We’ve all been taught as children to make sure we wash our hands before we eat. Eating with dirty hands could make us really sick. But it wouldn’t jeopardise our righteousness before God—for a person’s righteousness before God is through faith. It is not by the works of our hands, but the trust in our heart.
This is what Jesus explains in today’s text. Jesus called the crowd to him and said to them: “Listen and understand—It is not what goes into the mouth that makes a person unclean, but what comes from out of the mouth, that is what makes them unclean.”
Jesus had said this because some Pharisees and teachers of the law had asked him: “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!” The Pharisees understood that all people are sinful and unclean before God, but they had lost sight of God’s own word. They established a framework of human traditions, derived from some 600 man-made rules, which they thought would make them pure in God’s sight and his special, favoured people of privilege—them, and no one else.
Recently in Matthew’s Gospel we heard how Jesus had healed those who were seriously ill, raised a dead girl back to life, and freed those oppressed by demons. Obeying human rules and traditions wasn’t going to help these people who couldn’t help themselves. A huge crowd had followed Jesus; thousands of people who saw in him God’s power and authority to make them free. He was their hope, their grace, and their compassion. Jesus healed them. But by then it had become late. The people would need to eat.
Despite Jesus again showing God’s compassion by his miraculous feeding of the crowd with a few fish and five loaves, the Pharisees would have insisted that it wouldn’t have been right to feed the people—they hadn’t washed their hands and for them, it wouldn’t be right for any God-respecting Rabbi to serve such unclean people. They would rather the people go hungry.
You see how life-limiting their legalistic framework was?! They loved walking around in flowing robes and being acknowledged and having the most important seats of honour, yet they robbed the vulnerable and needy, devouring widows’ homes by taking from them the little they had left (Mark 12:38-40). What is more important to God? They said it was unlawful to heal a person on the Sabbath, because that would be doing work. So they’d rather let someone die than compromise their tradition. Yet if they had an ox that fell into a well on the Sabbath, they would immediately pull it out…because oxen were worth a lot of money. What is more important to God? They gave a tenth of their spices and herbs to please God, yet neglected justice, and love of God (Matthew 23:23; Luke 11:42). What is more important to God?
All the while the religious leaders behaved as the ‘holier than thous’—but they weren’t holy at all. The saying goes: “Home is where the heart is”, meaning one’s home will always be the place for which you feel the deepest affection, no matter where you are. For the religious leaders of Israel, their home; their heart, was in their appearance, human traditions, and performance. They claimed to know God, claimed to be holy, appeared outwardly righteous, but their hearts were far from God, full of hypocrisy and evil. They needed a new heart. Jesus explained it was not eating with unclean hands, but what came out of a person’s heart that defiled them: “For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, theft, false testimony, slander.”
The Canaanite woman, on the other hand, had her home with God. Even though she was a Gentile; from beyond the geographical borders of Israel, she was a member of God’s family. Her heart shows that. Her heart for Jesus whom she boldly comes to and addresses as “Lord, Son of David”—showing that she understands Jesus’ to be the Messiah—the Saviour King promised from of old through the line of David. She begs him for mercy—his divine help for her poor daughter who is severely afflicted by a demon. She recognises that in him there is divine help for those helpless to free themselves from entrapment to the kingdom of darkness. Freedom that futile human traditions and rules cannot give.
Jesus seems to dismiss her initially: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”. But somewhere this Gentile woman had heard and believed the prophecy of the Old Testament that God’s glory would not only be given to his people Israel but be a light for revelation to all nations (Isaiah 49:6-7). And so the woman came to that light for the nations, and she persists in crying out to Jesus for help—because she is so convinced he will indeed bring mercy and freedom to her daughter. It is not rules and traditions that will free her dear daughter. It is only Jesus.
In our text, it wasn’t only the Canaanite woman’s daughter that was oppressed by the kingdom of darkness. The Pharisees and religious leaders of Israel were as well. They believed the devil’s lie that it was up to how well they lived that would cause God to be pleased with them. But the woman bows before Jesus. Her posture shows where her heart is—it is her heart that kneels before Jesus’ throne. “Lord, help me” she says.
Jesus answered: “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to their dogs.” With our modern sensitivities, this sounds quite harsh, but Jesus is using the illustration of a family household. A parent sets a place for their children at the table and seats them there with their food in front of them—a picture of how God had intended to feed his children Israel with the bread from heaven, Jesus himself. A parent wouldn’t prepare a meal for their child only to put it in the pet puppy’s bowl.
Aware of the promise in Isaiah, that foreigners would be able to come to God’s Temple and through faith have a place in the household of God, the Canaanite woman takes up Jesus’ own picture! While the Gentiles like the Canaanites are not children from the chosen nation Israel, they are, through faith, just as much a part of the family home as a pet puppy is, waiting at their masters’ feet for the crumbs to fall to the floor. So she says: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
In total contrast to the Pharisees, the Canaanite woman boldly makes a beautiful confession of faith. She knows that Jesus is the Christ in whom there is God’s mercy, she confesses that God has not excluded anyone from Jesus’ ministry of grace because of their nationality, and that the only hope for her and her daughter is the mercy of God in Christ to make her holy and whole.
So then Jesus said to her: “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done to you as you will. And her daughter was healed in that instant.
How might today’s Gospel reading relate to us? What is our hope to receive the mercy of God and his compassionate, saving help? How often does Satan tempt us to think that we are capable of making ourselves holy? How often does he tempt us to think like the Pharisees—that God will approve of us more if we do better, and work harder at climbing the ladder of outward moral appearance? Or that God would be more pleased with us after our prayers, or works of service, or worship, than he was before we offered them? How often does he tempt us to think that God wouldn’t love us or forgive us for the wrong we have done, and we need to make it up to him before he will bless us? How often does he tempt us to deal with our sin and guilt and conflict through human ways—of blaming others, or covering it up, or justifying ourselves—rather than God’s way of confessing our sin and asking for, and granting forgiveness, for Jesus’ sake? He tempts us to have the same attitude as the Pharisees, to frown down and cast off those who don’t measure up to our human standards and expectations that obscure God’s word, and think of ourselves as more deserving of God’s blessing than they.
There is really no difference between this and the Pharisees’ religious worldview, because under the surface is the same issue: of trying to be pleasing to God through human efforts at righteousness—righteous acts that are like filthy rags in God’s sight, God says in Isaiah (Isaiah 64:6)—rather than seeing righteousness in Christ alone as a completely free gift, received through faith.
We are not here because we are good. We are here despite the times we are not good. For we were also once Gentiles, far off from God. Our hearts were spiritually dead and unable to know or love God, or truly love our neighbour. Like the Pharisees, our default condition is self-centredness. Like the Canaanite woman’s daughter, we were captive under the power of Satan, and powerless to free ourselves. In our natural state we are all unclean, defiled not by what we eat, but by the thoughts and motives that come from out of our hearts.
But we are here because God is good. We are here because God loves us and has freed us from sin, death, hell and the condemnation of the law. It was while we were sinners—while we were unrighteous, while we were not calling out to him—that God sent his only Son. You are here because he has saved you, and gathered you into his holy communion of saints of all times and places. You are here because of Christ’s effort, his work, his righteousness, his perfect obedience, his death, his precious blood. You are here because God did not exclude you from his ministry of grace, but sent you his Holy Spirit to call you to Jesus, so that through faith in him, you are no are no longer foreigners and aliens, but have the right to be called the children of God.
As children of God who are pleasing to him through faith alone in Christ, your Heavenly Father invites you to his family table, where he has intentionally set a place of honour for you. This is where Jesus again feeds the multitudes of his church of all times and places, not with fish and loaves, but with his own precious body and blood, for forgiveness, life and salvation. This is where you can be sure that God’s love is for you, and where you receive God’s merciful help he gives to you. Here is where he restores your body and soul to life everlasting. Here is where Christ feeds you with the food and drink that makes you clean from the inside out. Through faith, you depart holy, and favoured by God, so that together with the Canaanite woman and her daughter, you also have received God’s mercy in Christ, the son of David and the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. Amen.
