Have mercy on me, O Lord
Lent is one long Kyrie eleison, we might say, one long “Lord, have mercy upon us”. It reminds us that seeking mercy is an essential aspect of prayer, an essential feature of the Christian faith itself, a confessional mode that belongs to something profoundly positive. Nowhere is that more powerfully seen than in this Gospel story about our need for mercy.
A woman from outside of Israel – Matthew says “a Canaanite woman,” Mark, “a Greek, Syro-Phoenician by birth,” in either case the point is clear, she is from outside of Israel – comes to Jesus seeking a healing mercy for her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil,” disturbed in her mind in some sense, we would say. It is her quest for mercy that undergirds the whole scene, at once troubling and wonderful.
The point is very simple, yet I am quite aware of how disturbing this story is for people. What is all about? It is about an essential aspect of prayer, namely, the drawing out of us what in fact God seeks for us. There is no story more disturbing and yet more wonderful than this story. This woman from outside of Israel is put to the test about what it truly means to be an Israelite and she shows us exactly that. Jacob striving or wrestling with God becomes Israel, one who strives with God. This Canaanite woman is the embodiment of what it means to strive with God.
She hangs in there in the face of silence, rebuke, and insult. Why? Because she has a hold of the very principle upon which the desire for mercy completely depends. She senses in Christ the only answer to her dilemma about her daughter. What she grasps intuitively, or better intellectually, is the wonder of the story because like the blind man on the roadside begging, she is insistent. She won’t let go of what she has a hold of.
This troubles us because we would like to domesticate divinity, making God subject to human goals and purposes. Just give us what we want, what we may even think we are owed, even entitled. As if God owes us. She comes to Jesus, to be sure, with a very specific request but her insight into the truth of God in Jesus is far greater. Because of her insight, she holds on in the face of the torrent of testing. “Truth Lord,” she says, finally and with great prophetic insight, “yet even the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ tables.”
Her opening plea for mercy and her closing statement are intimately connected. You can’t have one without the other. That she hangs in and perseveres and does so with directness and courage is the great wonder of the Gospel. It teaches us something about the nature of the Christian Faith. It is about our working with the grace of God. It is something active and alive. Christ is alive in her, we might say, strange as that may seem.
The dialogue brings out the real meaning of being tested. Being tested is about our relation to what we know, somehow or another, upon which all things depend. She has a hold of that and will not let go, not unlike the Centurion who sought the healing of his servant. But here it is all about her activity, an activity of God within us. As Matthew makes clear in his account of the giving of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus says to the disciples, “your Father knows what you need before you ask.” Why pray then, you might ask? Yet immediately Jesus says, “Pray then like this: Our Father…” Because prayer is about our wanting what God wants for us. It is about our engagement with God’s will. It is a profound activity in which the very truth of our desires is drawn out of us. And this is what God seeks from us – the strength of our wills and desire for what is true and good.
This is what this story shows. This woman strives to strive towards the things of God no matter what. She perseveres. She is an outstanding example of prayer as the active engagement of our wills with God. She has a hold of a profound understanding of the nature of God.
It is not just the woman’s faith that is being put to the test to draw out the deep desires of our humanity. The disciples and, in a way the whole of Israel, are being tested and rebuked. The disciples complain to Jesus about her crying after them. “But [Jesus] answered” them and said, “I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” which reveals one of two things. Either salvation is confined to Israel, meaning that God is the God just of a particular people, or salvation is for all through Israel. It is the latter understanding that the woman grasps as she kneels before him and says, “Lord, help me.” “Let my cry come unto you,” the psalmist says; the prayer that ends T.S. Eliot’s poem, Ash Wednesday.
But here it leads to a further exchange which only seems to highlight the disturbing idea of God’s will being constrained to one group or tribe yet actually serves as the demonstration of the real nature of God’s engagement with the whole of our humanity. “It is not right to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs,” Jesus says, appearing to confirm the attitude of the disciples towards this non-Israelite woman, seeing her as no better than a dog. It is a common Middle Eastern insult which goes to the heart of all our cultural chauvinisms.
But this only serves to bring out clearly and precisely the deep insight into the nature of the goodness of God that goes beyond such cultural chauvinisms. “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table,” she says. It is not special pleading. It is the deep insight into the mercy and goodness of God that she has a hold of. In relation to God and his provisions for us in the Lenten journey of our souls, we are all like the little dogs who eat of the crumbs which fall from our master’s table. Yet the crumbs are more than enough to sustain us in the journey, a point that will be amply made on the Fourth Sunday in Lent. The crumbs belong to the eucharistic banquet, to the Holy Communion, the food of our wayfaring.
It is not something which we are owed or something to which we are entitled. Grace is something which God wants us to want and to seek. It simply means to seek the truth and goodness of God for one another and so to find it for ourselves. This whole remarkable Gospel illustrates the Prayer of Humble Access in our liturgy (BCP, p.83). “We do not presume to come to this thy Table … Trusting in our own righteousness” but rather like this woman, trusting in the “manifold and great mercies” of God. The Prayer echoes this story for we confess that “we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table,” making us even less than the little dogs, I suppose! The whole point is not about our entitlement but about the graciousness of God in Christ and our awareness of that mercy. “Thou art the same Lord, Whose property is always to have mercy.” This is what the Canaanite woman has a hold of and knows. Do we?
Prayer is about seeking what God wants for us and what God provides for us. To want that is to strive for it with the whole of our being no matter what obstacles stand in the way. To pray for mercy is not weakness but the strength of conviction, of faith itself, wonderfully expressed in the Lent Prose. “Hear us, O Lord, have mercy upon us” echoes the gradual psalm and this woman’s great prayer of faith.
Have mercy on me, O Lord
Fr. David Curry
Lent II, 2020