If Jesus is a Bigot, We're All Going to Hell: Pete Mace
If Jesus is a Bigot, We’re All Going to Hell:
A Pushback Against the Heresy that Jesus was “Just a Human”
A Sermon on Matthew 15:10-28
This Gospel reading is not an easy one, by many people’s standards, and I won’t claim that it is. And it’s enticing to think about just avoiding the second half of this passage in favor of the first half, where Jesus tells us that it isn’t what we eat but our words that defile us. On an average Sunday, I’d come up here and try to pull out a bit of understanding for us from a passage like that, and together we would try to tease out how what we read in the passage should guide and influence our lives. But even though this may fall short of a full explanation, the more I went along the more I felt like we had to address this interaction between Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Now I never walk away from a Sunday morning thinking that I’ve exhausted everything there is to say about a particular Gospel passage, and today will be no exception. In fact, this particular reading may be *the* example of not being able to cover everything. Someone could preach on just this passage for a month and still not cover everything there is to say about it.
My goal for us today isn’t to walk away from worship with a nice little nugget of how we should act the rest of the week. I think the nuggets are definitely in this passage, and the first half of our reading is pretty straightforwardly a guide for our words and actions. “It isn’t what goes into the mouth that defiles, but what comes out of the mouth that defiles”, Jesus says. Yesterday’s lunch goes down the sewer the next morning. But the words that we say to someone can never be unsaid, and if we're not a liar, they’ll reveal how our hearts really feel about that person.
Words don’t murder, words don’t commit adultery or theft or slander. They’re just words, neutral elements of speech that we use to communicate the ideas of our hearts and minds. So while that opportunity for instruction and correction in our lives is definitely here, that emphasis isn’t what I want us to focus on today. Instead, like Jacob wrestling with God’s messenger at the River Jabbok in Genesis 32, I want us to begin wrestling. Wrestling with ourselves, our own ideas. With our fellow Christians and most importantly with the Bible.
Since the beginning of Christianity, Christians have believed that the Bible is a living thing, it isn’t just words on a page in the same way that Shakespeare or the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar are just words on a page that tell us a story. Our understanding of Scripture grows as we grow closer to God, revelations are made about what the Bible means, how to interpret it, and what it’s saying to us. This isn’t to say those meanings aren’t there to begin with, but that as we continue growing in faith and continue reading, we become aware of more of what God wants for us to see in Scripture. What this understanding of Scripture means, to steal a quote from a professor of mine is that “There are an infinite number of ways to interpret the Bible correctly, and an even larger number of ways to do it wrongly.”
If there was only one meaning to the Bible, you could read it once or twice like an IKEA manual, set it down and go on about your life. But there isn’t, so we must wrestle with it and with each other in order to make sure we’re within the bounds of what is a faithful and acceptable interpretation of Scripture. Because it’s easy to step outside of those boundaries and kind of fudge them to make it look like you’re still being true to the message of Scripture.
That’s how you get things like the Prosperity Gospel, the Health and Wealth approach, or Universalism, that nothing we do here matters, everyone will go to Heaven in the end eventually. And while those interpretations are pretty straightforwardly identifiable as out-of-bounds and unorthodox concepts of the Bible and Jesus, the much scarier misinterpretations in my opinion are when people take Christian doctrines and beliefs and tweak them by just a little bit.
Imagine a board with a bunch of dials on it. The Prosperity Gospel cranked the “How Much Money I Can Have” knob all the way to an eleven, and so we can all see it as pretty obviously being off and we can notice that something is out of place. But what happens when someone takes one of those knobs, and just ticks it a spot or two, and then does to another knob over here, and then over there. You could be forgiven for not noticing if you weren’t looking specifically for it...
And before I continue, let me say that none of us have all our “belief knobs” tuned in perfectly. Nobody has a 100% perfect interpretation of the entire Bible. Nobody is a terrible person for being wrong on some things accidentally or from ignorance. So, when we wrestle with ourselves and each other it needs to be from a posture of love and correction, not a posture of being right or being combative.
Why am I bringing all this interpretational regulation up, though? Well, because our passage today is one of the easiest to not be sure where all the knobs are supposed to be set, and so it’s one of the easiest for us to intentionally or accidentally go out of the bounds of a faithful interpretation of Scripture on.
What do we do about Matthew 15:21-28? The interaction between Jesus and the disciples and the Canaanite Woman. While plenty of people find the whole story disturbing, most of them take particular trouble with verse 26 when Jesus calls this woman and other Gentiles dogs. Or when the disciples ask for Jesus to send her away, or he ignores her. These difficult instances that at first glance don’t line up with who we know Christ to be.
In reading a number of different commentaries and other resources about our Gospel for Sunday, what I found is that one of the prominent veins of interpretation for this passage, especially in recent times, is that Jesus “got caught with His compassion down and forced to confront his own prejudice; in a reversal of the usual roles, the respected teacher learns from an outsider the need to broaden his ministry of hospitality to those outside the house of Israel.” or to quote one clergy person “Jesus{...}learns that no one is outside the heart of God{...} If Jesus can change, if He can give up His bigotries and prejudices... then so can we.”
When reading these people’s interpretations, they can sound appealing and convincing. They use lots of the good words and phrases we're used to hearing. Words like: "compassion, barrier-breaking, willingness to be in relationship, growing closer to God." And it sounds...almost right, which, like I said earlier, can often be more dangerous than the seemingly crazy person on the corner screaming that the world is ending and that they’re the next Jesus, or whatever. The reason these subtle ones are so much more dangerous, in my opinion, is that they have the same teeth in them that obvious heresy does when it comes to pulling us away from faithful interpretation and the faith in general, but they’re hidden until it’s too late. It’s much easier to hear something that sounds almost like the Jesus we know in the Bible and take it at face value. To fall into that pit like the blind following the blind.
But... that being said: If these people are right. If Jesus is a bigot, and we still believe that God does exist and isn't a bigot, we’re all going to Hell. The only reason that Jesus was able to go up and die on the cross for our sins to be forgiven is because He was perfect and sinless. When He sacrificed Himself, he had no sins of His own to atone for and the gift of grace He received from that sacrifice spilled over onto us and covered our sins for us. The only way we can be forgiven is because Christ was sinless. So, if Jesus was truly bigoted and prejudiced like those quotes from earlier seem to claim, then He wasn’t perfect and did sin, and His death and resurrection didn’t change the outcome of death for the rest of us. So, if that’s the case and we still find ourselves believing in a just God, then our sins aren’t washed away by the Blood of Christ, and you know where that leads. Unless, and there is an unless, unless the people claiming that Jesus was a bigot also want to claim that bigotry, prejudice, and racism aren’t sins but simply opinions or states of mind. An argument I don’t think anyone can convincingly make, given all the other times Jesus goes around the purity laws of who is acceptable to associate with, the times he heals Gentiles, the times He loves neighbors that aren’t like Him and commands us to do the same.
Now, I can’t give you a perfectly wrapped explanation topped with a bow for this passage, but I can give you an attempt. And a warning. The warning is to not be distrustful of a person who comes to you admitting their own lack of understanding and is willing to sit with you in that, but to be very wary of anyone who claims that difficulties such as Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman can be swept away, but done so at the expense of changing the very nature of who Jesus is. For instance, here, doing so by defining Christ’s words as “problematic”, and in order to solve this issue reducing Jesus to merely Human.
Jesus is fully Human, but He isn’t “only human” like when we would say “Oh, you’re only human, you’ll make mistakes”. He is also fully God and so to gloss over things we find difficult by saying that Christ needed to be corrected and learn to see past His bigotry implies an expansion of His human nature and a denial of His divine nature. Jesus is the perfect human, the model for what we all can be and what we are all called to. He descended to be a human being, not to be dragged even farther down by us into the category of sinner as if we’re crabs in a bucket, but to show us the way out of the bucket. To show us a higher calling of what it means to be made in the Image of God.
The way we protect ourselves against these types of interpretations is by having a foundation of Scripture against which to hold these interpretations and ourselves for comparison. If what we think Matthew 15 says doesn’t line up and contradicts who we see Jesus to be elsewhere in the Gospel, does that mean Jesus just got caught “with His compassion down” or is it possible that we have an imperfect interpretation of a difficult passage?
For instance, does Jesus just hate Gentiles? Well, in Matthew 7 He heals the Centurion’s servant and claims the Centurion has greater faith than anyone He’s seen in Israel. Are the Children of Israel already sitting at that table able to rely on that status for salvation? In Matthew 3, John the Baptist claims that being a child of Abraham and Israel is nothing special, God can make children of Abraham out of the rocks of the Earth, just like He did when He made Adam. Is salvation only for the Jews? In Matthew 28, Jesus gives the Great Commission to make disciples of all nations. Just within this Gospel, much less all four Gospels or the Bible as a whole, we see instance after instance where the idea that the Son of God was withholding salvation from Gentiles, or that He was closed-minded or prejudiced, is challenged and denied.
Another thing we need in order to avoid wandering outside of faithful Scriptural interpretation is to be in community with people who will wrestle with us and for us, who will call us out to faithfulness. This means we need to also be the ones calling each other out, doing unto others what we would want them to do unto us. If these people had had some pushback before publishing these ideas, maybe I wouldn’t be standing here talking about it. Grappling with our fellow Christians can turn into arguing and meanness, sure, but it’s also how we can better understand each other and try to come to some sort of common ground. When was the last time you actually came to someone and really tried to understand their point of view and engage them in conversation? What was it about? Was it from a place of love? How did it go? What did you learn? If our main source for understanding Scripture is a Televangelist, a social media page, or a book, then we’re missing something deeply integral to the life of faith. A good standard of measure is this: “If this person’s words lead me astray and punch a hole in the boat I’m riding on, are they going to be down there patching it up with me? Or will they be safe on the shore watching me drown?” Who is in the trenches with you? Those are the people we need to be learning with and wrestling with.
Now that I've given the warning, here's the attempt to give some insight into this passage - Taking place immediately after Jesus teaches and rebukes that food purity isn’t necessary, but heart purity is, it’s hard to not see these two passages as being intrinsically linked. The Canaanite woman would have been someone considered unclean to the Jews by every metric. Ritually unclean, an outsider, a pagan, and likely an idol worshipper. A Canaanite, with all the history the people of Israel have with them all the way back to the book of Joshua and before. They would have been considered lower than dogs by the majority of Israelites.
Jesus was sent first and primarily to the people of Israel, those that were supposed to know Him already, in order that through His birth, death, and resurrection, He would gather to Him those who knew Him and separate them from those who claimed He was not their own. Then, once His salvation was perfected and put on offer, it became available to all. Once He had forgiven our sins, those of us who weren’t religiously Jewish could receive salvation.
In this instance of talking with a Gentile before salvation was offered to all, Jesus puts on display His previous lesson, if it's by the words of the mouth that one defiles themselves, it's also by their words that they become clean. Just like the Centurion who asked Jesus to heal his servant, it is by confessing Christ as Lord that the woman’s desire, the healing of her daughter, comes to fruition. Notice how Jesus doesn’t just say “Your daughter is made well” but says “Let it be done as you wish” The desires of her heart are coming on display and showing her as faithful. As far as the issue of what to make of Jesus calling the women and Gentiles dogs, I particularly like the words of one Ancient Theologian:
“The Lord then said to her, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” What have the Jews to say to this? Plainly he implied that they were children and called the Gentiles “dogs.” The woman agreed, saying to the Savior, “Yes, Lord.” That is to say, I know, Lord, that the Gentile people are dogs in worshiping idols and barking at God.“Yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” In other words, you came to the Jews and manifested yourself to them, and they didn’t want you to make exceptions. What they rejected, give to us who are asking for it. Knowing the persistent faith of this woman, our Lord said, “O woman, your faith is great! Let it be done for you as you desire.” Faith accepts what work does not merit, and through faith, the Gentiles were made children out of dogs.”
- Epiphanius
If God can make children from dirt, and from rocks, why not from dogs? Now does this type of answer make wrestling with this passage easy? No. Does that answer make our understanding of passages like this one in Matthew 15 clean and tidy? No. But if our only clean recourse is to dismiss the Holy One as a bigot, then I find this messy option much more preferable.
We’ve never been called to clean work as followers of Christ, often we will find ourselves in the messy parts of life. And the interpretation of Scripture in a community is no different. What I’m calling us here to today is not to tune out the people who have this specific interpretation or any one we don’t like, or to put each other down in our understanding of who we think Christ is, but to be willing to wrestle with each other. To develop the muscles of attention and patience to go to someone and say “Hey, I disagree, but can we talk about it?” To open the conversations knowing they won’t finish in a 15-minute sermon or an hour-long conversation. To take a posture of long-suffering with our neighbor, in order that we may all grow closer to God.
In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.