“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,” Mark Twain famously wrote in The Innocents Abroad. That was a long, long time ago, long before air planes with hundreds of seats crossed oceans and mountain ranges, and before colossal cruise ships regularly dumped thousands of visitors into small coastal cities, making it practically impossible for the travelers to meet some of the locals, let alone talk with them. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” Twain wrote. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of [humans] and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”[1]
Travel in Twain’s sense is not necessarily about going to far away places, especially when going there is primarily driven by the desire to collect iconic Instagram pics. Travel is about getting out of our little corner to meet the neighbor who is a stranger, to hear their story in their own accent, to taste their food and try to dance to their songs. Travel is about crossing all manner of borders to immerse ourselves in our neighbors’ world – not to appropriate what’s theirs, but to see them and their take on life with less prejudice, and perhaps to see ourselves in new ways.
Today and tomorrow, Tennessee legislators will be traveling to Nashville for a special session of the General Assembly, and I hope at least some of them will not just log miles, but have the courage to get out of their little corner.
The gospel reading for this Sunday is about Jesus crossing borders and a mother pleading with unrelenting persistence for her child’s well-being. We know what having a sick child can do to a parent: it makes you fearless.[2] It makes you say horrible things to the receptionist who won’t give you an appointment until two weeks after Labor Day. It makes you very rude to doctors who run test after test for hours, but won’t give you more than two minutes to tell you about the results. It makes you scream at the insurance rep who tells you that your plan does not cover the treatments your child needs. It makes you stay up all night doing research on the web, finding out where the best clinics are, the best doctors, the most promising programs. Your tender love turns fierce, and you will do anything it takes to make your child well.
Tomorrow, mothers, fathers, siblings, grannies, students and teachers will once again surround the capitol, gather on Legislative Plaza, and stand in legislators’ offices, pleading with unrelenting persistence for the lives of our children and neighbors. We hope their words will find open ears and open minds.
When Jesus crossed into the region of Tyre and Sidon, he entered territory that was foreign in every respect: foreign accents, foreign customs, foreign food, foreign gods – and yet he went there, made a significant detour, in fact, to get there. A woman from that region approached him, shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” It wasn’t proper for a woman to approach a man who didn’t belong to her family for help. It was unthinkable for a Jewish man to be approached by a Gentile woman, let alone when demons were involved.
And this woman wouldn’t stop shouting; she kept at it, insisting on mercy for her tormented daughter. We don’t know why Jesus crossed the border into her world, but we know why she crossed every line of propriety: we know what having a sick child can do to a parent. The barriers of custom, language, and ethnicity were high between her and the man from Nazareth, but they were no match for her love for her child. Shouting without any restraint she begged the Lord Jesus to liberate her daughter. And Jesus showed no reaction whatsoever, like she wasn’t even there.
To the disciples, the whole scene was annoying and embarrassing, and they urged him to put an end to it. “Send her away,” they said. And she kept shouting, “Lord, have mercy!” “Tell her to be quiet,” they said, but she kept pleading, “Lord, have mercy.”
How wide is the circle of God’s mercy that has the life of Jesus as its defining center? Wide enough to include one like her?
When Jesus finally speaks, he doesn’t sound like the Jesus we thought we knew. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Let her shout – she doesn’t belong to the flock I was sent to tend. But this Gentile woman is determined. She throws herself at his feet, praying, “Lord, help me.”
The Jesus we know would reach out and take her by the hand, wouldn’t he? He would tell her to get up and go home, assuring her that her child was well; or he would go home with her and free her child from what was tormenting her. But this stranger in a strange land says, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
How wide is the circle of God’s mercy that has the life of Jesus as its defining center? Which voices will prevail: the woman pleading, “Lord, help me?” or the voices of those already in the house, already at the table, already full, those who are telling Jesus, “Send her away”?
This is a hard story. It reflects the hard, and often harsh, debate over who belongs and who doesn’t. It’s a hard story to hear because Jesus just taught that it is not what enters the mouth that defiles, but what comes out of it; because in the language we use, our attitudes and commitments spill from our hearts and over our lips. And Jesus says – and it’s Jesus who says it, and not one of the disciples, it’s Jesus, no matter how much I wish it were not so – Jesus says, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
Is he perhaps talking to himself, thinking out loud? Is he speaking to the disciples, inviting their comments? Or is he looking the woman in the face saying it? We don’t know, but we wonder.
Many have wrestled with this story, trying to reconcile the Jesus they thought they knew with the Jesus who not only withholds his compassion, but comes across as incredibly rude. Some have proposed that he didn’t really mean it, that he was merely testing the woman’s resolve – how cruel that would be. Others have suggested that he wasn’t testing the woman’s resolve but the disciples’ understanding, that he was waiting for one of them, just one, to stand with her and say, “Lord, have mercy.” That’s a kind thought, but there’s nothing in the story to suggest that this was a test.
I am intrigued by the fact that Jesus talks about bread. Throwing the bread to the dogs would be wrong, he tells the mother, since it was the children’s supper. She knows all there is to know about feeding children, yet she doesn’t erupt in rage or collapse in silence under the weight of the insult comparing her daughter to a dog. No, she picks it up and, with quick wit, turns it just a tiny bit. “Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” What she has asked of him won’t take away anything from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Crumbs of mercy would be plenty to save her child. Hadn’t he just fed 5,000 people with a lunch that looked like nothing to his disciples? And when all had finished eating and all were full and satisfied, weren’t multiple baskets of broken pieces left? She had been paying attention; she knew that what her daughter needed was his to give, and that there was enough for all. “Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus finally said. “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed.
Almost immediately following this hard story about children and dogs, there is another bread story. Jesus is again with a crowd, curing the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others, and Matthew tells us, they were amazed and praised the God of Israel. Why would Matthew emphasize that they were praising the God of Israel? Because among them, there were now a bunch of Canaanites and other suspect Gentiles.
And now Jesus said to the disciples, “I have compassion for the crowd … and I do not want to send them away hungry.” No more sending away of those who hunger for the bread of salvation. No more sending away of those who hunger for liberation, for healing, for justice, for fullness of life. Jesus took the loaves and gave thanks, broke them, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full.
Of this bread, there is more than enough for all of us. There’s no reason to draw circles that keep “them” out, whoever we might imagine “them” to be; no reason to live in fear that there might only be just enough mercy for some.
There is so much that divides us along lines that have been drawn ages ago and continue to be redrawn, with new labels replacing old ones. Division, prejudice, fear and insult have been our lot for as long as any of us can remember. But this perplexing little story shows us how courage and mercy cross those lines for healing.
In mercy, God has drawn the circle wide, liberating us to come out of our little corners and discover the not so distant land where we are no longer strangers and aliens, but all of us members of the one household of God.
[1] Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Conclusion. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3176/3176-h/3176-h.htm
[2] With thanks to Anna Carter Florence, Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. 19, No. 5, August-September 2008, 30.