KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 3 April
Striving with God
When we hear the word ‘Israel’, we probably think of a place or a country in the Middle East. We forget that it is actually, first and foremost, a name and one that belongs to religion and theology. “Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed” (Gen. 32.28). Jacob wrestling with God becomes Israel. All the promises of God to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob become the promises to Israel, the people of God who will be known as ‘Israelites’. Not the same thing as ‘Israelis’ which is a modern term for citizens of the state of Israel.
Jacob changes from being a figure of deceit and cunning – tricking his brother Esau out of his birthright and deceiving his father Isaac – to becoming the figure of faith and insight into the truth of God. His vision of angels ascending and descending a ladder extending from the earth to heaven is complemented with his wrestling with God and being renamed Israel, meaning “one who strives with God.”
This is more than simply a matter of tribalism. Through Israel – as with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob – all nations of the earth shall be blessed. God is not simply the property or possession of any one group or identity. Perhaps nowhere is that more profoundly seen than in the encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus in the lesson read this week in Chapel. As I like to say, we do not possess the truth, the truth possesses us.
The Canaanite woman is from outside Israel, a non-Israelite. Yet the encounter will reveal her as a true Israelite because she strives with God, not against God. She has a powerful hold on the truth which she perceives in Jesus which she will not let go. She comes seeking him and seeking from him the healing of her daughter, “grievously vexed with a devil.” Not a healing of the body but of the mind or soul. It may not be the language of the therapeutic culture in terms of mental health, but it speaks to the ways in which we in our minds can be obsessed, even possessed with thoughts that are destructive of human personality. She senses in Jesus the power of God that alone can heal her daughter; an insight into the nature of God himself as Creator and Redeemer, of Jesus as Lord and Saviour. One who knows us better than we do ourselves.
She will not be put off in her quest. She is the image of humble perseverance and faith. But the encounter is quite disturbing because the scene is equally a critique of Israel, meaning the people of Israel pictured here in the disciples. The dialogue with the Canaanite woman reveals a distorted or mistaken view of the vocation of Israel. To put it bluntly, the dialogue criticizes the idea that God can be owned by any one group or another. In other words, the insight of the Canaanite woman is that God is the God of all human beings, not just some. Her insight is about the universality of God.
