Living in Tyre and Sidon

Text: Matthew 15:10-28

There’s a short gap between last week’s gospel and today’s. In it, Jesus heads for Gennesaret, where tales of Jesus’s miraculous powers of healing spread and “all who were sick” come, touch his cloak, and are healed. Then the Pharisees come all the way from Jerusalem to harass Jesus and his disciples, claiming that they have broken the Law by eating without washing their hands. It is a sure example of Jesus claiming hierarchy and nuance to Law, that purity laws are nothing compared with matters of faith. Then Jesus says to the Pharisees:

You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he said:
⁸“This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
⁹in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.” ’

It is this that precedes Jesus’s talk of defilement.

Taking today’s gospel out of this context, we might suggest that Jesus is railing against gossip, profanity, or lying. Or we might take it literally—that the talk of going into and coming out of the mouth…well, having seen some of Sophia’s spitups, I would say that is pretty gross. Or in his articulation to Peter, Jesus seems to suggest that our emotional reactions, those things we say when we’re cheesed, those things that we do without thinking, are bad.

But Jesus’s taking on the purity codes, his talk of defilement in Gennesaret, and the movement in the second half of the gospel to Tyre and Sidon should be taken together.

Tyre and Sidon represent, for the Pharisees, places of defilement. These locations would greatly distress the Pharisees. If they thought Jesus’s disciples were bad for not washing their hands before eating, what will they think of going to impure towns, talking with impure people, doing impure things?

This is a common situation in the gospels: Jesus either seems to be doing something he’s “not supposed to do” or he’s being scolded by the “true believers” for what they’ve seen, or more commonly, heard that he’s done.

We all know who is battling for the title of Pharisee today. They go by many names including the self-dubbed “Bible-believers”. They serve as the unelected watchdog of faith and encourage the crowds to not only see things the way they do, but to turn on each other ravenously. Imagine if the Pharisees had the Internet! Or access to journalists eager for a juicy story (about sex)!

We’ve included in this week’s bulletin an insert from the National Church. It highlights the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’ closing remarks to Lambeth in which he encourages a continued interest in the forming of an Anglican Covenant. What a truly fortunate thing to discuss in the midst of something so contentious as Jesus’s propensity to break the Law and get caught. How freely Jesus disregards the Laws that impede on the primary law, the Greatest Commandment and its partner: Love God and love your neighbor. How easily the Law is lesser to these fundamental principles.

This proclamation, found in the three Synoptics, concludes in Matthew 22:40 by suggesting that “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Covenants are radically inclusive decisions of mutual benefit. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines covenant as “A bond entered into voluntarily by two parties by which each pledges himself to do something for the other”. Its use prior to the Old Testament was in civil and governmental matters and implies the relationship of two parties, not the 44 regional and national churches that comprise the Anglican Communion, or a single document to which each church must subscribe; the Augsburg Confession is just such a document for Lutherans. Perhaps there are now too many Pharisees in the church, like cooks in the kitchen.

In this chapter from Matthew, Jesus is highlighting that the notion of defilement, or ritual impurity, is not a matter of what one eats or where one is/lives, but about what one says and does. Like in Jesus’s other demonstrations, such as his parable of the Good Samaritan or his regular meals with tax collectors, Jesus shows priority for love in the midst of ritual impurity over the avoidance of those things that would cause defilement according to the Law. The Samaritan, considered impure by the Pharisees, based solely on where he lives, helps a man made impure by his situation while two observant Jews left the man there to die. This is Jesus’s radical proposition! He demonstrates for all of us that tradition isn’t a problem—traditionalism is. That some traditions need questioning. Some need to be discussed and re-examined. By physically placing himself in a land that represents impurity, conversing with a woman who is impure by the nature of her home, Jesus questions this very tradition, challenging the puritanical around him. It’s as if he is saying to the Pharisees “You don’t like it that we didn’t wash our hands? Wait and see where we’re going to eat!”

Now, Jesus calls the woman’s faith “great”—33 verses after calling Peter’s faith “little”—not because of who she is or where she comes from, but because of what she feels and says. My heart doesn’t always cause me to spew filth (though occasionally when I’m driving it does), but can motivate loving action. Jesus’s interaction with this woman seems to demonstrate that difference in faith between little and great. His disciples are following him, but she is acting like him. Remember last week, when I said Peter “gets it”. He does. But does he do it? For in their time, it was the disciples’ job to live like their rabbi. They followed him wherever he went, they listened to his teaching, they followed his instruction, and lived like him. Think about Jesus with these followers, wandering all over Palestine. They lived together, ate together, always watching their rabbi for instruction. You know they watched him eat, how he walked, how he spoke to strangers, and were trying to learn how to do that too. You know they’re doing that! But sometimes they are so busy watching that they forget to do! They forget to act! Their heads are in the way. But this woman speaks from her heart with her great faith and Jesus commends her on the spot. Unlike Peter, whose faith wavered and needed to be rescued by Jesus, her faith is strong, regardless of her environment and who is watching her.

We are called to that kind of faith and discipleship. Jesus knew his disciples didn’t get it all right. He didn’t expect them to. He didn’t pick the best scholars, he picked fishermen for a reason. But these examples of great faith served them as they serve us today.

And it is hard to live out that kind of faith and discipleship, isn’t it? Sometimes we have great faith—but don’t act upon it. Sometimes we are such great disciples that we forget to have faith. As we guard and protect our faith, out of love and devotion, of course, we no doubt smother it. I can see how easy it is for the Pharisees (then and now) to object. But Jesus was a boundary pusher, living by faith in God, moved by the Holy Spirit. He knew that a Spirit, active and glory-filled should not be confined by rules of adherence.

These rules included the traditional boundaries of right living and behavior, boundaries of preaching and interpretation, boundaries of worship practice and prayer forms, Jesus pushed all of these boundaries.

Jesus calls us to follow him, live like him, act like him. We should love our traditions that form us and feed us. But what of those boundaries that confine us? What of those things that prevent us from loving God and our neighbor? I have faith that an Anglican Covenant, regardless of what has caused its creation, will be Spirit-led. But I’m also incredibly confident that it will be a means of measurement and a further set of boundaries for our faith.

Instead, we are called by Jesus to look for today’s Tyre and Sidon. We are called to minister to those people rejected because of where and how they live. This is living and loving like Jesus.