August 14, 2011

Elaine Wainwright

Pentecost 9     Genesis 45:1-15     
Matthew 15:21-28


Video available on YouTube

Send her away for she is crying after us! Send her away! How many times have I read the story in today’s gospel, studied it, prayed it and preached it and yet somehow the starkness of this plea of the disciples to Jesus has not struck me with the same impact as when I was preparing for today’s preaching.

These words – Send her away! Send her away! – have echoed through my consciousness during the week. They won’t leave me because I hear in them the cry of so many of my own people in Australia – politicians and people from all works of life – crying out at present: send her away! send them away! They are “Canaanites” like this outsider woman! They are “illegals”, they are “people smuggled”, they are “queue jumpers”. All this hidden in the cry to send them away – out of sight, out of mind so that we don’t have to be challenged by their arrival on our shores, that we don’t have to change our way of life. Send them to Malaysia. Process them off shore. Send them away! They are crying after us!

This is the lens I would like to use with you today as we explore together this gospel story as it is told in the Gospel of Matthew. The plight of the refugees arriving by boat on your shore may not be addressing you so starkly at present as it is in Australia but that experience can provide a lens into our gospel that invites us all to ponder, to explore in our minds and hearts during the week ahead who it is in our personal and our social context/s of whom you, your family and friends, your community say: Send her away! She is crying after us!

Who is this woman whom the disciples want to send away? She is a woman who meets Jesus on the border, the border between inside Israel and outside. She is a border or boundary walker, a danger to those settled on either side of the border just as those millions of displaced peoples of our world are to the settled, just as those arriving by boats are considered to be by the Australian people. They breach our borders, the borders we have constructed that say who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. The gospel storytelling community made this woman ‘other’ by giving her a name which was not hers. They called her ‘Canaanite’, the name of the ancient ‘enemies’ of Israel. She is outsider, she is not one of ‘them’ just as naming asylum seekers as “illegal immigrants” makes them not one of us. And so the gospel keeps inviting us into this story: who is inside and who is outside in our lives, personally and socially? Who do we encounter on the border, that dangerous place of cross-over where Jesus is found in today’s gospel, the place where a border-crossing woman confronts him and his disciples with her cry: Have mercy… my daughter is tormented with a demon..

And her cry “my daughter is tormented with a demon” sends me back to Australia’s asylum seekers and I hear the cry of the mothers: my children are traumatized by all they have been through, they are traumatized by being imprisoned in the land in which they sought freedom, they are refusing to eat, they are cutting themselves, they are violent, they are silent… my children are tormented by the demon of incarceration. These mothers cry out as did the mother called ‘Canaanite’. The cry of ‘the other’, the cry of the outsider: have mercy, have mercy. How could such a cry not be heard.

But in the gospel story, the most shocking thing happens even before we hear the words of the disciples: Jesus did not answer her a word! Jesus ignores the plea for mercy. Never before in the gospel story has Jesus ignored such a plea. What a shocking confrontation for us as readers but a confrontation that invites us into our response to the ‘other’ who cries out to us in our lives for ‘mercy’, for food, for presence, for acceptance. Do we remain silent in the face of the cry? Do we ignore? Or do we find ourselves with the disciples saying: send her away, send them away! Send them to Malaysia so that they can be processed offshore. Send them away from here, from us, from our space. Send them away.

And this confronting gospel story does not stop there. When Jesus does begin to speak to the woman he does so in words which place himself and his people at the centre of reality further marginalizing the woman: I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. My theology says that Israel has a monopoly on my ‘mercy’ not the outsider. It is Australians, that conglomerate of historical border crossers, who have a monopoly on that country, not the new comers, the new outsiders. But Justa, the name given to the Canaanite woman in later tradition, is not silenced by Jesus’ theologizing or by the theologizing of the gospel storytelling community who constructed this story. This just woman, this woman who knows from the depth of her need what is right and just, in Israel, on its borders, on any border, again voices her plea using different words: help me.

The gospel reader is further shocked – surely Jesus will now hear her plea but no – Jesus answers: it is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. Whether proverbial statement or not, these words echo through our consciousness like those of the disciples: send her way, send her away. But they are more shocking as they name-call the woman. They associate the border crosser, the marginal person crying out in need for her demon-possessed daughter with ‘the dogs’. Australian resources for ‘Australians’, not for those yapping at our borders! Justa, however, is not silenced just as the asylum seeking mothers will not be silenced. The plight of their children is too great. They quickly learn the language so that they can turn it around as did Justa who had learnt the language of Israel’s tradition: Ah, yes, but even the dogs eat the crumbs. She turns the insult to advantage.

One can almost hear the moment of recognition happening for Jesus at this point in the story. He has ignored Justa and excluded her with theological and proverbial claims but she would not be silenced. Her need and the need of her daughter was too great and it was this need which she persistently placed before Jesus which broke through his exclusion of her on traditional, on even we might say theological grounds. His exclamation says it all: Woman, great is your faith [which has challenged mine]. Let it be done for you [and your daughter] as you have willed, as you have wished. What Jesus doesn’t say is that her wish, her will, her thelema is that of God. She has shown Jesus what God wills – that all should share in God’s healing love. The story tells of Jesus setting aside the word or way of God for a tradition of exclusion. Justa brings Jesus back to an understanding of the centrality of God’s healing word for all.

Can the asylum-seeing mothers do similarly for Australia, bringing us to such a moment of recognition of our shared humanity? Will we remember that we have all, but for our indigenous peoples, come by boats very recently to the land we now call home? How many of our ancestors cried out for mercy for themselves and their children as they entered Australia as a new land? And again, returning to our immediate lives here, who is it that cries out in our lives? Can we stand with the disciples and with Jesus in today’s gospel and discern those places in our lives where we silently ignore, where we cry out to ‘send them away’, where we theologize and use pungent proverbial statements in order to authorize our failure to respond to the cry for mercy? We can do this if we stand with Jesus on the border or the margins of our social world. Like Jesus, we too can theologize away the call for mercy but if we keep listening to and engaging with the one who cries out, then we too can shift, as he did, to a recognition of what is of God: that healing and wholeness belong to all.

May the words of today’s gospel keep echoing in your minds and hearts and find expression in your lives during the week ahead.