Who Belongs in the House of Israel?
Jesus and the shouting Canaanite woman
Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’[a] table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.
Matthew 15:21-28
I saw an interesting map online last week drawn from New York Times data. It broke down by state how people self-identify their lineage in the United States, and which self-identity was largest in each state (not the majority, just the largest single identified ancestry). Some of it was predictable—people who self-identify as German dominate the Midwest, Italian in New York, African-American in the southeast, Mexican heritage in the southwest. Vermont was labeled Irish, to my surprise. In two states, Tennessee and Kentucky, the largest self-identified ancestry was simply “American.”
You might laugh at that, but sociologists say that is because people have been there so long, with their ancestry all blended together, they don’t know what ancient tribe they’re supposed to belong to. Scotch-Irish, German, English, who knows, so just go with “American.” And the whole reason we might laugh at that is that we know that “American” is not really an ethnicity, because being American isn’t about blood ancestry. So for most of our history, we have wrestled with a question: what makes you an American? And who belongs in America?
In ancient Israel, we might think this was an easier question, because people were more homogeneous in their tribal lineage. But over hundreds of years of exile and empire, people intermingle, intermarry, and move around. Now you and I might not see a problem with that, but let’s say you are an Israelite who knew your people came from twelve tribes, twelve sons of Jacob, who were now mostly gone. And the prophets had said God would resurrect all your people, all twelve tribes, who you can’t even identify on a map anymore. Some people thought the tribes were intact somewhere but exiled far off. But others worried that they were just totally gone with the wind, scattered, and even more challenging, blended in with the rest of the world. How are you supposed to resurrect all the tribes of Israel when the tribes are mixed in with the world? If you were trying to resurrect Israel and only focused on identifiable Israelites (Jews of the southern kingdom), it’d be like trying to save America by only focusing on the people from Tennessee and Kentucky.
But you can see the logic: if God will one day save Israel, worry about ethnic Israelites. The Pharisee movement thought if Israelites had stricter and stricter obedience to the Law, God would finally resurrect Israel—as one rabbinic tradition said, if Israel could just keep two Sabbaths in a row, the Messiah would come!
Focusing just on ethnic Israelites is what the disciples would have believed, too. After all, Jesus had sent them out just a few chapters earlier, telling them not to worry about the Gentiles, don’t check out the Samaritans, just focus on the lost sheep of Israel (Matt 10). But it brings us back to our American question: who belongs in the house of Israel?
In our gospel reading today, Jesus visits Tyre, 100 miles north of Jerusalem. He only goes for this story, and then he leaves; just for this moment. This is not the Jewish homeland, this is Gentile territory. So why is he there? Before Matthew can tell us, here comes an apparently quite loud woman. Mark says she’s Syrophoenician, what it would have been called in their time, but Matthew says she’s Canaanite, helping readers pay attention that there is something going on here that goes way, way back to the days of Joshua, who conquered the Canaanites. Now thousands of years later, here is Jesus, whose name is also Yeshua, and a Canaanite woman is in agony. Is he here to conquer her again like Joshua? Or just ignore her?
You might remember the other woman who just wants to silently touch his cloak in a crowd (Matt 9:20-22). That might be more your style of coming to Jesus, “Let me just touch his robe and not bother him.” This is not that woman. Matthew says she is shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David”—a non-Jew shouting his very Jewish messianic title—“my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Jesus doesn’t say anything. But something is cooking. Meanwhile, the disciples are already annoyed at her, as they often are at kids, women, and others who want Jesus’ help at their inconvenience, wanting to send her away. So Jesus sees this as a “teachable moment.”
You have to imagine him saying this like he knows where the script is going, when he says what would have been the conventional prophetic interpretation of his ministry: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She cries again for help. And he responds with more conventional wisdom, like a proverb: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Again, if you don’t know what Jesus is doing, this might sound like Jesus is being racist and misogynistic. But he is reenacting and performing the same popular theologies that his own disciples hold. Yes, God is for the house of Israel. But Jesus knows where this play is going, like a point guard in basketball setting up an alley-oop, and so when he says “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” he knows this passionate woman is about to take that ball and dunk it: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” It’s like saying, “But Lord, I’m not asking for anybody else’s meal, I’m just asking for the scraps of your grace.” “Woman, great is your faith!” And her daughter’s demon was gone.
So what is this really about? If the disciples had paid closer attention, they would have seen what the prophets had already said it was about. In Isaiah 56, the Lord says:
“The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath and do not profane it and hold fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer.….for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord God, who gathers the outcasts of Israel: I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.”
Isaiah 56:6-7a, 8
Even in the restoration of Israel, it is not about only those who are “from here,” it is anyone who accepts the grace of his Sabbath and holds fast to his covenant.
Again, the Pharisees look at this and say God will save Israel if we finally get our act together and keep the Law. Jesus says yes, we are called to fulfill the covenant, but the heart of it. And God is not waiting for us to get it perfect. What’s more, never forget that the covenant is not a burden, but a gift. To this day, when people hear the gospel that delivers us from our sins that also asks us to live a life no longer enslaved to sin, people hear two different things: is being a Christian a burden that self-righteous people embrace to puff ourselves up? Or is it accepting a gift that God keeps on giving to all sinners?
In Romans, Paul points out what Jesus also pointed out: Israel did not accept the gift of living in relationship with God. They did not repent and return to be gathered into God. And here comes this Canaanite woman, who is not merely asking for help from Jesus, but is embodying part of a great Jewish tradition. Not only Rahab, Jesus’ own ancestor, a Canaanite who helps Israelite spies in Jericho, but Jesus’ other ancestor Ruth, a Moabite, not an Israelite, was happy to glean from the fields whatever the Israelites didn’t want to eat. This woman is doing the same thing: Lord, I see the grace that your own children aren’t taking. Let me just have some of the spares. And yet even though Israel rejected the gift over and over, they and anyone who returns to God still receive his blessing. And yet there is some qualification, some marker, something that makes you part of God’s people. But if it is not where you came from, or how good you are, who belongs in the house of Israel?
Remember the night Jacob got a new name. He arrives at the river, sends his family ahead, and suddenly a mysterious divine being appears, and they wrestle all night. Jacob won’t let him go without a blessing. The sun comes up, and now he has a new name: Israel, “the one who wrestles with God and humans and survived.”
Look again at this woman. She’s wrestling with humans, alright, and she’s wrestling with God (and in the same person). Now someone asked the other day, how could Jacob wrestle with God and win? Why would God do that? Why does a father wrestle with his children? To have fun, to bond with them, and to teach them something important they can only feel by knowing in their bodies that you love them. And so when we wrestle with God as this woman wrestled with Jesus, feel it in your bones: God loves you. You belong. And it’s not just your bloodline; your vocation, your political convictions, your skills, your class, your pedigree, nothing else makes you part of God’s people except saying “yes” to his gift. Jesus is saying, “This woman, who you think is not part of Israel, had a faith so strong that she was willing to have it out with me. She is my people.”
So when Jesus said, “I came to save the lost sheep of Israel,” he wasn’t lying. He’s teaching, “Who belongs in Israel is more than you thought.” What makes you a Vermonter may be how many generations back you go, but what puts you in the house of Israel is your willingness to say yes to the gift and hold on to God in the wrestle. And that is a word we call faith.
Faith is not simply wrestling with how much you believe in God or not, but the daily wrestle that can only come from a life of deep faith. By faith, will you honor the gifts he has poured out on you by denouncing sin in your life even when you don’t feel like it? By faith, will you seek to fulfill his covenant through the spirit of the Law written on your heart even when it’s hard? By faith, will you love God and love your neighbor as yourself when our flesh tells us to love only ourselves? And when you fail at that, by faith, will you keep trying and know God still sees you and loves you no matter what?
Your faith may not be a woman boldly shouting at Jesus. Your wrestling may not be at a dramatic riverfront by the moonlight. Your wrestling faith may be the last whisper, barely holding onto Jesus that may not even feel like faith. But if there is something in you that is still trying, still curious, still can’t quite let Jesus go, then you have enough faith to move mountains. Because like this woman, you have to have great faith to wrestle at all with the almighty God. Jesus already knows she’s going to win; the disciples don’t, and it seems like she shouldn’t know she will receive his grace. She’s not supposed to belong in the house of Israel. But the wrestle itself is a gift, and she won’t let him go. Will you? Amen.
This sermon was informed by the scholarship of Jason Staples, author of Paul and the Resurrection of Israel, whose Substack is here. I also regularly listen to Fr. Aaron and Marissa Burt’s wonderful At Home with the Lectionary podcast for lectionary discussions in my sermon prep.
