“It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs”
There is all the difference in the world between wrestling with God and wrestling against God. And, perhaps, nowhere is that better illustrated than in this outstanding and yet disturbing Gospel story. Wrestling against God, we might say, belongs to the Temptations of Christ presented to us last Sunday. Wrestling against God is really about putting God to the test either by presuming to manipulate the natural world at the expense of its truth and integrity, turning stones into bread, as it were, the technological idolatry of our times that contributes to a kind of denaturing and a dehumanizing of ourselves, or seeking to be ourselves the ultimate authority and power of all reality, itself a repeat of the Fall, and a denial of our creatureliness and of God as creator, and, finally, as in Matthew’s account, the worship of ourselves which is really the worship of Satan, the worship of what is simply the negation and denial of God himself, the worship of what opposes God in its self-delusion. Wrestling against God is profoundly anti-human, anti-nature, and anti-God.
The Temptations of Christ are all a reworking of the great exodus themes of the trials of Israel in the wilderness. Exodus is the Greek term for going forth and is the Greek name for the Second Book of Moses, known in the Hebrew as Shemot, or Names. Numbers is the fourth Book of Moses but its Hebrew name means simply “In the wilderness”. The whole point of the exodus as recounted in the Torah and re-presented in Christ’s being “led up by the Spirit into the wilderness. to be tempted by the devil” is about learning through suffering; in particular, our learning through the sufferings of Christ for us and with us. He suffers our temptations to teach us the overcoming of temptation in him and not simply in us. It is an illumination at the same time as it reveals what needs to be purged in us, namely our false attachment to the things of ourselves and the world that negates their truth and being. It is only through our going with Christ into the wilderness that we learn the radical truth of ourselves as found in him.
Exodus complements The Odyssey of Homer which is about the homecoming of the Greek heroes from Troy. That homecoming is about discovering the order of the cosmos, the intellectual and spiritual structure of reality, in which we find our place. For the Greeks, our place in the cosmos is found in the polis, the community or city-state, so to speak. For the Hebrews, it is not so much about a place but about creation as grounded by definition in the will of God. The exodus journey is about an education that brings us to the Law, concretely and concisely expressed in the Ten Commandments. The Temptations of Christ recall us to the Law in countering the various forms of idolatry which are always about confusing the created with the Creator. In the Temptations we see the radical meaning of that confusion. It is Satan, the devil, the accuser and the tempter, who is defined by opposition and denial of the very principle of his own being and nature. He exists in contradiction to what is prior to himself.
Exodus is, literally, freedom from slavery, the enslavement of the Hebrews to the Egyptians. But, morally, the exodus is freedom from sin, from the forms of our self-obsession, our hubris or pride. Intellectually, the exodus is freedom from ignorance. But the going forth from slavery, from sin and from ignorance is not just our freedom from such things; it is our being freed to God, to the principle upon which the being and knowing of all things depend, especially ourselves as rational and spiritual creatures.
This does not deny nor denigrate the physical and material, the social and economic aspects of our lives, so much as it belongs to their redemption. The Book of Numbers, for instance, shows the complaining nature of our humanity about our immediate appetites and desires as if the satisfaction of those things was the whole truth of our humanity. There is the murmuring of the people of Israel against what God provides for us in the wilderness, even to the point of thinking that it would be better to be back in Egypt in slavery! “O that we had meat to eat! We remember the fish … the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions and the garlic … would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?” (Numbers 11. 4-5, 14. 3). All that we have in the wilderness is “this manna”, angel’s bread as it would later be called. In other words, we wrestle against God in the provisions he makes for our learning about the truth and dignity of our humanity as found in God’s Word written in the Law.
Jacob becomes Israel by wrestling with God. That doesn’t mean forcing God to our wills but finding our wills in God’s will for our humanity. That is the radical meaning of prayer. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Prayer is “the soul in paraphrase, the heart in pilgrimage,” “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” our being recalled to the truth of ourselves. It is, as Herbert puts it, “something understood.” It is understood or learned through struggle, through suffering and sacrifice, ultimately through the passion, death and resurrection of Christ. We go into the wilderness with Christ to learn from him.
Today’s Gospel follows upon last Sunday’s in presenting to us what it means to learn from Christ. It is about wrestling with God in contrast to wrestling against God. This is shown to us by the extraordinary example of a non-Israelite woman, the Canaanite woman who comes out – an kind of exodus – the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, seeking Jesus for the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil,” trapped in some form of mental or spiritual possession or obsession which is debilitating and disabling. At issue is the question of human agency which finds its meaning through our working with God, not in our isolation or opposition to God. This woman exemplifies what it means to be a true Israelite, we might say, one who wrestles with God and breaks into the heart of God, but only because God wills that we should break into his heart, the heart which seeks the good of all things.
The disturbing point for us is that this is a real struggle. That struggle is the struggle of faith to take hold of “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen,” but known in some sense. This woman has a hold of something understood about God in Christ and she will not be put off. The story, it seems to me, is at once about the showing forth of her desire for the healing of her daughter through Christ and about the mistaken forms of our relation to God as seen in the disciples. The story draws out of her what she seeks and shows us the strength and tenacity of that desire. Such is prayer, not our forcing God’s will to ours but our perseverance in seeking God’s will for us.
Jesus is actually putting the disciples and Israel itself to the test. The point is that God’s will for our humanity cannot be constrained to a select few; it is for all. But our access to it has to be through the truth of human agency in wrestling with and into the will of God. This is what belongs to the truth of our humanity. Dante, in the opening canto of the Paradiso, coins a lovely word for what is ultimately envisioned. Trashumanar or transhumanised. The concept has unfortunately been co-opted by the current ideological agendas of our contemporary world in ways that negate our created being and even our bodies by suggesting that we can be whatever we think we are in our minds alone, a kind of sophistic solipsism, or by way of allowing our thinking to be taken over by machines. These tendencies are profoundly anti-human. Our technocratic arrogance supplants rather than enhances our humanity making us other than human in some form of false transcendence. Two things are assumed: the self as somehow completely disconnected from the physical and material world, on the one hand, and an idolatry of technological power which substitutes what belongs to human agency and freedom to the things of our own creation, on the other hand. It is not a new story. It is really about wrestling against God and thus losing our humanity.
The Canaanite woman names her desire for the healing of her daughter. Jesus “answered her not a word.” That is perplexing but is this not like the scene at the wedding of Cana when Mary names the human condition, our lack of what belongs to human joy, “they have no wine”? Jesus’ response was to say “mine hour has not yet come,” indicating that human redemption is not simply at the dictate of our wills. Just so in the wilderness journey of the exodus, human desires are named in the form of complaints that result in two things: a highlighting of the problem of trying to make God subject to us and our immediate desires, and God’s provision for us in the wilderness journey. The real testing is the testing of us, learning to trust in what God provides and to work with God not against God.
The disciples ask Jesus to send the woman away, “for she crieth after us.” Jesus responds by saying “I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” essentially expressing Israel’s own sense that somehow God is for them and not for others. The deeper and underlying point, though, as the story shows, is that this non-Israelite belongs to Israel in its universal mission as “a light to lighten the Gentiles.” God’s grace is not exclusive.
The woman intuits this, I think, because she immediately comes and kneels before him and simply says, “Lord, help me.” It is the essence of prayer, the recognition, as the Collect puts it, “that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.” It is found, instead, in our wrestling with God. This is wonderful but the intensity of the wrestling that is looked for in us is highlighted in the next exchange. “It is not right,” he says, “to take the children’s bread and to cast it to dogs.” Wow. But this is a further critique and testing of Israel and Israel’s mission. At first glance it seems like an incredible put down, speaking to the woman as if she were a dog! Yet it serves as the occasion to bring out the deep spiritual insight of this remarkable woman, an insight into the truth of God and God’s will for our humanity. It is about our being transformed into what makes us more truly human, not less.
“Truth, Lord; “ she says, “yet the little dogs eat off the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” She has grasped the truth of God as Creator and thus as Redeemer too. She has grasped that even the little dogs are part of creation and as such are embraced in the loving care of God. The insight here is that, so too, we live from the crumbs that fall from the hand of God. The manna from on high is more than sufficient for us in the wilderness journey. It is the break-through moment in wrestling with God, in our striving. “O woman, great is thy faith. And her daughter was made whole from that very hour.”
The fourth Sunday in Lent will remind us that the fragments, the crumbs, taken up from the banquet in the wilderness – another echo of the exodus – is far, far more than sufficient. It sustains God’s pilgrimage people throughout all ages including our own. Wrestling with God is about learning in the wilderness what God seeks for us. It only happens through our serious commitment and desire, to our faith and willingness to wrestle with God and not against God in the presumptions of ourselves. This story is at once a critique not only of Israel but of ourselves in wanting God to be subject to us but also a powerful illustration of prayer and faith which works with God. In our wrestling with God we are transformed into the truth of ourselves.
“It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 2, 2023