Human Relations Day

January 20, 2008

“Hey! Easy, Jesus”

Matthew 15:21-28

Rev. Jim Wood, SLUMC 1/20/2008

During the Nuremberg war crime trials, one of the jurists from the United States was John Parker of Charlotte, North Carolina, the presiding judge of the Circuit Court of Appeals in that state. He and the other judges worked hard to ensure a fair hearing for the Nazi war leaders, even in the emotional fervor that surrounded that tribunal. When Judge Parker returned to the States, he shared with friends his impression of the trials. He said he remembered one incident in particular. When the justices of the victor nations met to outline procedures for the trials, the leader of the Russian group was quite impatient with the time being spent by the careful planning. He finally exploded, “Why take so much time for this? Let’s give them a fair trial and shoot them.”

Human life is sometimes that cheaply dismissed, especially when emotions are rampant or when people feel themselves threatened. We’re living through such a time of emotional upheaval, not only in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Middle East, and in Darfur, but also in our own country. Strident voices spit out their harsh, demeaning labels and people’s lives are brutalized by violence.

Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman, as recounted in this (afternoon’s) morning’s reading from the Bible, has long embarrassed his followers because Jesus’ apparent response to this woman veers toward a similar harshness, simply because she’s a foreigner. Although finally praising her faith and answering her request, Jesus’ attitude seems unnecessarily rough and rude, and when he calls her and other Gentiles “dogs,” we find it contradictory. Therefore, we say, “Hey! Easy, Jesus. This isn’t like you! I mean, you were warm and open with people and responsive to their feelings and their needs. You taught love for enemies and kindness for the stranger. Why then do you demean this woman just because she’s an outsider?” Biblical commentators have tried to soften these words of Jesus and to rationalize his attitude, but their efforts haven’t been very helpful.

The key to understanding this incident lies, I think, in the genius Jesus had for precipitating encounters in which persons finally faced and internalized the truth about themselves: like the rich young ruler, like Zacchaeus, and Simon the Pharisee. In this case, it was not the Canaanite woman, it was the disciples! They came complaining, “Send [this woman] away, for she keeps shouting after us,” Jesus realized that somewhere along the way they had misread his purposes. Although his focus of ministry was restoring those who belonged by birth to Israel but for some reason had lost contact with the heritage and practices of their faith, the disciples had narrowed that purpose until it had become a parochial exclusivism, which held that only Jews counted with God. All Gentiles were, therefore, treated as sinners, subject for righteous scorn and judgment. Jesus, aware that such an attitude pervaded his followers, seized the moment when this Gentile woman asked for help for her daughter who was being tormented by a demon. By his silence and his strategic hesitation, Jesus exposes the disciples’ discriminatory attitude. The woman seems to understand what is happening as she reads it in Jesus’ face, and so she persists, despite his seeming resistance to her. When he uses the cruel words, “It’s not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” you can almost see the disciples smile their self-righteous approval. However, little by little, insight dawns on them and their intolerance is revealed in all its ugliness and littleness. When Jesus declares, “Woman, great is your faith,” he not only affirms the woman as a person, but also challenges the disciples to move above their own loveless stereotypes and beyond their heartless despising to embrace this woman as one to whom God’s love is offered.

So it is! Too many pages of history have been stained with human blood shed unnecessarily because people let prejudice, ignorance, bigotry, arrogance and suspicion narrow their world and cheapen human life. And what about us? Like the disciples, Jesus summons us to loving acceptance and understanding in a world of cleverness without compassion where cruel and cynical games between people hide empty lives and crush human hearts. Three reminders Christ gives us in this encounter with the Canaanite woman.

The first is this: persons are persons. No matter where, what or who, a human being is a human being, incredibly precious in God’s sight. Such conviction is easy to lose, however, in an age where individual identity and personal significance are lost in the teeming masses and their overwhelming need. You find that out when you face the victims of world hunger, when the refugees of the world are numbered, when you are an outpatient at County Hospital, when you visit the Department of Motor Vehicles or register for Social Security benefits.

Yes, it’s a challenge to remain human today when sheer numbers of other human beings bring the stress of sharing life space, when we hurt and no one seems to care. Tensions and frustration produce a corroding distrust, resentment and hostility between persons. It gets so that people irritate us simply because they share space alongside or in front of us in crowded stores, in ticket lines, on sidewalks and highways. We get so edgy that we begin to believe every rumor we hear, yell at suspicious characters and support repressive measures, which violate privacy and human dignity of others.

On our first night in Ireland, at Dublin’s Burlington Hotel, it was our pleasure to experience an Irish cabaret. The songs and dancing were great, but everyone loved the antics of Noel V. Ginnity, an Irish comedian. He told a story that illustrates what I’m trying to say. It seems that a man was driving his car on a narrow winding mountain road. He came to a hairpin curve and accidentally crossed the center dividing line a bit. A woman, driving the opposite way, had to swerve to avoid hitting him. As they passed she yelled out her window, “PIG!”

“Why that . . . so and so!” the man thought. “SOW!” he yelled back as he leaned out his car window. Then he zoomed on around the curve—and hit a pig!

Christ’s invitation reminds us that it’s the human birthright to be born whole in body, mind and senses, to be nourished materially, emotionally and mentally and to stand tall in a world where there’s space and beauty and where the essential dignity of the individual is known and respected by all.

As Carl Sandburg wrote in his prologue to The Family of Man, “The first cry of a newborn baby in Chicago or Zimboango, in Amsterdam or Rangoon, has the same pitch and key, each saying, ‘I am! I have come through! I belong! I am a member of the Family.’” Yes, persons are persons of immeasurable worth.

The second reminder for us in this encounter of Jesus with the Canaanite woman is that pain is pain. The foreign woman’s distress over her daughter’s illness was no less because she was a Gentile. Jesus knew that, though the disciples had forgotten it. The personal burdens carried by any stranger or enemy are just as heavy as those we bear. Pain is no respecter of the racial, economic or religious barriers that we erect. Tears of grief in the eyes of a Russian father as his son dies are as real as ours. The emptiness at death is as vast for the South African mineworker as for his white supervisor. Hunger creates the same delirium in a mother of India as in a mother of Appalachia. Blood from violence runs red everywhere and human hearts are just as lonely in the shacks of Tijuana and Palestinian Bethlehem as they are in the Biltmore Estates and Paradise Valley. Fear and confusion can restrict life for a mother in Iraq just as much as they can for an American mother. Pain is pain and humankind hurts the same the world over.

But we easily forget that—just as the disciples did. We cannot realize and sometimes will not accept that persons different from us hurt as deeply as we do—perhaps even more so. That’s why persons of empathy and compassion are needed. Few of us really enter into the suffering of someone else, especially when the other person is very different from us, when they have been categorized and placed by us in a different group because of race, economic status, religious heritage or lifestyle.

Tagore, the poet of India, tells a memorable story from his life. His servant didn’t come in on time one morning. Like so many professional men of his kind, Tagore was utterly helpless when it came to the routine details of the day, getting his clothes together, his breakfast, tidying up his place. An hour went by and Tagore was getting angrier by the minute. He thought of all kinds of punishment. Three hours later, he no longer thought of punishment. He would discharge the man without any further consideration, get rid of him, and turn him out. Finally, the man showed up. It was mid-day. Without a word, the servant proceeded with his duties as though nothing had happened. He picked up Tagore’s clothes and set to making breakfast, and started cleaning up. Tagore watched all of this with mounting rage. Finally, he said, “Drop everything! Get out! I can’t stand the sight of you. You’re dismissed. Fired!”

The man, however, continued sweeping and after another few minutes, looked up at Tagore and said with quiet dignity, “My little girl died last night.”

Pain is pain, whether you’re a servant or a renowned poet, whether you’re black or white, rich or poor, Jew or Catholic, smart or illiterate, friend or enemy, Canaanite stranger or intimate disciple. So Jesus reminds us.

And then his final reminder: love is love. It must be given and received; it must be lived without preferential treatment, special privilege, exclusions, conditions or barter. More and more we must learn, Jesus declares, to trust others, trust them enough that we can affirm the worth of even those persons who are presented to us as enemies. We must reach out and risk our heart to love’s fierce danger, touch the soul of a stranger, even the stranger who may return a cold aloofness and speak words to us that bite and offend.

Of course, this isn’t easy; it takes courage and the very power and presence of the Holy Spirit to bridge the distance and scale the barriers that separate us from those who are different, those whom we deem in some other class or category or race or national origin. We tend to feel uncomfortable around persons who don’t think as we do, act as we do, look as we do. It’s not easy to relate to persons we don’t understand, who respond in strange ways and sometimes contradict what we cherish. It’s not easy—it’s difficult! So we need God’s help to do it, we need Christ’s love in us to do it.

Tomorrow we’re going to have an opportunity to honor the memory and birth of a man who, trusting God, sought to do what I’ve been talking about. A simple but profound black Baptist preacher from Georgia would one day share his dream in our nation’s capital and would say before hundreds of thousands of people, “I have a dream …” A part of that great dream was that one day, here in America, “his children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character …” The words of our anthem this morning also say it:

I hear a distant song: it fills the air.

I hear it deep and strong, rise up in prayer:

O Lord, we are many; help us to be one.

Heal our divisions; let thy will be done.

Jesus, knowing how difficult it is, said, “It’s easy to relate to friends and to savor friendships, but if that can happen, it can also happen with the stranger—and even the enemy.” Love can be given and love can be received, because with God, all things are possible.

One of the most disturbing and yet inspiring places in the Holy Land is a place called Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust, outside of Jerusalem. Leading up to this impressive memorial is a walk lined with Carob trees planted to honor those whom the Israelis consider “righteous Gentiles.” A righteous Gentile is one who risked his or her life to save Jews during Hitler’s holocaust in Nazi Germany. Under each tree is a person’s or a couple’s name. One tree is planted to honor a woman named Stefania Burzminski. She lives in Boston now, but she was born and raised in Poland. Stefania was 16-years-old when her father died and her mother and her older brother were taken off to a labor camp. That left Stefania in the family apartment to care for her 6-year-old sister. After the war, it was discovered that Stefania not only cared for her younger sister in that apartment, but she also sheltered 13 Jews. In an interview, she was asked why she did it and her response was this: “Our parents taught us not to make differences between people. They told us we all have one God. And therefore in the future if you can help people, do it.” And she concluded, “I always thought that if I could help somebody I ought to try and do it.”

Persons are persons. Pain is pain. Love is love. Life is so brief, so fleeting, such a mixture of heartache and tears, joy and laughter, that the greatest gift we can give and receive is love. And God is love. Let us pray:

O Lord, we have seen your face shining through the dark, wet eyes of African children hungry for food; the brown, dusty faces of Central Americans victimized by tyranny, hoping for freedom; the tired, wrinkled faces of the very old staring at blank, blue walls, searching for the lost past. May we touch and be touched by the pain and suffering of this world. May we rediscover our common humanity through the saving power of a cup of cool water, a loaf of bread, a listening ear, a shared hurt, a gentle touch. And may the One who turned the violence of our hands into the possibility for healing, embrace us with your love. Amen.