by CCW | 4 March 2012 14:07
“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.
The exchange between Jesus and the woman here is one of the greatest exchanges in the whole of the Scriptures. There is an intensity and a humility in the woman. The disciples and even Jesus, at first, appear hard-hearted, unmoved and without compassion for the woman in her distress. But Jesus’ words here are really a critique of the disciples and by extension of the kind of thinking that would keep God to ourselves rather than see his goodness as being in principle and in truth for all and everyone. The initial silence of Jesus – “he answered her not a word”, the disciples complaining about her – “send her away”, Jesus’ word that he is “not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, and, then, the even more pointed statement that “it is not right to take the children’s bread and cast it to dogs”, are all a critique of Israel’s claim to have a special relation to God that excludes others. That is of course only one side of the Jewish understanding. The point of the whole exchange is that it is through Israel that all of us are God’s children. The Jewishness of Jesus, after all, is part of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation.
This is not something that can be taken for granted. There is and there has to be a struggle, a struggle and a break-through of the understanding. It happens through the insight of this strong woman. She will not be put off but persists in her quest. Why? Because of the strong truth of which she has such a hold. Her response to Jesus, acknowledged by him as strong words of great faith, is the ultimate critique of any kind of claim by anyone to have an exclusive relationship with God.
The humility in which it is expressed is breath-taking and heart-achingly beautiful. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs”, Jesus says; the bread that is the Word of God is for the children of God. But who are they? It should not be squandered and cavalierly thrown about, to be sure. The bread that is the Word is salvation. It is health and healing to a broken and wounded world, a world of souls grievously vexed with the devils of all our preoccupations, pretensions and foolishnesses, mine and yours. This woman cuts through all the vain and empty verbiage of our lives to claim the universality of God’s grace.
“Truth, Lord,” she says. That is not the way your bread and word should be regarded. “Yet,” and with that little word comes the profoundest insight. “Yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” The Word of God which calls the world into being is the Word which sustains the whole creation. In a way, every living thing lives from the creative Word of God. Here that Word goes forth in redemption to call us back to the truth that we live “not by bread alone but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God”. This is her insight, too. And in a marvelous way she connects the healing power and saving grace of God with the image of bread or more precisely and more wonderfully with “the crumbs which fall” from the rich banquet of divine love, a banquet to which we are all invited but to which none of us can presume to come “trusting in our own righteousness” but only in the “manifold and great mercies of God.” She does not presume upon anything other than the mercy and goodness of God. Her simple plea is the prayer she makes upon her knees, “Lord, help me.”
In two weeks time, on The Fourth Sunday in Lent, we will be reminded again about the “gather[ing] up of the fragments that remain” from the feast in the wilderness when Jesus feeds the multitude that had followed him there. Word and bread, yet again. The provisions of God for us in the journey of our lives are about his being with us, “giv[ing] us our daily bread.” and sustaining us with his grace. It is there for us all if we will be like this Caananite woman who on her knees before Jesus persists in seeking God’s grace.
Fr. David Curry
Lent II, March 4th, 2012
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2012/03/04/sermon-for-the-second-sunday-in-lent-2/
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