August 18, 2002
Commentary by Paul Nancarrow |
See also: [2008] [2005] |
Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Matthew 15:(10-20), 21-28
This week’s lectionary stresses the universality of God’s saving grace. The readings emphasize that relationship with God is not limited by particularities of nationality, social status, previous history—or indeed by any preconditions of person, group, or society.
In the Isaiah passage, the universality of God’s love forms the basis of the promise to "foreigners who join themselves to the LORD." Although such "foreigners" have no direct inheritance in the promises of the covenant, nevertheless God will bring them also to the "holy mountain," God will accept their offerings and sacrifices side by side with the offerings and sacrifices of those born Jews, God will make the Temple of Jerusalem "a house of prayer for all peoples." The only qualification to enter the house of prayer is to "maintain justice, and do what is right," "to love the name of the LORD," to "keep the Sabbath and not profane it," and to "hold fast [God’s] covenant." The prophet assures such faithful foreigners that there is no preconditional barrier to their full participation in the covenant community of God.
And this was an issue of no little importance to the community to whom the prophecy was addressed. This passage comes from the part of the Book of Isaiah that is often identified as "Third Isaiah," a collection of oracles that many scholars trace to the post-exilic rebuilding of Jerusalem and reestablishment of Temple worship. The issue of who was in and who was out of the restored community was a matter of bitter controversy. The upper classes who had been exiled to Babylon had made great efforts to maintain their religious and cultural identity during their seventy years of captivity; to them, ethnic and ideological purity was a hallmark of their very survival. Those who had been left behind in Judah when Jerusalem was destroyed, however, had found their survival tied to sharing life with the other peoples of the land. When the exiles returned, the question of what to do with non-Israelite members of the local community became acute. According to the Book of Ezra, chapter 10, the ruling party decreed that the foreigners had to be expelled: all "foreign wives" and their children were expected to be "put away." The Isaiah oracle represents the other side of the controversy: foreigners are not to be excluded from the covenant by their "foreignness"; instead, membership in the covenant community is to be determined by ethics rather than ethnicity, by faithfulness rather than family lineage. The prophet represents a radical new interpretation of the meaning of the covenant, and a new vision of the universality of God’s saving love.
The story of the Canaanite woman in the Matthew passage takes the theme of universality and expands it even farther. Isaiah bespeaks concern for the foreigners who have joined themselves to the LORD; but the Canaanite woman (Mark calls her a Syrophoenician, adding an even greater emphasis to her ethnic difference) has not made even that much of a faith commitment. She comes to Jesus simply because she has heard that he heals, and her daughter needs healing. She apparently knows enough of Jewish hope and history to address Jesus by the messianic title, "Son of David"; but there is no indication in the text that the name has any meaning for her beyond being a religious honorific. At first Jesus ignores her, and even when he does speak to her it is only to attempt to dismiss her, referring to her people metaphorically as "dogs"; he maintains that his mission is only to the "lost sheep of the house of Israel," and he has nothing to say or do for those who are outside that covenant community. The woman, in a remarkable act of courage and trust, acknowledges that she is no member of the covenant, and yet she still believes she has a claim on divine love and healing: "even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table." Just as Jesus uses the homiest images to provoke parabolic insight, so the woman now uses a domestic image of food shared among all the denizens of a household to express her parabolic insight to Jesus. It is that courage, trust, and insight that Jesus recognizes, more than any ethnic or cultural identity, as participation in the essence of the covenant faith. It is that participation in faith that enables her reception of healing; in a rare instance of healing-at-a-distance, Matthew notes that as Jesus speaks, "her daughter was healed instantly."
From this point on in Matthew’s story of Jesus, Jesus’ mission is not only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, nor even to foreigners who have joined themselves to the LORD, but is to everyone, of whatever origin or condition, who has faith. For Matthew’s congregation, composed predominantly of Jewish Christians but probably including a Gentile minority as well, the broadening of Jesus’ mission to all people of faith was no mere historical story, but a matter of immediate community concern. Once again, the universality of God’s love is seen to extend beyond the boundaries imagined by the particular community.
The reading from Romans is also about the universality of God’s mercy, but from a surprisingly different angle. This week’s selection continues Paul’s explanation to the Gentile Christians in Rome that God has not abandoned the first covenant made with the people of Israel. Even though the Jews have not accepted the revelation of Christ, they are not rejected from God’s intention for the salvation of the whole world. Paul’s argument in this passage is that God is merciful to all because all have been disobedient. Gentiles were originally disobedient in not being part of the covenant; Jews are, for Paul, now disobedient in not being followers of Jesus. But the important factor in the equation, Paul maintains, is not the nature or the community of the disobedience, but the mercy of God that lures disobedience toward faith. Participation in God’s love is not conditioned by Jewishness or Gentileness or any other preconceived notion—it is solely and simply a matter of God’s mercy and our reception. Paul seems here to take the theme of universality to its greatest extension: God’s love is not only for foreigners who have joined themselves to the LORD, not only for those who express faith in divine love, but even for those who are disobedient whether or not they think of themselves as disobedient. God’s mercy is for all, and it is divine mercy, rather than ethnicity or cultural identity or intellectual assent to statements of faith, that gives us our status in relationship with God. The universality of God’s love is precisely that—universal—and it cannot be constrained by humanly constructed ins and outs.
These texts, then, present the proclamation of the universality of God’s love against a backdrop of tension with the working structures of existing faith communities. Post-exilic Jerusalem, the group of disciples around Jesus, the Gentile church of Rome, all find themselves stretched to accommodate a wider understanding of God’s saving grace. A process-relational perspective helps us to understand the source—and perhaps even the healthy necessity—of that tension. In process thought, every moment of experience happens as the coming-together and integrating of the givens of the past on the one hand, and new possibilities for the future on the other. Both past influence and future openness are needed for real experience: if there is only the repetition of the past, then the moment has no new content and is no real experience; if there is only novel influx, then the moment has no continuity with or purchase on the actual world. Every unit of becoming is a delicate balance of pre-existing structure and more expansive openness. The same is true of systems built out of such moments of experience: human individuals and human communities thrive as they integrate the inheritance of their past with the promise of God’s future. The challenge of integrating past and future can produce tension; but that tension is also the entry-point for greater energy for growth and life.
That energizing tension is of course also present in faith communities. The good news of the universality of God’s love constantly pushes a community beyond its existing boundaries; at the same time, a community must respect its inheritance from its past in order to continue to be a community. The constant challenge for communities of faith is to rediscover their identity in and through the mercy and faithfulness of God that is not bound by any human construction. The texts invite us to recognize that our community identity is carried, not by relationships determined by socially conditioned ins and outs, but by relationships that actualize the love and grace of God.
One question for the
preacher, then, is, "Who are the ins and who are the outs
of our particular community? Who are the ‘foreigners,’ the
‘Canaanites,’ the ‘disobedient’ whom God is sending to us? Where
is God calling us—not the church down the street, not the judicatory,
not ‘Christianity’ as a whole, but us—where is God calling us
to push past preconceived boundaries and embody the universal openness of
God’s love?" Those questions will cause any congregation some
tension; but by God’s grace it can be the tension of expanding life.
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