Perspective: Crumbs for Everyone!

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

Crumbs for Everyone!

From there, Jesus went to the regions of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from those territories came out and shouted, "Show me mercy, Son of David. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession." But He didn't respond to her at all.

His disciples came and urged Him, "Send her away; she keeps shouting out after us."

Jesus replied, "I've been sent only to the lost sheep, the people of Israel."

But she knelt before Him and said, "Lord, help me."

He replied, "It is not good to take the children's bread and toss it to dogs."

Matthew 15:21-26 (CEB)

'Cause we can talk and debate 'til we're blue in the face

About the language and tradition that He's coming to save

Meanwhile we sit just like we don't give a $%@#

About fifty thousand people who are dying today

From "What Matters More" by Derek Webb

I love stories about Jesus. I love the stories of Jesus' healings and other miracles. I love the stories of Jesus' standing up for the oppressed and knocking arrogant religious people off of their high horses. I love the parables, the stories that Jesus told. I love what all of these stories teach us about God and about ourselves, and I love how these stories help me to make sense of my own story.

Of course, there are some stories about Jesus that I don't love quite as much.

There was once a Canaanite woman who had a daughter who was troubled a demon of some sort. One day, this woman sees Jesus and His disciples in her hometown. She's heard about the miracles performed by this man, so she begins calling out to Him, "Show me mercy, Son of David. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession." At first, everyone seems to ignore her, so she continues to beg.

The Disciples grow tired of listening to her, so they try to get Jesus to send her away. Jesus seems to share their feelings. He says, "I've been sent only to the lost sheep, the people of Israel."

The woman then throws herself at Jesus' feet and says, "Lord, help me."

Jesus then says, "It is not good to take the children's bread and toss it to dogs."

So this woman comes to Jesus, begging Him to heal her disturbed daughter, and Jesus refuses. First, He says that He only cares about His own people, the Israelites, and then, to add insult to injury, He basically calls the poor woman to a dog.

Jesus is not supposed to act like that!

Is this the same Jesus who had a heart-to-heart conversation with a Samaritan woman who had a bad reputation?¹ Is this the same Jesus who called His disciples to take His message "unto the uttermost part of the earth"?² Is this the same Jesus whose disciples ministered to a eunuch from Ethiopia³ and a military officer from Rome?⁴ Why would Jesus say such horrible things to this woman? Was Jesus just having a bad day, or was He actually a racist jerk?

Like any good parent, this woman will move heaven and earth to help her child, so Jesus' crass words don't phase her at all. In fact, she even takes the label of "dog" and runs with it. She continues to beg, saying, "Yes, Lord. But even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall off their masters' table." The woman's words apparently impress Jesus, for He answers her, saying, "Woman, you have great faith. It will be just as you wish." With these words, the woman's child is healed.⁵

So did Jesus have a change of heart upon hearing the woman's response? Did He perhaps see the error of His ways and decide to do what's right by helping her? Did He suddenly realize that non-Jewish people are worth saving just as much as the people of Israel? On the surface, it certainly seems as though Jesus changes in some way, but, if Jesus is God incarnate as most Christians claim and if God never changes, then how can Jesus change in such a profound way?

Maybe something else is going on here. The wannabe philosopher in me hates to take anything at face value, especially a story so disturbing. I believe that if we only take things at face value we run the risk of missing the treasure buried just beneath the surface.

Earlier in the Gospel story, Jesus performs another healing from a distance. This time, Jesus is approached by a centurion who begs Him to heal his paralyzed servant. The fact that this man is a centurion, a military officer who commands one hundred troops, implies that he is a Roman and not an Israelite. Jesus does not give the centurion the cold shoulder as he does the Canaanite woman. In fact, He's quite eager to help. He even offers to go to the centurion's home, but the centurion, who does not feel worthy to have Jesus darken his doorstep, asks him to heal the servant from a distance. Jesus does what the centurion asks.⁶

If Jesus is indeed bigoted against Gentiles - non-Jewish people - then His bigotry is a recent development.

Let's step back from Jesus' unkindness for a moment and turn our attention to what the Canaanite woman says to Him. When Jesus calls the woman a dog, the woman says that even dogs eat crumbs from their masters' table. If Jesus is comparing the woman to a dog, then the woman is comparing a miraculous healing to a crumb. With this comparison in mind, the question must be asked,

If a miraculous healing is but a mere crumb from God's table, what in the world is a meal?

Remember that it was the Disciples who wanted Jesus to send the woman away. I wonder if, maybe, Jesus was simply mirroring the Disciples' own bigotry while, at the same time, pushing the Gentile woman to declare her faith before the Disciples.

The people of Israel understood themselves to be God's chosen people, and when people believe themselves to be chosen by God they risk becoming arrogant. In the Gospel, there is a recurring theme of outsiders having more faith than the chosen. When Jesus was very young, it was Zoroastrian astrologers who worshiped Him, while the king of Israel wanted to get rid of Him.⁷ When the Roman centurion asks Jesus to heal his servant from afar, Jesus says, "I say to you with all seriousness that even in Israel I haven't found faith like this."⁸ When the Canaanite woman answers Jesus, He commends her for her great faith.

I don't believe that Jesus actually regarded the Canaanite woman as a dog: I believe that He saw her not only as child of God, but also as a woman of great faith who had something to teach the Disciples. What the woman said to Jesus is indeed profound: by comparing a miraculous healing to a crumb from God's table, she shows that she believes in a big, powerful, extravagant, generous God.

This concept of God reminds me of another story about Jesus. One day, Jesus is ministering to a large number of people in an isolated place. The Gospel story tells us that there were five thousand men, so, if we factor in women and children, there could have been tens of thousands of people present. As day becomes evening, the people grow hungry, and the Disciples only find five loaves of bread and two fish. There might be enough food for everybody to have a crumb as long as they make the crumbs small enough. Jesus breaks up the food and passes the pieces around. Somehow, everyone walks away filled, and, strangely, there is more food at the end than there is at the start.⁹

A breadcrumb from God is a feast fit for a king.

We live in a harsh, unfriendly world where people seem to enjoy kicking others when they're already down. At times, the world around us might make us feel like dogs - or worse. The Creator of this world, on the other hand, is big, loving, gracious, and extravagant. To God, none of us are dogs, for we are all God's beloved children. This big God's heart is big enough to contain the entire world.


Notes:

1. John 4:4-42
2. Acts 1:8 (KJV)
3. Acts 8:28-39
4. Acts 10
5. Matthew 15:27-28 (CEB)
6. Matthew 8:5-8
7. Matthew 2:1-12
8. Matthew 8:10 (CEB)
9. Matthew 14:13-21

The image featured in this perspective is public domain.

Perspective: Holy Mockery

I share these thoughts hoping they are of help to someone else.

Comments are always welcomed.

Holy Mockery

I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection and the sharing of His sufferings by becoming like Him in His death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.

Philippians 3:10-11 (NRSV)

In my lifetime when I'm disgraced

By jealousy and lies

I laugh aloud 'cause my life

Has gotten inside someone else's mind

From "Bullets" by Creed

I have amassed a nice collection of cross necklaces over the years. One of these crosses, a Christmas gift from my mother, is made of sterling silver. Another cross in my collection is a gift of love, made by hand and given to me by an anonymous gift giver. Another is made from olive wood from the Holy Land. My favorite in this collection, another Christmas gift from my mother, is a cross made up of three small nails.

It is not uncommon to see people wearing crosses on necklaces or as earrings. Some people have even tattooed crosses onto their skin. Not only do people adorn their bodies with crosses, people also adorn their churches with crosses as well. At my church, there is a large cross hanging at the very front of the sanctuary. In the same sanctuary, there is a smaller brass cross on the communion table. I live across the street from a church with a cross at the very top of the steeple.

Today, the cross is a religious symbol, but, in the culture from which it came, the cross would have struck fear into people's hearts. A cross is an execution stake that was used by the Roman Empire. A convicted criminal was staked to a cross by nails driven through the wrists and ankles. The cross was then set upright, and the criminal hung on that cross until death. It was a long, brutal, agonizing process. If the criminal took too long to die, the executioners might break his legs in order to expediate the process.¹

It is by this method that the Romans executed Jesus.

When Christians wear crosses, they wear replicas of the instrument of death used to murder their Savior.

It turns out that my favorite cross necklace is a representation of the instrument of death used to murder Jesus, made up of the instruments used to stake Jesus to that same instrument of death.

The fact that we use crosses as decorations is rather morbid if you think about it.

In the past couple of years, I have come to realize that, in order to fully enter into the hope and joy of Christ's resurrection, which is celebrated on Easter Sunday, one must enter into the despair and darkness of Christ's crucifixion, which is commemorated on the preceding Friday. When we remember the crucifixion, we essentially practice a form of ritualized hopelessness as we watch Christ defeated by corrupt religion, imperial brutality, the sin of humanity, and death itself. Our Messiah has died a horrible death; our God has forsaken us; and all of our hopes and dreams for salvation lie shattered in a pile on the ground.

On Easter Sunday we are filled with hope as we find and empty tomb and see Jesus appear among us, saying, "Peace be with you." We see that the victory of corruption, violence, sin, and death has been overturned and that Christ has conquered all in the Resurrection. We realize that our Messiah is alive and better than ever, that God was with us the whole time, and that our hopes and dreams are already being realized, though not necessarily in the way we first envisioned them.

This cycle of crucifixion and resurrection is not just a series of events that happened two thousand years ago that we commemorate every spring. Crucifixion and resurrection are things that we experience in our own lives. We all go through times in our lives that can only be described as godforsaken. Sometimes the experience is our own fault; sometimes it is the fault of someone else; and sometimes all we can do is to chalk it up to the fact that we live in a broken world. The Crucifixion reminds us that we all have heavy, ugly, gruesome crosses to bear in this life.

The Resurrection, on the other hand, reminds us that the cross was not the end of the story and that there is indeed new life beyond the crosses we bear. The resurrected Christ is proof of this new life. Sometimes we have the tendency to wallow in our own tombs of sin, guilt, shame, regret, and self-pity, but, just as Christ called out to His dead friend, "Lazarus, come forth!" Christ calls us to come forth from our figurative tombs and to embrace the new, abundant, eternal life He offers us.²

Because of the Resurrection, we are able to engage in a certain type of mockery.

As I stated earlier, the Church commemorates the crucifixion of Christ on the Friday before Easter Sunday. Do you know what that Friday is called on the Church calendar?

It's called Good Friday. Yes, the Church remembers the horrific act of violence and injustice inflicted on its Savior and calls it good.

Christians brandish crosses - symbols of death - as if they are symbols of life.

St. Paul expresses this same mockery as follows:

Death has been swallowed up in victory.

Where, O death, is your victory?

Where, O death, is your sting?³

Paul is doing something that we're generally taught not to do: he's making light of death. In fact, he's trash-talking death.

We wear crosses to honor our Savior, Jesus Christ, but in the process we mock death as well. The saving knowledge of Christ's resurrection and the assurance of the new life that it offers us allow us to look at that which frightens us the most and laugh in its face. The Resurrection gives us joy and strength in the midst of the forces that would threaten to undo us. Paul writes, "We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren't crushed. We are confused, but we aren't depressed. We are harassed, but we aren't abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren't knocked out."⁴

The cross reminds us that life can be difficult, even brutal, at times, but the Resurrection reminds us of the beauty that awaits us beyond the ugliness of life. Whatever difficulties you face right now, may you find the strength to keep going, knowing that the cross you bear is not the end of your story. May the story of Christ's resurrection give you joy and even laughter in the midst your circumstances.


Notes:

1. Wikipedia: Crucifixion
2. See John 11 for the story of Jesus' raising Lazarus to life.
3. 1 Corinthians 15:54-55 (NRSV)
4. 2 Corinthians 4:8-9 (CEB)