims not eating bacon or shellfish, or Hindus not eating meat at all.
That food freedom is based in part on this morning’s Gospel, as well as Peter’s encounter with God in Acts chapter 10, and Paul’s teaching in Romans chapter 14 among other places. The bottom line is that the Spirit taught the Apostles very early on that Gentiles did not need to become Jews to follow Jesus, and therefore did not have to follow Jewish laws about food and other practices. We do remain guided by the moral law. For example, you can eat whatever you want, in moderation, but try to be healthy and don’t fall into gluttony.
No one, not mom and not God, ever told me what I couldn’t eat. But God, mum and dad have had a lot to say about what comes out of my mouth. Did I mention I have an older brother and three younger sisters? I’ve had a lot of lessons on that subject. My wife, my kids, my teachers, my church - there is an entire framework of guidance for my speech.
Freedom of speech is foundational to all of our other freedoms, and responsibility in speech is foundational to our lives. But Jesus is going past the externalities of speech to what our speech reveals about our very hearts.
In this morning’s Gospel, Jesus has just been challenged by the Pharisees because some of his disciples did not observe the ritual washing of hands. But he sees into their hearts and knows that the ritual washing is an empty façade. Their stringent focus on such things is utter hypocrisy. Further, by pressing this point on the people they are imposing that façade upon them as well, teaching them that if you do A, B and C properly you will earn God’s favor.
But that is a misrepresentation of the Law. There is no requirement to wash before meals in the Law of Moses. The practice evolved in rabbinic teaching from instructions to wash after touching something or someone who was ritually unclean. That may or may not have had anything to do with sin. One could be ritually unclean from touching a dead body or a leper, for example.
It is also a complete reversal of the Spirit behind the Law. While God used the prophets regularly to confront the people about their failures to uphold the covenant with false idols and so on, he also regularly warned them about their hearts being aligned with their external expressions of faith.
Jesus summarized the Law as loving God with all your heart, all your soul and all your strength (Deuteronomy 6:5) and loving your neighbor as yourself (Leviticus 19:18). Washing our hands may or may not serve one or both of those purposes, depending on what? That depends on how our hearts and minds are aligned with the action.
What comes out of our mouths is inevitably tied to what is on our minds and what is in our hearts. Anxiety, fear, anger, lust, envy, jealousy, resentment, covetousness – we can make a rather long list of the sorts of thoughts and feelings that cause us to fail to properly love God and each other. It violates the moral law. The list Jesus cites of “murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness and slander” ties directly back to the Ten Commandments.
In contrast to the Pharisees, who styled themselves as strictly holy men, Jesus encounters this woman who is on the surface quite the opposite. She is in the region of Tyre and Sidon, famously the birthplace of Jezebel, who led Israel astray to other gods and tried to kill Elijah. She is a Canaanite, the people Abraham was sent to displace and Joshua conquered to take the Promised Land.
What comes out of her mouth? “Have mercy on me.” She calls Jesus Lord. She acknowledges his messianic tie to the line of King David. She begs for help for her daughter and even when she is rather abruptly rebuffed by Jesus, she responds in humble supplication. Where is her heart? Jesus honors her faith and the daughter is healed instantly.
She is, in effect, a living parable, an extreme example of how a right heart and a right spirit is God’s desire for us, even if all the externalities look wrong. It’s what God wants for us, for our sakes. It’s not as though God is cosmically needy. He wants us to be free from the weight of anxiety, fear, anger, lust, envy, jealousy, resentment, covetousness and so on. There is an order of operation, Israel then the Gentiles, but the operation is universally available.
We’ve all said things we wish we had not. Worse, words that hurt, words that destroy, words that defile will come out of our mouths. We might have been having a bad day, tired, stressed about something or many things. We may have been immature. We all have flaws. We all fall short of the Kingdom of God.
Sometimes we describe it in terms almost as though we might have a demon. “I don’t know what came over me.” “I wasn’t myself.” Or, “I was beside myself.” But excuses don’t erase the fact that we are responsible. What are we to do?
We must follow the example of this Canaanite woman, who says to Jesus exactly what Peter said when he was sinking below the waves on the Sea of Galilee, “Lord help me.” When we ask, he helps. Universally available. This is the heart of healing, the heart of spiritual growth, the heart of receiving and sharing the forgiveness we all need.
Parents disciplined children about what came out of my mouth, often to preserve the bonds of love that makes a family. It is the heart of finding the peace and joy the Lord desires for all of his children.
AMEN!