Trinity 8 – Matthew 15: 21-28

As some of you know, I was born and brought up in Lebanon, a strip of land on the East Mediterranean coast measuring about 180 miles from north/south and 60 miles west/east and rising from the coast to the peak of Mount Sanin at 11,000 feet. It's a land of huge variety geographically, ethnically and religiously, in my neighbourhood of Ain Mreisse, we had Sunni and Shia Muslim, Druze, and Melkite, Maronite and Armenian Christian. It was a huge melting-pot. If you took the road south from Beirut, after about an hour's drive you would reach Sidon, or Saida, as the Arabs call it, and half-an-hour further on you would reach Tyre, famous in the ancient world for its production of a luxury good – a dye called 'Tyrian blue', and the burial place of Phoenician kings – including the great King Hiram, a contemporary of Solomon. I can remember seeing Hiram's great stone sarcophagus as a teenager. The Arabs call Tyre Sur, from which the name Suria or Syria is derived. Tyre or Sur was once the centre of the Assyrian Empire. If you travel far enough South you eventually arrive at the closed border with Israel, a firm boundary separating the Jewish state to the south from the Arab states to the North, South and East.

Although there wasn't a physical border between the land of ancient Israel and the area which is now in the south of Lebanon, there was a different kind of barrier: a clear religious and ethnic one that divided Jews from Gentiles. In fact there were a number of barriers which divided Jew from Gentile, in particular, the barriers of Land Temple, Law and the Covenant. The Jews had the land of Israel; while the Gentiles represented what the Jews called 'the nations' or ethane. The Jews worshipped the God of Israel on Mount Zion where the Temple stood – the Gentiles worshipped different gods. The Jews had the Law – given by God- that marked them out from the surrounding nations and through obedience to which they sought to become a holy people; the Gentiles didn't have the law — although a Gentile could become righteous — a righteous Gentile — if he obeyed a set of moral precepts called the Laws of Noah, which, according to The Talmud, God had delivered to all humankind through Noah. The Jews had the covenant — the covenant God made with Abraham and made again wⁱth David — and were therefore the Covenant people; the Gentiles were not members of the covenant community and therefore outsiders. Three key features of Jewish practice and behaviour would have marked them out from members of other groups: the fact that th^ey circumcised their males; that the kept a kosher diet; and observed the Sabbath.

So when Jesus withdraws into southern Lebanon, he is crossing more than a geographical boundary, but a strongly-marked social, cultural and religious divide. This story has a number of especially interesting features. Firstly, the pagan woman recognises that Jesus is special because she calls him "Son of David" — which is the language of faith — pleading with Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter — "Lord, help me!. Secondly, Jesus seems remarkably hostile to her and seems to deny her seeming to say that he cared only for his fellow Jews, "the lost sheep of Israel". He rather cuttingly says: "It is not nor right to take the children's bread and toss it to the dogs - kynarion — a rather derogatory term used by Jews for Gentiles To which the woman very wittily replies "Yes it is Lord Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table" — meaning we may not be members of God's covenant community, but we are blessed nevertheless, simply because that covenant community exists, whether members of that covenant community like or not. Jesus takes this riposte as a sign of great faith and the woman's daughter is healed at that moment.

One of the first great debates in the early Church was about who could be blessed by God. The Jews in Jesus' Day naturally assumed that they were the blessed ones, because, after all, they were the recipients of Land, Temple, Law and Covenant. They were the descendants of Abraham. Some might grudgingly accept that perhaps God's blessings could extend beyond the Jewish domain, but only in a very restricted sense. Some Gentiles, for example, might choose to become God-fearers, people who acknowledged the Jewish God without accepting the whole package, or proselytes, an upgraded version of God-fearer. But that was the length and sum of it. The trouble was that when Christianity really got going, it was Gentiles who responded with the greatest enthusiasm to the message of the Gospel. The story of Cornelius in Acts chapter 10 was pivotal – how could you account for the fact that God had poured out his Holy Spirit – an incontrovertible blessing – on somebody who was not a member of the covenant community?

On the one hand you had Jesus choosing 12 apostles to represent the twelve tribes of Israel – a new Israel – a Jewish monopoly you would think; on the other, God is blessing Gentiles. It sharpened a new question – in this new situation, how are Jewish Christians or Christian Jews to relate to their Gentile Christian brothers and sisters? The Jewish Christian conservatives were clear: in order to become full Christians, they must first become Jews; otherwise we refuse to sit down at the meal table with them. In sharp contrast, the Apostle Paul said, Absolutely Not! Because God has poured out his Spirit on Gentiles, they are blessed – end of story – and logic requires that they be incorporated into the new larger covenant community of God through baptism alone – and the faith that makes it effective – and not through any 'works of the law'. In practice, Gentile men do not need to get circumcised; they don't need to keep a kosher diet; they can worship on the Lord's Day and are not required to worship on the Jewish Sabbath.

Paul was clear. We are saved not by race, but through grace. We are children of Abraham, not by ethnic descent but because we share an Abraham-type faith. Well before God delivered the law, Abraham believed God's promise of descendants as numerous as the stars and the grains of sand and God credited it to him as righteousness. Remember what John the Baptist said to his Jewish compatriots and they came forward to receive his baptism of repentance, God can raise children of Abraham from these stones. Because God is the Lord of the Universe, who creates out of nothing, who makes the impossible possible, and whose blessing is profligate and not conserved.

This great truth about God has radical personal, social, cultural and political implications. Christianity is par excellence an anti-tribal religion. There is no basis under Christ for any nation or community to think that it has a monopoly of God's love and wisdom. Politically, we need to recognise that our own interests are inextricably bound up with those of others. We may have been appalled at what many have called the mindless violence perpetrated in cities across the country this last week – and quite rightly so.