Scripture can be found here…
An email landed in my inbox this week with the title “Finding Your Tribe.” The article began:
“Part of being human is the search for an individual identity. Bound to this strong need to establish a unique persona, however, is an equally intense desire for acceptance.”
This set me thinking. How had I learned that word, “tribe,” and what had it meant to me along the way?
My first exposure had to be those black-and-white TV shows I watched after school when I was a kid—a lot of them set in the Wild West. The tribes in question were people I first learned to call “Indians,” and then, “native Americans,” and then, “indigenous peoples.” When I was watching “The Rifleman,” the people in those tribes seemed very exotic, and somewhat frightening, with their unfamiliar clothing and customs, and they way they always seemed to be at war with the people we thought of as the “good white settlers.”
Later, I learned the definition that’s the basis for the email I got this week: “a community of those that feel comfortable to us and nurture our journey.” Being a part of this kind of tribe means you are with people you like, people you want to be with, with whom you have things in common, like age or stage of life, work, interests. This definition of “tribe” is all about connection and intimacy.
Eventually, I learned about the twelve tribes of Israel, those descendants of Jacob who were God’s covenant people in the Bible… the people who form Jesus’ tribe, in very real terms. According to the genealogy we find at the beginning of the gospel of Matthew, Jesus is a member of the tribe of Jacob’s son Judah. But if Matthew’s gospel is any indication, being a member of a tribe isn’t always about your personal comfort levels. Jesus spends a good amount of the time trying to persuade other descendants of Jacob to take a new view of their religious customs, to open their minds to the wideness of God’s mercy.
Which is why today’s story is so baffling, on first take. Jesus and his disciples are in a region where they aren’t a part of the religious majority—Tyre and Sidon. There he encounters a Canaanite woman.
Canaanites are mentioned in the bible more than any other ethnic group, and that’s because Canaan is huge—a territory covering a vast portion of the eastern Mediterranean, and including modern day countries such as Israel, Syria, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, and Libya. Canaanites practiced a polytheistic religion: they worshiped many gods.
In the history of God’s covenant people, Canaanites are their enemy.
So. An unnamed Canaanite woman approaches Jesus, and calls out to him:
“Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
That title? “Son of David”? By saying that, this woman has just revealed that she believes Jesus is the Messiah, God’s anointed one.
Jesus ignores her.
Nevertheless, she persists.
Jesus’ disciples get a little antsy. They want him to send her away. She’s annoying. She’s loud. She’s embarrassing.
So, he disclaims any responsibility for her. Hey, he says. I was sent to the lost sheep of my own people, my own tribe.
The woman approaches Jesus. She kneels before him. “Help me, Lord.”
Jesus then insults her cruelly. Helping you? he says. That would be like taking food meant for the children and throwing it to the dogs.
Every time I read those words of Jesus, I cringe. How can it be? It hurts to hear him speak like this.
But this is tribalism. Tribes? They can function for good: they can help you to know who you can consider family. They can be a source of strength, identity, pride. But tribalism? That is no longer about what is good and strong. That is about who’s in and who’s out. Who we care about and who we consider expendable. For whom we will rush in, and who we will pass on by. Whose lives matter, and whose lives don’t.
Jesus has been immersed in a kind of tribalism his whole life, one that tells him that the covenant people, his people, are the only ones whose lives truly matter. Tribalism is the particular pool Jesus is swimming in.
We citizens of the United States all grew up in a similar pool, the pool of white supremacy. This is the pool that allowed white Europeans to kidnap Black human beings from Africa into 250 years of slavery, and it is the pool that ensured, once slavery was technically abolished, Black people would continue to be terrorized, and lynched, and refused civil rights. It’s the pool that has allowed for the gutting of the Voting Rights Act over the last decade. This is the pool all Americans swim in.
Jesus is swimming in a pool that tells him Canaanite lives don’t matter. Then the woman—this woman! She is a marvel. She is not devastated by what she has been called, by what her daughter has been called. I’m guessing, she’s heard it all before. I suppose she could weep. She could run away in shame. But she doesn’t. Instead, she utterly disarms Jesus with– a joke? a bitter retort? Or maybe just the logical extension of his own words. “Even the dogs get to lick up the crumbs,” she says.
I love to imagine the look on Jesus’ face. The shock. Then, maybe, a smile. Laughter, as he is forced to confront his own prejudice, by a mother who will not stop from doing everything she can to stop her daughter’s suffering.
“Great is your faithfulness,” Jesus says. “Let it be.” And the daughter is healed.
I know there is a traditional interpretation of this story that many of you have heard: Jesus is testing the woman’s faith.
I don’t think so. For one thing, the woman declares her faith from the start. She calls Jesus “son of David,” which means, she calls him, “Messiah.”
For another thing, the writer of this gospel, the one we call “Matthew,” never misses an opportunity to explain things. He explains the purpose of parables, and what they mean. He explains religious practices and uses the Hebrew Scriptures to explain who Jesus is. And he explains when religious leaders hostile to Jesus are testing him.
But Matthew offers no words of explanation for this moment. He doesn’t say, “Jesus was testing her,” and if that were the case, I believe he would.
So we are left with a story in which Jesus learns. Jesus grows. Jesus changes his mind. Jesus becomes able to affirm that Canaanite lives do, indeed matter.
Jesus can’t get out of the pool he has been swimming in his whole life. None of us can. But, like Jesus, we can see that pool for what it is, and we can decide to change our attitude and our actions. We can affirm the equal dignity and worth of all God’s children—we can affirm that yes, their lives matter too. They are included. They are precious. They are worthy. God created them, and so, they are our kin.
If Jesus can unlearn the tribalism that has bound him, so can we. In Jesus, we see that learning and growth are part of the sacred story, even for the one we affirm as Messiah and Lord. Learning and growth are part of each of our sacred stories. In this, as in all things, God is with us.
Thanks be to God. Amen.