Two Examples of Godly Life

Listen again to the beginning of today’s collect, the prayer meant to thematically focus our liturgical attention this morning: "Almighty God, you have given your only Son to be for us a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life." An example of godly life. Now listen again to today’s Gospel. Jesus says to the woman from Canaan, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel… It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs…" That is, to people such as you. An example of godly life? Jesus’ words hardly seem exemplary or godly.

And yet. There is, ultimately, an example for us here. Some of you will remember that some years ago, long before everyone started wearing colored silicon wristbands, some people (at least) wore wristbands, necklaces or charms that said WWJD. What would Jesus do? Although well intentioned, it was not necessarily a theologically sound movement. We, as human beings, are not called to be Jesus. We are called to follow Jesus, to seek Jesus’ guidance and study Jesus’ teaching. But what Jesus would do in any given situation is not necessarily what each of us as individuals is supposed to do. And what the divine Son of God actually did in many situations is not something that we, as human beings, are able to do.

But one way to look at this morning’s gospel is to consider it as a glimpse, not so much of the divine Son of God, but of the very human Jesus. Theologically speaking, Jesus was fully human and fully divine. 100% human and 100% divine. It’s very hard for me to comprehend how someone fully divine could say what Jesus is reported by Matthew to have said to the Canaanite woman. But I can accept these words coming from the mouth of someone fully human. Someone who therefore offers us an example of godly life that it is realistic for us to emulate. And ultimately, Jesus accepts the Canaanite woman—a nameless, foreign, heathen, woman—as an authentic, faithful human being, and he offers her the fullness of God’s healing love. To get to that point, he would have had to overcome the cultural perceptions of his day and move beyond the shortcomings of his own human experience and expectations.

For the last two Sundays, we have heard stories of Jesus’ compassionate and generous ministry in the region of Galilee, that area of the Holy Land huddled around a modest sized lake impressively known as the Sea of Galilee. When Jesus was in Galilee, he was with his people—his neighbors, his kin. And beyond these personal connections for Jesus, these were the people of Israel, God’s chosen people. Just as God had sent manna in the wilderness to sustain these people, the people of Israel, Jesus had been sent to the house of Israel to offer them new bread and new wine and to renew the ancient and sacred covenant between God and these particular people.

For Jesus and his fellow Galileans, Canaanites were foreigners, outsiders. Not only were they foreign, different; even more importantly they did not worship the Hebrew God. They were heathens. Not just in Jesus’ imagination, not just in the cultural assumptions of the day, but in all of Jesus’ own experience, Canaanites were not people who had faith in the God whom Jesus served. They were not part of the story of God’s plan of salvation. In fact, politically they were enemies of Israel.

For Jesus to even entertain the possibility that this woman was a person of faith, a true seeker of God’s healing and worthy of God’s care… for Jesus to imagine that a Canaanite might be a person of faith made about as much sense as us imagining that a telemarketer has our best interests at heart and therefore we should offer them our life’s savings. Ever fiber of our experience argues against it!

But experience is limited. And Jesus is to us a godly example of someone who overcame the limits of his personal experience, who crossed the boundaries of his expectations about others to share God’s love.

Some of you may have read the book or seen the movie Chocolat. The story is much too involved to summarize here, but on one particularly unsettling Easter morning, when a whole town’s past experiences and expectations of life have been turned upside down, the young priest Father Henri says this: "I don’t know what form my homily should take this morning. Do I want to speak of the miracle of our Lord’s divine transformation? Not really, no. I don’t want to talk about his divinity; I’d rather talk about his humanity. I mean, you know, how he lived his life here on earth… his kindness, his tolerance…. Listen. Here’s what I think. I think we can’t go around measuring our goodness by what we don’t do, by what we deny ourselves, what we resist… I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include…"

I think we measure goodness—godliness—by what we embrace, what we create, and who we include in God’s love, in God’s kingdom. No matter what our own limited, fallible, self-centered human experience and expectations may suggest. The godly life is measured by what we embrace, what we create and who we include… even heathen Canaanites. Jesus is to us an example of a godly life.

But Jesus is not the only example we may turn to from this morning’s passage. The Canaanite woman, too, is an example of godly life.

She stood before Jesus with nothing except her prayer.

She had none of the things that are usually assumed to bring standing or power or identity to an individual. Matthew doesn’t even give her a name. She was an alien from a foreign land; she had no citizenship in Jesus’ world. She was an infidel. She was a woman. A woman alone. At that time a woman without the attendance, sponsorship or protection of a brother or husband or father was nothing. You’ll remember two weeks ago Jesus fed 5000 men, not counting women and children. Women did not count. I hope Jesus fed them, but they did not count. Even women of Galilee did not count. A woman from Canaan was nothing. She had nothing.

And she reminds us that we stand before God just as bare as she did. We have nothing. We are nothing. None of the ways we traditionally strive to identify ourselves have any meaning. Before God we are not sons or daughters. We are not citizens, or physicians, or engineers, or presidents of the civic club, or parents, or volunteers at the neighborhood school. These may enrich our lives and the lives of others, but they do not "earn" us an audience or any status or standing before God. They do not grant us any right or expectation that God will attend to us.

The Canaanite woman came before God with nothing except her prayer. Certainly she had no reason in heaven or on earth to expect that God would respond to her prayer. Nothing in her own past experience or personal expectation would have given her hope that God would embrace and help her. But she prayed. She pled. She persisted. And God responded.

An example to us of a godly life. We, too stand before God with nothing to our name except our prayers. And, no matter what our limited experience has been, no matter what our limited expectations may be… if we persist in faith and prayer, God’s kingdom will enfold us.

Two examples to us of the godly life. Jesus himself and a nameless woman from Canaan. In different ways both teach us not to be bound by our own limited expectations. Both teach us not to stop at the boundaries of our particular expectations in our interactions with one another and with God. Not to stop at the boundaries of our own experience or expectations. Jesus’ experience gave him no reason to expect that a Canaanite woman might sincerely and faithfully desire God’s love. But ultimately he crossed the boundaries of his experience and expectations and embraced her with God’s healing touch. An example to us of godly life. And the Canaanite woman. Standing before God, face to face, with nothing but her prayer and no personal experience or expectation that her prayer would be heard. And yet, persistently, urgently, she prayed. An example to us of godly life.

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