This weekend (this whole year, really) our country has been celebrating 250 years of independence from British rule - the “birthday” of the United States. But even as we display our sense of national pride with waving flags, parades, and red, white, and blue EVERYTHING, many of us hold our sense of patriotism alongside complicated feelings. It’s not that we don’t love our country; it’s that we recognize a deep and painful divide between ourselves and our fellow compatriots. The wound is deep. Our seemingly insurmountable differences make us question whether we’ll be able to be “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all” ever again.
These divisions go beyond national identity, though. This past week at General Assembly, there was a stark divide between those who think that the PCUSA is making progress towards the kindom of God and those who believe that our denomination must be forcibly returned to, quote, “biblical values”. The discussions in committee and on the floor of plenary were painful at times, and the online discourse was bitter and tribalistic. A lot of it was incited by bad actors with explicitly divisive motives, but their attitudes infected the larger conversation in truly toxic ways. Conflict is hard enough when it’s between groups of people who have nothing in common, but when it’s between groups who share an identity, it causes a deeper kind of grief - the grief of a broken whole.
Although the story in today’s Scripture reading is included in both Mark and Matthew’s gospels, Matthew makes a subtle change that impacts how we understand the relationship between the woman and Jesus. In Mark’s version (which most likely came first), the woman is a Syrophoenician - a Greek. She would have spoken a different language, had a different history, claimed a different identity than Jesus - an outsider in every way. But Matthew describes the woman as a Canaanite. The Canaanites, remember, had been the people living in the Promised Land when the Hebrews finally arrived there. In order to take it, the Hebrew people had committed genocide against the Canaanites, so obviously there were deep, unhealed wounds in their shared history. But by Jesus’ time, they’d been living among one another and intermarrying for centuries, to the point that their languages and cultures had become intertwined.
So there’s a complex relationship here between this woman and Jesus. Which, if you ask me, makes the scenario even more heartbreaking - and even more relatable. This woman shares a part of her history and identity with Jesus and his disciples, and yet when she comes to them asking for help, they not only ignore and dismiss her, Jesus even goes so far as to insult her. She has a claim to relationship with them, and yet their rejection is complete. They don’t seem interested in healing the relationship, let alone the woman’s daughter. The pain and desperation she must have felt in that moment isn’t hard to imagine for anyone who has ever begged for a seat at the table in their own country or their own denomination and been unceremoniously ridiculed and excluded.
Most of us find ourselves readily empathizing with this woman (as we should), yet just as the relationship between the Jews and the Canaanites is complicated, so too is the morality in this story. According to God’s own standards, this woman clearly deserves mercy and acceptance - and yet, it’s denied to her by none other than God incarnate. The cognitive dissonance is extremely uncomfortable - I can’t think of another story in Scripture where Jesus could possibly be interpreted as “the bad guy”. And yet, that seems to be what’s happening here.
Even if this isn’t intentional, I think it’s actually helpful as we consider the things that divide us today. In so many Bible stories, the “sides” are clear: Jesus is the righteous one standing tall among the misguided, the stubborn, and the confused. Naturally, as followers of Jesus, we get used to associating ourselves with Jesus’ words and actions - even as we recognize our own sin, we see ourselves as “the good guys” too. But when Jesus behaves in a way that strikes us as morally wrong (or at least ambiguous), it challenges that perception. Which side are we *really* on? Is it *actually* possible for us to see Jesus in those who oppose us? Jesus’ unexpected behavior in this story breaks down our assumptions and forces us to reconsider the dynamics of our conflicts. And breaking down our own assumptions is a crucial first step in navigating a divided community.
After dealing with our assumptions, we next have to be honest with ourselves about how we tend to deal with division. What would you do in this woman’s shoes? How would you react to someone, Jesus or not, who was denying your right to belong? These days, a response like Jesus’ would immediately drive most of us online to circle the wagons and double down on the division. That’s certainly what I see happening most often when it comes to our national dialogues and even sometimes in our theological ones. We immediately seek out like-minded people to assure us that we have the moral high ground and to join us in disparaging those on the “other side”. Sometimes, we get really mean about it. We deepen the wound.
Imagine the consequences if that’s what the Canaanite woman had chosen to do. The bad PR alone would have set Jesus’ ministry back quite a bit. It certainly wouldn’t have helped Jewish/Canaanite relations. The already existing divisions within the broken whole would widen, and the groups’ respective perceptions of each other would become more deeply entrenched. The woman’s daughter would still be suffering, and Canaanites would remain outside of Jesus’ ministry and salvation. It might have felt more comforting to everyone in the moment, but it would have done nothing to advance the kindom of God - maybe even harming it in the long run.
Admirably, that’s not the choice that the woman made. She didn’t walk away in anger. She didn’t return the insult. Importantly, she also didn’t allow the insults to stand for the sake of civility or both-sides-ism, as some purported peacemakers insist on today. She stood her ground and spoke her truth boldly. She engaged with Jesus’ argument instead of dismissing it out of hand. Although everything Jesus and the disciples did was designed to make her go away, she *INSISTED* on remaining in the conversation. Not submitting, not retaliating - simply staying engaged.
And then, a miracle happened - Jesus changed his mind. He was able to see her perspective, to understand her need and realize that he didn’t have to give up his values and mission in order to help her. I don’t use the term “miracle” lightly - we all know how hard it is to get through to someone whose mind is already made up on an issue. Jesus’ own words indicate that he fell into that category: he’d been specifically sent to his own people; he had no obligation to anyone with the wrong nationality or the wrong beliefs. But the Canaanite woman’s refusal to give up on the conversation was somehow enough to shift Jesus’ understanding of his mission, expanding it to include an entire people - a people with whom he shared a history and a heritage - that he hadn’t previously considered redeemable.
When the divisions among us are as stark as they’ve become in recent years, we can’t expect to insult, shame, or shun our way to wholeness. It’s just not going to happen. It’s like picking at an open wound. I know that we’re all exhausted. I know that we’re all fed up. I know that we’re all losing faith in one another. But we are still a people of hope and miracles. No matter how difficult it may be, we *have* to keep talking to one another, because it’s the only way anything is ever going to change. If Godself can realize that he was wrong, then isn’t it possible that “those people” can, too?
Now, when I say that we need to keep the lines of communication open, there are several things that I’m NOT saying. I’m NOT saying that we always need to have exactly the right words. I’m NOT saying that we have to turn off our emotions. I’m certainly NOT saying that we have to subject ourselves to abuse. And I’m definitely NOT saying that we can’t take a break from the conversation if we need to. But collectively, we just can’t opt out of the conversation altogether. A deep wound can’t heal if its edges remain too far apart. So as difficult as it might be, and as long as it might take, we have to bandage our wound with words, bringing the edges close enough together to create the conditions in which healing is possible. God can take it from there. I think that’s what the kindom of heaven is like - a beautiful scar bearing witness to an old wound that, against all odds, has healed perfectly.
As we go forward from this weekend, as we reflect on all that happened at General Assembly and continue to celebrate 250 years of our nation, let’s keep talking. Talk about what we have in common, about the communities that we both share and love, about the values that we all cherish. But also, talk about what isn’t working. Talk about the pain that you feel. Talk about the needs that aren’t being met. Talk about the justice that has been denied for too long. It will be hard - and we may have to step away from the conversation times - but a wound doesn’t heal all at once. The important thing is not to give up. Because when we give up on the conversation, we’ve given up on each other. And we cannot be whole - we cannot be healed - without “the other side”. May God grant us the strength and courage to keep talking until then. Amen.
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