Sermon for the Second Sunday in Lent
“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs
which fall from their masters’ table”
“Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” we heard last week. It was Jesus’ response to the first temptation of the tempter, the devil. It captures, really, an entire attitude and approach to the Scriptures, especially in our Anglican understanding. It belongs to an entire theology of revelation. It speaks ever so profoundly to the deeper meaning of our humanity as spiritual and intellectual creatures who are not and cannot be defined simply by the things of this world. This whole outlook and way of understanding is, of course, profoundly sacramental. Jesus will make the connection between bread and word ever so clear. “I am the bread of life”, he says, the bread of the Passover which he says is his body, “this sacrament of the holy Bread of eternal life” as the Prayer Book Eucharistic prayer so beautifully puts it.
This sacramental connection between bread and word is present in this Sunday’s Gospel, too. It tells the wonderful, though somewhat disturbing, story of the Caananite woman coming out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, seeking Jesus on behalf of her daughter who is “grievously vexed with a devil”. Some of the same themes present themselves here as last Sunday. The ensuing dialogue is about the strength of this woman who is an outsider, we might say, but who has an insight into who Jesus is for the whole of our humanity. The dialogue, which is initially so troubling, serves to bring out a tension within Israel about God only to conclude that through Israel God in Jesus Christ is for everyone. But it is not cheap grace. The importunity or perseverance of this remarkable woman is like the insistence of the blind man on Quinquagesima Sunday. It belongs to a remarkable insight into the power of God’s unconditional goodness in Jesus Christ. But it testifies as well to the necessity of our seeking what God wants for us. As the poet John Donne puts it in a marvelous and super-intense sonnet, “salvation to all that will is nigh”. You have to want it, to will it. But you can only will what God gives.
