“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”
We are called to holiness, St. Paul reminds us. Sanctification means being made holy. The doctrinal concepts of justification and sanctification are necessarily intertwined. Justification is how we are known in the sight of God. God sees us in Christ who is our justification, the one who makes us right with God. In other words, it is about our being known in the knowing love of God. Yet as Paul reminded us on Quinquagesima Sunday “now we see in a glass darkly”; we do not yet see ourselves fully and truly in God. Thus, while the justifying righteousness of Christ is perfect and inherent in him it is not yet fully realised in us. Sanctification is about living more fully truly and fully in Christ and in the work of redemption which he has accomplished for us. Lent is about our journey with Christ in that work of redemption. As such it recalls us to both the principles of justification and sanctification.
Today’s Collect helps us to understand the dynamic between the Epistle and Gospel. God sees “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” This puts starkly the human condition, our sinfulness and insufficiency. But to know this is to be looking to God, to his healing grace and truth for us and in us. What Paul is talking about in the Epistle reading from Thessalonians is about nothing less than seeking to be who we are in the sight of God. That turns on what we see in the Gospel, namely, the amazing story of the persistence and strength of an unnamed “woman of Canaan” who illustrates for us what it means to be looking to God for grace and mercy, for healing and salvation; in short, to being made whole, our sanctification.
The story is about the struggle that belongs to faith. Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel, meaning one who struggles with God. That struggle is about breaking into the heart of God, into the meaning of God’s will and purpose for our life. Here in this story of a non-Israelite we have, in my view, one of the most powerful images of what it truly means to be an Israelite, as it were, to be who we are in the sight of God and to be living in that understanding. It is found in the amazing but disturbing dialogue and exchange between Jesus, his disciples, and this woman. She has a hold of the one thing necessary: an insight into the truth of God in Jesus Christ who alone is the principle of life, on the one hand, and the healing or restoration of our wounded and broken humanity, on the other hand. She knows the human need for divine mercy. This is her litany and ours. The Prayer Book Litany, the first part of the Liturgy to be translated and reworked from Latin into English by Thomas Cranmer, simply explicates in a comprehensive and exhaustive way all the things for which we seek God’s help and mercy.
She illustrates the meaning of the idea “that the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise” (Ps. 51, 17). She is deeply troubled about her “daughter grievously vexed with a devil.” It is a phrase worth pondering. It speaks directly to our contemporary culture of addiction and psychotic disorders, of neuroses and mental distresses that are destructive and paralysing and which affect not only the individual but their families and friends. They are part and parcel of a broken and troubled world. Such things are really about a loss of self, what we might call, a negative negating of the self. Though some may think that there are cures to be found in the therapeutic culture whether through prescribed drugs, the pill cure, or through the talking cure, such as cognitive behaviour therapy, the older view of Freud, for instance, was that there is no cure to the discontents that beset modernity; at best, there are only ways to cope.
This story teaches us about another approach to the brokenness of souls and the community of souls. The woman knows that she has no power of herself to help herself or her daughter. She knows that what she seeks, namely healing and wholeness for another, can only be found in the source and end of all life and meaning, God. Human assistance is at best limited and finite, radically and necessarily incomplete. Healing and wholeness for herself and for her daughter can only be found in the mercy of God. Lent is simply the concentration of the whole life-long journey of our souls to who we are in God. She has a hold of the truth of God in Christ Jesus. She has made a journey out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon to Jesus. She is driven by a profound insight about the human condition.
The exchange brings out the strength and truth of her insight. It is intentionally disturbing because it is a critique of Israel when Israel thinks that they possess God, that God is only for them, rather than the idea that God works through the particularities of culture and human experience to bring out what is universal and belongs to the truth of our humanity. God is not just for Israel. God is God for all. God’s mercy and truth cannot be constrained. At issue is our engagement with the will of God.
She cries out to Jesus, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David; my daughter is grievously vexed with a devil. But he answered her not a word.” This troubles us; indeed, that is the whole point. It is meant to trouble us. Why? Because we so easily assume that there should be an immediate response to our wishes, especially from God, whatever we may think ‘god’ to be – progress, social entitlement, ourselves – whatever. But that so easily turns God into a Genie who grants your every wish. There is something more at work here in the disturbing silence of Jesus and it concerns the attitude of the disciples. Jesus is putting them to the test about the meaning of faith, on the one hand, and drawing out of the woman the depth of her faith, on the other hand.
The disciples complain to Jesus about the persistence of the woman, literally wanting him to send her away. Think about that. It is as if she doesn’t really matter. She is just a nuisance. But is it possible for Jesus to think that way? Jesus’ response here is to the disciples. He answers them, saying, “I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That would seem at first glance to confirm the view of the disciples, that the concerns of a non-Israelite are of no concern to them. The woman sees this response of Jesus very differently. She sees it through a kind of insight that belongs to the prophetic traditions and other parts of the Hebrew Scriptures about the universality of the divine will for all people as being part of Israel’s vocation. In other words, the lost sheep of Israel takes on another meaning.
What this woman does takes us to the heart of prayer. “Then came she, and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.” The outward gesture and the spoken words express simply and profoundly the meaning of all prayer. It is about seeking God’s help out of the realisation that “we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves”. Far from rendering us passive and paralyzed, the prayer is about our looking to God and as such belongs to the highest activity of the human spirit. It is God’s spirit at work in us and with us.
Surely that is enough, isn’t it, to effect what we seek? But no. Jesus’ response which seems so harsh and cruel is actually part of his criticism of the disciples and of Israel who see God as their own possession. “It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” This seems like an insult and a put-down, as if the woman and her daughter are merely dogs! But that is the point of how we assume things for ourselves at the expense or the neglect of others, treating them as less than human and certainly less important than us. That is the point which Jesus is making about our attitudes and approaches to one another. It is how we so often see others and treat others.
Polemarchus, in Plato’s Republic, states a very conventional view which remains all too common. Justice, he says, is “doing good to your friends and harm to your enemies.” But justice as a virtue, a form of human excellence, Socrates explains, cannot mean doing harm. And it also has to be about the good for all and not just for some. The woman here grasps something of that understanding in her wonderful response. She does not presume upon some special status such as what is assumed by the disciples. She simply highlights the deeper truth of all creation in relation to God. She ‘out-dogs’ Jesus, we might say, suggesting that the dogs, indeed, the “little dogs”, to use the adjective which the King James Version adds to the text, are all part of God’s creation. “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
This is the strength of humility, the power and truth of an honest understanding of our relation to God. It is the counter to our presumption and sense of entitlement, as if God owes us. As if we are owed or deserve certain things in life, such as trips to Cancun and a Ferrari, and indeed owed them by God! She understands life as God’s gift and, therefore, healing, too, as a gift of God. Yet her words are themselves a gift to us. They show us the strength of humility and belong to our approach to God in the liturgy. Her words shape the Prayer of Humble Access. We neither deserve the sacrament nor have a right to it. We rightly and truly say, echoing the words of this woman that “we are not worthy So much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table” (BCP, p. 83).
Our holiness is about our constant looking to God in the strong desire to enter into the heart of God who sees and knows our hearts better than we do ourselves. It means to persevere and to be strong in holding onto what we are given to know about the goodness of God. Paradoxically, this story shows us exactly that. It opens us out to the real meaning of prayer and faith in looking to Jesus who alone is our justification and in whom is our sanctification. It is about holding on to what we are learning and seeing in the journey of our lives to God and with God in Christ. It is the struggle of faith to be actively engaged with God’s good will for us all.
“For this is the will of God, even your sanctification”
Fr. David Curry
Lent II, 2022