(RNS) — This past Sunday (Aug. 16), in the Gospel read in many churches around the world, Jesus comes across as a real jerk. He sounds like President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
The Gospel was Matthew 15: 21-28, the story of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus pleading for him to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon.
Jesus at first ignores her, pretends she is not there. But she keeps following him, calling out to him. She ignores the disciples’ attempts to get rid of her. They finally ask Jesus to send her away.
He replies that he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” His mission is to Jews, not Gentiles. But the woman keeps coming and begs him, “Lord, help me.”
Jesus responds in a very un-Christian manner: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, he calls her a bitch.
I prefer to believe that this unflattering story was made up by Matthew. But why would Matthew make it up? Perhaps because he had an important message to teach the early Jewish Christians — and us.
This Gospel story reflects the reluctance of early Jewish Christians to accept Gentiles into the Christian community. ... Peter changed his mind when he saw that Gentiles had received the Holy Spirit. ... Jesus at first rejects the Canaanite woman because she is not from the house of Israel. But he changes his mind when he sees how much faith she has. He changes his mind when he sees how much she loves her daughter. The Gospel is telling the early Jewish Christians that, like Jesus, they must change their attitude toward the Gentiles. ...
Of course the text doesn't say that Jesus actually "changed his mind" about accepting the foreign woman, which is what repentance would have to be to be repentance.
Only that Jesus makes an exception in the case of the foreign woman's request, while not repudiating his Jewish chauvinism.
It bothers us that Matthew is a co-conspirator in this offensive bigotry that the Gentiles aren't even an afterthought in the mind of someone who is supposed to be their Saviour.
It evidently bothers Reese because it's his job to worship Jesus, so he prefers to state that Matthew must have put the bad words in Jesus' mouth in order to convey a deeper meaning.
Unfortunately that deeper meaning is foreign to this text, and the bad idea turns out to be part and parcel of Jesus' very parochial eschatological message in Matthew. A lot more is at stake than just this one pericope from Matthew 15.
To wit: that the Son of Man was imminently coming on the clouds with the angels to bring God's kingdom to Israel, who would save the few Jews who had repented, but who would also condemn the many Jews, who were guilty, he said ominously, of the blood of all the prophets who had come before him, going all the way back in time to Abel.
The Gentiles might have been happy to learn that they were completely peripheral to all this.
Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come.
-- Matthew 10:5f., 23
It is interesting that Homer's Odyssey bothers us for a similar reason.
We don't like Homer's Odysseus because he doesn't feel the slightest bit of remorse over what he did to the Trojans, to the Cyclops, or to the suitors. The hero is not humane in punishing the malefactors.
Instead film-maker Christopher Nolan now offers us a Pauline Odysseus, plagued by an introspective conscience like Paul had in Romans 7, admitting the fact of the evil that he had done at Troy but wishing now that he had not done it. The law of Zeus has become the law of Odysseus' mind, the sacking of Troy evidence of the principle of the evil inclination operating in his flesh.
This is more pathetic than funny if you have actually read the sources. Aristotle after all epitomized in his Politics the old Greek understanding that men who behave like Odysseus aren't normal, aren't part of the polis. They must be either gods or wild beasts. Nolan gives us neither a god nor a beast, just another ordinary man.
What will never not be funny, however, is a Jesuit who offers us a Jesus who is also neither a god nor a beast, just a convert to the Pharisaism of a Paul who compasseth sea and land to make one proselyte.
Some of the finest casuistry in the business.
