Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15:10-28
Oh, dear, this gospel reading doesn’t paint the most flattering picture of Jesus, does it? It starts out well - Jesus tells the disciples that, essentially, you can’t judge a book by its cover. He tells them that a person isn’t defined by their outward behaviour, but by the intentions of their hearts. Just before our reading for today, Jesus gets down on the Pharisees for being so strict about what they and others eat, but not caring in their hearts about the well-being of the elderly. He wants them, and the disciples, and us, to understand that there is no room for that kind of hypocrisy in the life of a believer - that we can’t pick on others for their outward behaviour when, although our outward actions may be perfect, we harbour ill-will and evil towards others. It’s a good message from Jesus, one that is important for us to hear.
But then what does Jesus go and do? After telling people that it’s their inside and not their outside that counts? Well, Jesus first ignores and then downright insults a Canaanite woman who comes to him seeking God’s healing. Now, this is a very hard story, and its difficult for us to face what is going on here - we’d rather get to the end where Jesus heals the woman’s daughter - but the ugly truth of this story is that, initially, Jesus is being a hypocrite. He’s just finished condemning the Pharisees for their behaviour and then he goes and does the same thing. He judges a Canaanite woman - judges her to be unworthy of receiving a blessing from God - simply because she was born in Canaan and not in Israel. It’s true, Canaanites aren’t considered followers of God according to the Jews; thousands of years of tradition and Scriptural interpretation back Jesus up when he calls this woman a dog and tells her she’s second-class, or even third-class, to the Israelites. Jesus is well within the accepted bounds of behaviour to refuse to share God’s healing with her. But Jesus has, up to this point, made it very clear that the accepted bounds of behaviour are not acceptable to God. Jesus has made it clear that refusing God’s grace to people because they are "unworthy" is actually unacceptable. And then he goes and does it himself. It is, frankly, appalling.
But maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. Jesus was fully divine, but he was also fully human, and we humans are really good at being hypocritical. Especially as Christians. We claim to follow a God of justice and grace, who teaches us that even the unworthy are worthy of God’s love, and then we act in ways that deny that justice and that exclude people from that grace. We claim that God has made us stewards of creation, and then we drive gas-guzzling SUVs and turn up the air-conditioning in our homes, poisoning the air that God has given us to share. We claim that Christ is in the poor and hungry who are before us, and then we throw food away and walk by the beggars on the street. We claim that God loves all peoples on earth and commands us to work for equality, and then we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the racism in our own backyards. We claim to follow the way of peace, and then we speak words of payback, getting even, retaliation, and we make excuses for our actions on the basis of tradition, Scripture, and accepted bounds of behaviour. But let’s be clear: we do not live out our faith-life with integrity - all too often, our actions contradict our professed faith.
So what does God do with all of our hypocrisy? Well, thanks be to God, God sends the Holy Spirit, who confronts us when our actions contradict our faith, who points out very clearly when we fail to we live out our faith with integrity and grace towards others, and who then moves us to change.
We see the Spirit doing all this when the Canaanite woman confronts Jesus. Not only once, not even twice, but three times the woman considered unworthy to receive the blessing of God petitions Jesus. She calls to him, she follows him, and then she kneels before him, and after he rejects her for a third time, reminds him that God is so generous and provides God’s people with so much that there is more than enough to share with others. "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table." And that does it for Jesus. The Holy Spirit has somehow prompted this unworthy woman to proclaim the Gospel to the Son of God himself, and then the Holy Spirit moves Jesus to hear the truth of her words. And so Jesus says, "Woman, great is your faith!" and he instantly heals her daughter. By the power of the Holy Spirit, this woman’s faith is so great - greater than Peter’s faith last week, greater than Jesus’ faith a few minutes earlier, greater than even our own faith - it is so great that Jesus is inspired by it and, in response, spreads God’s grace farther than apparently even he thought it could go.
So who are the Spirit-inspired people that God sends our way? Who are the "unworthy" who confront us when we don’t live out our faith the way we should? Well, having just come from the Synod Youth Gathering, I can tell you that the young people today are definitely some of those whom the Spirit is using. Yes, they’re young, and inexperienced, and naive, and idealistic, and occasionally even badly behaved. Yes, they speak without thinking and are sometimes disrespectful. Yes, thousands of years of tradition and even Scripture tells us that they don’t deserve a real voice in the community until they’re adults, but even so... Even so, the Holy Spirit is using these kids to confront us with our hypocrisy. They’re confronting us on issues of racism, sexism, classism. They’re asking how we as a church, who claim to follow Jesus Christ, can allow poverty to continue, how we can discriminate against sexual minorities, how we can be so lacking in integrity in our faith lives. They notice all the ways our actions contradict our faith, and they challenge us on it. They’re doing it directly, by telling us what they think, but they’re also doing it indirectly, protesting our actions by leaving the church. We might ignore them, or reject them, or even insult them as Jesus did to the Canaanite woman, but that won’t shut them up. Nothing can shut Spirit-inspired people up. And in the end, just as the Canaanite woman prompted Jesus to bring his actions back into harmony with his faith, they will do the same to us.
Because just as the Holy Spirit is working among the youth, opening their eyes and giving them prophetic voices, the Holy Spirit is also at work among us, among you. The Spirit is at work, radically reintegrating your faith and your actions so that you are as true to your proclamation of the gospel as Jesus ended up being. The Holy Spirit is reshaping your heart to notice those moments when your actions contradict your faith, and is moving you to act with integrity and love. The Spirit is opening your eyes to see injustice, and moving you to correct it. Daily, the Spirit is placing in your path people - like the Canaanite woman - who desperately need a word of grace, and the Spirit is moving you to proclaim it to them. The Holy Spirit is teaching you how to live out your faith, and helping you to do it.
Now, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, but it’s always good to have a reminder: God isn’t doing this so that we’ll be nice people whom everybody will love. We are not the point of the Holy Spirit doing all this work in the world. God is doing this so that, as Isaiah tells us in the first reading, God’s "salvation will come, and [God’s] deliverance be revealed." God is sending the Holy Spirit to confront us when our faith-based actions are hypocritical, and God is working with the Holy Spirit to change us because God has promised God would. This radical reintegration of our actions and our faith, brought about by the Holy Spirit, is the beginning of the salvation and deliverance that God promised so long ago. And even though our outward actions show we don’t deserve it, and even though our inward inclinations show we’re not worthy of it, God, through the Holy Spirit, is bringing us to the righteous living that God has demanded and promised, and God is using us to make real the kingdom of heaven here on earth. So may God send us people like the Canaanite woman to challenge our hypocrisy, and may God then direct our responses to be as grace-filled as Jesus’, through the power of the Holy Spirit, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
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