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Jesus on
Vacation
A sermon by Dr. Jim
Somerville,
Pastor, Richmond’s First Baptist Church
Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, August 17, 2008
The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Matthew 15:21-28
In a book called
Leaving
Church Barbara
Brown Taylor talks about how busy she was as the assistant rector at a big,
Episcopal church in Atlanta. She says, “I preached, celebrated the sacraments,
visited the sick, and educated the young. I met with the steady stream of
people who showed up at the church door looking for food, shelter, medical care,
and sympathy. I also proofread the bulletin, recruited Sunday school teachers,
kept the roster for nursing home visitations, and attended a great many
committee meetings.” She says that because she was the assistant and not the
rector she did get a break when she finally went home at night. She didn’t get
those 3:00 a.m. calls when someone ended up in the emergency room or a loved one
was found lifeless on a bathroom floor. She didn’t get those other calls
either, when someone was furious about the way the finance committee was
investing the church endowment or the way a Sunday school teacher had spoken to
a child.
Still, she stayed busier
than she could believe. “With just seven days in a week,” she asked, “where is
the time to be a good preacher, teacher, pastor, prophet, celebrant, prayer,
writer, foot washer, administrator, community activist, clergy colleague,
student of scripture, and wholesome exemplar of the gospel”? That last part was
the hardest of all, she claims, being “a wholesome example of the gospel,”
something she had promised to do when she was ordained. She tried to be a good
example, but she wondered if being good was the same as being whole. And when
she dreamed about the things that made her more whole, most of those dreams had
no other people in them, which seemed like a betrayal of her calling to pastoral
ministry. “I dreamed of renting a cottage on a deserted beach and spending one
whole week beyond the sound of another human voice,” she writes. “I dreamed of
taking a pile of books to a house in the woods and reading one whole volume
every day without interruption. I dreamed of living for a while in a town where
I knew no one and did not speak the language so I could go to the store for
butter or sit all night in a café without anyone recognizing me.” But she was
trying to be a wholesome example to others, she says, and her own wholesome
example was Christ, and when she looked at his life she did not see him taking
any time off to read or relax. Instead, she says, “I saw someone who was always
feeding people, healing people, teaching people, helping people.”
I don’t want to disagree
with Barbara Brown Taylor, who is as able a student of the scriptures as ever
lived, but I think that if you will look closely at today’s Gospel text you will
see a slightly different picture emerging. In the chapter that precedes our
reading for today Jesus has been “feeding people, healing people, teaching
people, helping people.” He has been doing it until he is exhausted. He needs
a break.
Look at the clues:
§
In chapter
14, verse 13, Jesus got in a boat with his disciples and “withdrew to a deserted
place by himself.” But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from
the towns, so that when Jesus stepped ashore he saw a crowd of some 5,000 people
waiting for him and, because he was Jesus, he had compassion for them, and
taught them, and eventually fed them.
§
In the
paragraph beginning at 14:34, Matthew tells us that when Jesus and his disciples
crossed back over the Sea of Galilee later they came to land at Gennesaret, and
after the people of that place recognized him, they sent word throughout the
region and brought all who were sick to him, and begged him that they might
touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed”
(34-36).
You get a picture of Jesus
and his disciples surrounded by crowds of people who are begging to touch the
fringe of his cloak, putting their sick family members in his path, pressing
around him so closely, and with such a clamor, that he can hardly hear himself
think, much less take time for a meal. Barbara Brown Taylor says, “When he
tried to withdraw from these people, they followed him. When they tried to eat
him up, he did not resist. ‘Take, eat, this is my body, given for you,’ he
said, holding out a loaf of [bread].
Like a single mother, he fed his spiritual offspring from his own flesh and
blood until all of his reserves were gone. Then he died, and, though he rose
from the dead three days later, this was quite an act to follow,” she says.
“When I looked at his life I did not see any beach cottages or all night cafes.”
But look at Matthew 15:21,
which says, “Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and
Sidon.” He went
away,
Matthew says, meaning, I think, that he went away from all those crowds of
people, and he went to the district of
Tyre and Sidon
which, according to the map in the back of your Bible, is a district along the
coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Mark, in his version of this story, says that
Jesus “entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.” I have to
confess that I’ve done that before. I used to take my family to the same beach
house summer after summer, and I made it a point not to get to know the
neighbors too well. Once you let it slip that you’re a minister they start
coming by in the evenings, sitting on the porch with you, telling you their
troubles. Ordinarily, I don’t mind that sort of thing at all. I’m glad to
listen and I love to help. But when I’m on vacation, well, that’s different.
Vacation is, almost by definition, a time when you take a break from the
ordinary.
So, while neither Matthew
nor Mark say that Jesus was on vacation, they do say that he went away to the
Mediterranean coast, that he entered a house, and that he didn’t want anyone to
know that he was there. Sounds like a vacation to me. Again, I don’t want to
disagree with Barbara Brown Taylor but I can imagine a nice pastel-colored beach
cottage somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean, with Jesus sitting on the
front porch, gazing out over those deep blue waters, savoring those delicious
breezes. I can imagine that the sweetest thing of all for him would be the
silence and the solitude of such a place, with nothing but the occasional cry of
a gull and the sound of the surf to distract him. You wouldn’t hold such a
thing against him, would you? Everybody needs a break from time to time. But
suddenly the silence was broken by the sound of this woman coming up the front
steps in her flip-flops, calling for his help.
“Have mercy on me, Lord!
I know you’re on vacation. But my daughter is possessed by a demon. I need
your help.” And if Jesus had a
widow’s mite for every
time he had heard that request he would have been a rich man. He had been
surrounded by crowds of people, remember? They had been pressing in against
him, begging to touch the fringe of his cloak. He hadn’t even been able to
eat. And now, when he has finally gotten a few minutes’ peace, here comes this
Canaanite woman. She’s from another country. She has a different religion. It
would be like a Muslim woman coming to me on vacation, asking for help. I might
not say it but I would wonder: “Isn’t there a mosque you could go to? An Imam
you could ask? Why are you coming to me?” And so I can almost forgive Jesus
for what he does next, which is nothing at all. Apparently he just keeps
looking off into the distance, pretending not to hear, until the disciples come
begging him to send her away. “She keeps shouting after us,” they say. “Do
something!” And so he tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the
house of Israel.” In other words, “I can’t help you. I’m up here in Gentile
territory. I am way out of my jurisdiction.” But this woman comes and kneels
before him, bowing her head to the ground and begging, “Lord, help me.” It is
the request Jesus has never been able to refuse, but this time he says, “It
isn’t fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” It is another
way, but not a more polite way, of saying, “Go away, woman, you’re bothering
me.”
And yet she won’t go
away. Jesus is not just her best hope, he is her only hope. She looks up into
his face, her eyes searching for some flicker of empathy. “Yes, Lord,” she
says, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
It’s a good answer. It is such a good answer that Jesus looks into those
pleading eyes and feels his resolve crumbling. He can’t help himself. Above
the weariness of his human nature and the strength of his divine nature it is
his nature to feel with those who are hurting and want to do something about
it. Christ, thy name is compassion. And so he says to her, “Woman, great is
your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” Even as he did it he must
have known what it would mean. Soon the news would spread, and before long
everyone in town would be coming up those front steps, begging for mercy. His
vacation would be over. But he did it anyway, and the woman went home to find
her daughter sleeping in her own bed, resting in perfect peace for the first
time in years.
There is a word for what
preachers do when they try to explain why bad things happen to good people.
It’s called theodicy, and it comes from two Greeks words that mean,
essentially, “to justify God.” Theodicy is how we try to get God off the hook,
how we try to convince people that even though terrible things happen, God is
still loving and still powerful. Today I’ve been doing something that might be
called Christodicy—I’ve been trying to get Jesus off the hook. I’ve been
trying to convince you that even though he first ignores this woman, and then
tells her it’s not his problem, and then calls her a Canaanite dog, he is still
loving and compassionate. “He was just worn out,” I’ve been saying. “He needed
a break.”
Surely you can
sympathize. We have all said or done things we have regretted, and often we
have said them or done them when we were tired, when we just weren’t ourselves.
That’s the excuse I’ve been trying to make for Jesus today: he was tired; he
wasn’t himself. The fact that I have spent most of the sermon trying to justify
his behavior suggests that his behavior was uncharacteristic, that usually,
instead of putting people down, he lifted them up. And that’s true, isn’t it?
Follow Jesus through the Gospels and you will see that it is his way, usually,
to reach down into the depths of human misery to lift people up. The force that
he used was humanizing rather than dehumanizing. And that’s what makes this
story so difficult. In it we see Jesus ignoring this woman, dismissing her, and
finally insulting her. It isn’t like him at all. And maybe that’s what we are
supposed to learn from this story—that ignoring, dismissing, or insulting a
fellow human being is not Christlike behavior. When we see it in him it
shocks us; we scramble to explain. But what about when he sees it in us? Is he
shocked by our behavior, or is it just what he has come to expect?
I know I’ve been guilty,
and I know it usually happens when I’m tired. When I was living in Wingate,
North Carolina, there was an indigent couple that used to come asking for help
all the time. They lived in a tiny camper at the edge of a field and they
really didn’t have anything. They needed help. But sometimes when I was
exhausted from all those things Barbara Brown Taylor talks about—from preaching
sermons and educating the young and visiting the sick and proofreading the
bulletin—I just didn’t want to deal with them. It was easy in those times to
think of all the reasons I shouldn’t deal with them: they weren’t members
of my church; helping them would only make them more dependent; someone else
might need that money. I was tempted to say, “It isn’t fair to take the
children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” Except these weren’t dogs. They
were people. And that’s something I learned from that Canaanite woman. No
matter how much Jesus ignored her, dismissed her, insulted her she never stopped
believing that her daughter was worth something, and eventually she convinced
him that she was worth something too. Instead of seeing her as a Canaanite dog
he came to see her as a woman of great faith.
It may be only a
coincidence but at the end of this Gospel Jesus doesn’t tell his followers to go
and make disciples among the lost sheep of the house of Israel. He tells them
to go and make disciples of every nation, including that nation where the
Canaanite woman lived. Is it possible that she persuaded him? That while he
was on vacation Jesus learned that the love of God was big enough not only for
the house of Israel, but for the whole human race? Is it possible he learned
that among the people of the world there is no one we can ignore, dismiss, or
insult, but that all people everywhere—people of every class and race and
culture—are the children of God? It sounds possible to me. It sounds like the
truth. In fact, it sounds like the gospel truth.
—Jim Somerville ©2008
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