Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

  

The words of passion from Jeremiah in his love affair with God remind me of the “burning” of Pablo Neruda’s poem “Ode to a Naked Beauty”: “As if you were on fire from within./The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”  Jeremiah complains that loving God puts him at odds with the world and causes him to suffer; he is not a willing sufferer but has been seduced by God. The usual translation is “duped,” but a mystical tradition within the Church that renders patah as “seduced,” and I think it is appropriate, especially for this passage.  Jeremiah’s love for God is all-encompassing. He is in love with a being, caught up in a passion that will not be denied.  Indeed, these lines could have been taken from the lover’s complaint of a Shakespearean sonnet.

“I say to myself, I will not mention him,
I will speak in his name no more.
But then it becomes like fire burning in my heart,
imprisoned in my bones;
I grow weary holding it in; I cannot endure.”

            This intensity finds its resonance in today’s gospel reading from Matthew, where God’s love for humanity is likewise intense and “foolish” in the person of Jesus, who realizes that he will soon suffer and die because of this passionate love for humanity.  That is why he sharply rebukes Peter, whom he had praised just moments before, and suggests that seeking to avoid suffering is an inclination from Satan. Clearly, Peter loves Jesus and wants Jesus to avoid suffering and death. Peter wants the Triumphant King, not the Suffering Servant, but clearly, Jesus is the Suffering Servant, and many who followed him equated him with Jeremiah, for whom the Suffering Servant was likely penned (some thought Jesus as the resurrected Jeremiah).

            Of course, in word and action, Peter was perhaps the most passionate of all the disciples. I think Jesus realized that what is essential for the continuation of the mission was passion, not administrative acumen (though we need not find them as opposing qualities). Peter’s passion needed to be directed toward God’s mission of embracing humanity. Our purest expression of love for God is our love for those whom God has created.  Jesus makes falling in love with God less of a mystical affair and one of flesh and blood reality. Jesus’ Great Commission (John 15:12) isn’t about loving God directly but loving one’s neighbor. It is in loving one’s neighbor, then, that the love of God becomes flesh and blood. Like God, our love will be often rejected, and we will indeed pay a high price for having been “seduced” to love the God we can see in each other because our love of Christ compels us beyond the love of family, or nation, or tribe, and seeks the love of God in all, not just among the "lovable.

Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

 

 Jesus’ action with the Canaanite woman in Matthew’s gospel is troubling for us who experience the universalism of the Church and the belief that God has offered salvation to the entire world. However, Matthew’s community was Jewish, and the Canaanites were well outside God’s covenant with the Jewish people, and it seems Jesus sided with the popular understanding of such a separation. Although this story is also present in the Gospel of Mark, the change in Matthew to a Canaanite from a Syro-Phoenician woman speaks of Matthew’s desire to emphasize how much outside God’s covenant she was. Add to this Jesus’ words of rebuke, and the stage is set rhetorically for what comes next.

The woman’s response to Jesus’ rebuke of “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs” with, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps
that fall from the table of their masters” is a coup of a well-tempered response that upends Jesus’ harshness; it is a moral drama being played out in front of a crowd who sides with Jesus. So what does Jesus do? He proclaims her daughter is healed because of her great faith to see beyond what the crowd saw: an insurmountable barrier to God’s grace. This event is on the heels of Jesus proclaiming in front of the Pharisees and scribes, “…it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” The Canaanite woman is yet another instance of Jesus proclaiming God’s reign isn’t localized, or dependent upon the traditions of “the elders”, but upon compassion and justice, making a strong connection with the first reading from Third Isaiah, which asserts that God’s justice and mercy is also a function of allowing “foreigners” to serve at the Temple if they agree to keep the Sabbath and the Law of the Covenant. To do so would be a great act of faith not only for the foreigners but also for the Jewish people.

Contempt for “the foreigner” is a cultural characteristic, it seems, for many. Most recently, children and young adults seeking refuge in this country have had to endure not only exile from their homes and families but also the contempt born of fear from many in our country and some in our church. Jesus’ morality drama played out to staunch the flow of animosity for the Canaanite who represented the consummate foreigner. Jesus’ clear message to the crowd: Faith trumps creed because faith is the foundation of creed, not the other way around.

We worship a living God, not a living document. Too often, text takes the place of a living faith. Where the community’s faith is strong, the “traditions of the elders” are always held accountable by living faith. When creed runs contrary to the living faith, it is discarded or altered to reflect the current reality. Ours is a living relationship with God, not a relationship with a text; that is simply another more insidious form of idolatry. Our true worship is as old as Isaiah in establishing justice and righteousness and calling brother or sister all who nurture faith in a living God.