A Jewish Jesus and a Canaanite Woman at Table

Proper 15/20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A: Matt 15: (10-20), 21-28

Matthew’s Gospel is a story, and it is in the nature of stories that things change. What is true at one point may not be quite the same at another, and to read faithfully means not merely to read the parts, but the whole. This is particularly important in the case of this Sunday’s reading.

The story of Jesus’ encounter with a Canaanite woman (15:21-28) will be heard by all using the various three-year lectionaries this week. The Revised Common Lectionary offers, but does not require, the episode immediately prior as well (vv.10-20), where Jesus comments on food and defilement. Together—especially bearing in mind the brief but important epistle reading from Romans about God’s fidelity to Israel—these make for a demanding yet potentially fruitful combination, where Jesus’ Jewish identity and God’s covenant with Israel take on new significance. While some of us will only read the second part of the Gospel, the first sheds light on the rest.

The scene where we begin (vv.10-20) follows and assumes a controversy with the Pharisees (vv.1-10), which started with a dispute about hand-washing before meals. Jesus now responds:

Jesus called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” (15:10)

Matthew takes this whole scene over from Mark, but makes changes, including the omission of an editorial comment: “Thus he declared all foods clean” (Mark 7:19b). Instead, Matthew’s punchline (v. 20) goes back to the issue of the disciples not washing hands (15:2), and affirms this omission does not cause defilement. Defilement or ritual impurity, by the way, is not some miasma of exclusion and marginalization, but simply means that one was not in the required state of purity to attend Temple worship before bathing. Defilement was a regular and necessary occurrence, contracted by inevitable bodily functions and required social duties; but as we see it could also be contracted by moral failure.

Jesus remained (and certainly was for Matthew) an observant Jew, even if he was in conflict with some Jewish teachers about specific issues (as other teachers were with each other, then as now). Through this Gospel, the Law is treated with complete respect, even if some of its purported authorities are not. This is exemplified in the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus is presented as a new Moses, who fulfills rather than repeals the requirements of the Torah, and demands more rather than less. Here Jesus personifies the authoritative teacher of the Law, not someone who dismisses it.

Matthew’s version isn’t so much a different position about diet (or Judaism) from Mark’s, but a clarification about the saying quoted above. Jesus is not declaring that what Jews eat is now irrelevant, but that food itself (and the state of hands that take it) cannot actually defile the eater, or make them a source of impurity to others, even if the food in question is prohibited. As Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin (among others) has pointed out,¹ Jesus is actually taking a traditional Jewish position here. Jesus however also holds to the view—again, a traditional Jewish one—that the agent of unjust or immoral behavior is not only wrong, but impure and a source of impurity.

Jesus Teaching - Unknown artist, Austrian 17th century. Yale University Art Gallery

In Matthew there is a slight toning-down of the dietary issue by offering the closing line about hand-washing instead of food. This insistence on washing before meals seems to have been a Pharisaic distinctive, not a universal Jewish practice. Matthew’s Jesus is more relaxed about hand-washing than about eating non-kosher food, but the basic point is clear: the heart and its potential for producing evil is a fundamental source of defilement, food is not.

Matthew’s deepest interest however is not in either food or hand-washing, but in Jesus. His identity and authority are not set over against Jewish thought and practice; rather he is presented as the authoritative Jewish teacher—the new Moses— even when in conflict with some others, specifically some Pharisees. Matthew’s audience was still acutely aware of such conflicts a generation later.

When Jesus “left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon” (v.20) this picture of Jesus’ Jewish identity and authority should be ringing in our ears. Whether or not these earlier verses are actually read, the Canaanite woman encountering Jesus can’t (mustn’t) be read away of this context, although this happens more often than not.

The prominence of a woman’s action and of the crossing of ethnic boundaries are crucial for Matthew, just as they are intriguing for us, if not necessarily in the same ways. Ethnic difference is not an abstraction here, but refers to a particular history and set of relationships. Mark had depicted the woman as “Syro-Phoenician,” yet for Matthew she is “Canaanite.” This doesn’t mean he changed her ethnicity, but places her gentile identity more clearly within the biblical narrative, given that the Canaanites were ancient foes and indigenous occupants of what became the Promised Land. Jesus’ actions here are now presented as part of that history of struggle. Alienation is the starting point. And here that biblical narrative will develop in an intriguing way.

While we cannot easily get past the degrading terms of their exchange, it’s worth contextualizing it. The peoples involved were mutually contemptuous, and while the “dogs” designation may not be comfortable, the relationships it reflects are hardly Jesus’ innovation. We tend to be very offended by language, but often far too relaxed about the (more) offensive conditions it reflects. Jesus starts firmly with the existing real relationships and conflicts, not with abstract ideas of inclusion. Matthew—here and as a whole—takes this given mutual enmity and alienation, presents them more honestly than we tend to be about the modern equivalents, and then unpicks them stitch by stitch through the narrative, and in this painful exchange, rather than just declaring them meaningless or shocking and to be avoided or hushed.

We have noted how Jewish Matthew’s Gospel is, but this is not a sort of fixed horizon against which everything in the Gospel is to be interpreted. Matthew’s Gospel is the story of how the Jewish Messiah becomes the savior of the world—by being the Jewish Messiah first in all the particularity that means. So through the story, the boundaries of ethnicity assumed in the Covenant of Moses are not ignored, but named clearly. Note for instance the earlier command to the twelve "Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:5) which echoes in today’s Gospel (v.24). It will only be at the end of the story, when Jesus’ death has dismantled the separation between Jews and Gentiles and a new Covenant made in his blood (26:28), that a mission to the nations can actually take place (28:19)

This makes the current story the more extraordinary. Like the Transfiguration and perhaps last week’s Walking on Water episode too, this story—and yes within it, the courage and faith of a gentile woman—cracks the neat arc of Matthew’s own narrative to hint at what will come. This glimpse however will only be fulfilled when much more has been done, when the crucified and risen Jewish Messiah commands his disciples to go to all nations.

Yet then is not now, as far as the Gospel narrative is concerned. It is not just that the bold Canaanite changes Jesus’ mind or seems to, but that her presence in the narrative persuades even Matthew to allow a glimpse, before the time expected, of a Gospel that can be shared by Jew and Gentile, and in which all are children, and all eat the bread of God.

1. “Jesus Kept Kosher: The Jewish Christ of the Gospel of Mark.” Tikkun 27, no. 2 (2012): 43–67; see also The Jewish Gospels.