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The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
Grant, we beseech thee, merciful God, that thy Church, being gathered together in unity by thy Holy Spirit, may manifest thy power among all peoples, to the glory of thy Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen. (Proper 16)
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The Eleventh Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Matthew 15:10-28
A Sermon by
Fr. Spurlock
on
Matthew 15:10-28
✛
Transgressing Tradition
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[Jesus] answered them, “And why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? Well did Isaiah prophesy… when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”
That quote from the fifteenth chapter of Matthew precedes the gospel we have just read. But it is the necessary context we need to better understand what we have heard this morning, so is worth our attention for a moment. In the first verse of chapter fifteen, Jesus is asked by the Pharisees, “Why do your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat.” This is another attempt by the Pharisees to catch Jesus in a bit of false teaching. The pious tradition of the elders they are referring to is rooted in the thirtieth chapter of the Book of Exodus (30.17-19) containing the Law of Moses that commanded wash basins be set up outside the tent of meeting so that the priests could wash their hands before leading worship. That’s what God commanded. But over the subsequent centuries, the scribes and Pharisees, the teachers and exemplars of the law, had extended that command to all the people to wash their hands, not just before worship, but to include, if you’ll pardon the pun, a handful of other situations including washing before meals.
Two or three years after ordination I was invited back to my seminary for an alumni meeting where a group of us were told an amusing story by a fellow who graduated a year after me. As a curate in his church back home he spilled some wine on the floor while he administered the chalice during communion. Not knowing what to do, but believing there must be some tradition surrounding the mopping up of consecrated wine, he got on his knees and began wiping the floor while saying a series of Hail Mary’s. Why hadn’t anyone at the seminary instructed him on how properly to handle spilt communion wine, he wondered? Unfortunately, Jesus is silent on the matter in Holy Scripture, but thanks be to God, there are those in the church who have redressed this omission and codified the proper manner of handling such accidents. But it defeats the purpose of this sermon to teach you what it is. Suffice it to say, man creates many traditions surrounding matters about which God remains silent.
While the instincts around such traditions that spring up are certainly borne out of a zealous devotion to the service of God, in time these bits of supererogation have sometimes choked out meaningful devotion and service in favor of cheap external acts of piety. In Jesus’ day, by putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable, the Pharisees were holding people to a rigorous piety of their own devising, over and against the simple and faithful piety asked for by God. And now, in their inability to recognize Jesus for who he is, the Pharisees find themselves in the dangerous position of demanding of God, the law Giver, why he’s not teaching their traditions to his disciples.
But then in a beautiful transition, we see Jesus speak a good word into this misdirected state of affairs. First, Jesus called the people away from the grumbling Pharisees, and had them gather close to him. And then he began to teach them. The Old Testament prophets foretold that when the messiah came he would open the eyes of the blind. Here we see Jesus as the antithesis of the Pharisees. The Pharisees are blind guides who lead the blind into the ditch. With them all is darkness and obfuscation. But Jesus is the messiah, the anointed one of God who has come to bring light into the world, to give sight to the blind, and understanding to the simple, so he begins teaching them God’s good intentions.
“Every plant,” he says, “which my heavenly Father has not planted will be rooted up.” In a recent sermon, Father Daniels told us he doesn’t have a lot of experience growing things in the earth. Well, I do. In another time and place, I planted a vegetable garden in my back yard. One of the pleasures of growing such a garden is that you get to pick what’s planted in it. And because you intend to grow such things, your whole gardening self is bent on producing and enjoying a good harvest from the things you plant there. But one of the frustrations of having a garden is the relentless work it takes to keep out all the unwanted things that want to creep in, like devouring pests and noxious, choking weeds. Gardening is just like Jesus describes it being. Every plant that I hath not planted I’m going to root out and destroy. And as a gardener that’s what you spend a lot of time doing. It’s one of the responsibilities of being lord over your own vegetable patch. But this small and homely example gives us insight into the sovereignty of God over his garden which is our world, and our very lives. God desires a good harvest from the things he has planted here, and so he tends them with the care of the most dedicated gardener hoping to reap true love, faithfulness, chastity and self-control, a bounty of good things for all people, truth, loyalty, and faithful devotion to his purposes for all mankind, these are the fruits of purified hearts and virtuous living. But things keep creeping into his garden that threaten this harvest of good things, evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, telling lies, slander. The good things that God desires from each one of us cannot thrive and flourish amidst such noxiousness, so God seeks to root those things out. They corrupt and destroy his creatures. They are the things that defile us, and no amount of hand washing or outward acts of piety are sufficient to wash them away.
As if to make his point, Jesus leaves off teaching and starts walking, and he walks to the district of Tyre and Sidon where he meets, what Matthew calls, a Canaanite woman. Matthew is being provocative here. Tyre and Sidon are not Jewish territory, they’re gentile places. In Jesus’ day, people from this region would have been called Syrophoenicians, or Tyrians and Sidonians. But Matthew goes out of his way to call this woman a Canaanite. To a Syrophoenician, this is as offensive as calling an African American any number of things that were common in the Jim Crow south. Or as ugly as the things we Americans called the Japanese during World War II, or as ugly as we most recently called Iraqis when we went to war with them in the 1990s. Do you understand what I mean? Matthew is using a racial slur about this woman. When she asks Jesus to have mercy on her because her daughter is possessed by an evil spirit, Jesus relates to her some of the traditions of the elders. Jews had always thought these Canaanites, as they called them, were dogs and beneath contempt. In answer to Jesus’ setting forth the traditional understanding of “these people” she says, Yes, Lord, but even we share in the bounty of the good things God gives to his chosen people. “What faith!” Jesus exclaims. What if Jesus had come to do no more than to hold up the traditions of the elders, and to teach them to those who would follow him? What more could he say to this woman than, you are a dog, and you will get nothing from me, lest you defile me. I wash my hands of you.
But Jesus is God incarnate, come into the world to teach us his good purposes for all mankind. He reaches right past the traditions of men and plumbs the depths of her daughter’s heart. Note what he does not do for her. Jesus does not give her a lot of instructions about going to a ritual bath or washing her hands or changing her religion or getting on her knees and mumbling a lot of prayers, he simply reaches into the heart of this young woman and roots the evil out of her, and she is healed from that moment on.
What if we permitted Jesus to be the sovereign gardener of our own soul, permitting him to plant there the good that he desires, and root out the evil that is in us? We could be healed at this very hour. And then if we took ourselves outside the doors of this church and lived out our lives in the face of men as God intends us to, what effect might that have, even on our nation?
