Seeds of Gentile Christianity in the Gospel

10 Pentecost, ap15, August 17, 2014

Genesis 45:1-15  Psalm 67
Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 Matthew 15: (10-20), 21-28

Lectionary Link

   Was Jesus of Nazareth a rabbi who believed that reforms were needed in the Judaism of his time?  Or was Jesus of Nazareth a self-conscious founder of a new faith community and religion, the one we’ve come to call Christianity?  Or was he a founder of a significant movement within Judaism as another rabbinical school, or a piety group like the Pharisees or Zealots or Sadducees or something like one of the other schools or traditions which have developed within Judaism?

  Sometimes there is a tug of war in the presentation of the significance of Jesus in the four Gospels.  Sometimes, Jesus was presented to be an apocalyptic prophet who proclaimed the end of the world in his generation.  At other times he was seen as a rabbi who was a Torah legalist, even saying that not one jot or tittle of the law shall go violated.  At other times he was regarded as one who reduced the dietary and purity codes and Sabbath rules to secondary status.

  From the Passion narratives which are included in all four Gospels, we assume that Jesus is presented as one who was excommunicated from the synagogue.  Being put on a cross is worse than merely being removed from the religious community and from humanity by death.  One scenario was that Judas betrayed Jesus to the Jews by giving them the clue to get the Roman authorities involved.  Judas perhaps told the religious authorities that the followers of Jesus were calling him a king; Caesar's representatives wouldn't like that so the Roman guards would respond to a any suggestion of insurrection.

   The Pauline churches were followers of Jesus often led by Jews who wanted all of the benefit of their Jewish traditions but who had observed the impact of the message of Jesus upon the lives of non-Jewish people.  They were baffled that so many Gentiles loved Jesus.  They were baffled that so few of their fellow Jews came to follow Jesus in a worshipful way.  Most Jews   continued within the other pieties and traditions of Judaism.

  The Pauline churches consisted of Gentile membership but they held fast to Hebraic/Jewish roots of their faith.  Paul was proud of his Jewishness even as he said the faith of Gentile Christians was consistent with the faith of Abraham who lived before the people of Israel, Moses and the Torah.  The writings of Paul came before the Gospel writings and there was a dilemma.  How did an increasingly Gentile church tell the story of Jesus when the churches were no longer a part of the synagogues?

  The Gospels are presentations of life events and sayings of Jesus as parables for the origin of many things that had come be practiced within the churches.  Paul did not require of Gentile Christians the practice of circumcision, dietary rules of Judaism or ritual purity practices of Judaism or the observation of the Jewish religious calendar.  How could Paul dispense with such practices and fully claim his own Jewish heritage?

  The advent of a Christo-centric Judaism within the Gentile people of the Roman Empire was so significant it had to be noted when presenting the accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus.

  Jesus came from the tradition of the prophet Jonah who was commanded by God to preach repentance to the foreign Ninevites.  Jonah did not want the foreigners of Ninevah to hear the message of the covenant and was upset when they came to repentance. The prophet Elijah healed the Aramaen General Naaman of his leprosy as an indication that the healing of the God of Israel was not limited to the people of Israel.  Jesus came from the prophetic tradition of Isaiah who called the house of God a house of prayer for all people.  It was a place to gather foreigners and outcasts.   Jesus was seen to be a representative of this specific prophetic tradition of reaching beyond the Jewish ethnic community to the foreign communities.

   When the Gospels were written they included the presentation of the life of Jesus as one who was reaching beyond Judaism to other communities of people.

  The Canaanite woman, unnamed with an unnamed daughter in the Gospel text, came to Jesus seeking healing from a disordered inner life; so disordered that they simply called it an unclean spirit or demon.  For the Canaanite woman, health or salvation was to have her daughter receive a “clean interior” life, an interior life rightly ordered.

  The ancient cry of the Psalmist was “Create in me a clean heart O God.  God I don’t want to feel dirty inside anymore.  I want to feel new and fresh and clean.”  Such a hope, expresses the hope of salvation.

  Jesus, probably disappoints our mothers, Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister, by giving every young child the authority of his word not to wash their hands before a meal.  But Jesus was teaching a lesson:  Salvation cleanliness comes from within.  The opposite of not feeling clean is to feel dirty, unclean, unworthy and worthless.  The expressions of feeling unclean mean that the actions we perform are unclean and defiled, harmful to ourselves and others.  Jesus was saying that physical dirt is not that same thing as the defilement of moral and spiritual dirt, or the defilement of being addicted to idols.   Washing one’s hands was not going to clean the heart, even though it was good physical hygienic practice.  Jesus was saying, “Don’t equate the ritual practice of washing one’s hand with the clean heart that comes from the act of Jesus baptizing us with the higher power of the Holy Spirit.”

   This Canaanite woman, an unclean foreigner who had a daughter who had an unclean spirit wanted the salvation of a clean heart for her daughter.

  The Gospel writer presented Jesus engaging in a hyperbolic or exaggerate debate.  This debate provided an example of the dialog that happened and was occurring within the early Christian communities regarding a strain of Judaism which was reaching beyond their ethnic community.  The dialog between Jesus and the Canaanite woman also was an origin parable for what had already happened in Gentile Christianity.  The Gospel writers were trying to show that the roots of Gentile Christianity could be found in the ministry of Jesus, but the dialog also showed that the mission to the Gentiles was very controversial.

  A paraphrase of the words of Jesus might be: “Woman, you are a foreigner.  Don’t you know the common opinion about Jews?  We keep to ourselves.  We are made special by the Torah.  And as a teacher, don’t you see that I’m here to make sure that the lost sheep of Israel are fully brought into the fold of practicing Judaism?   In this role, should I throw the saving food of the Torah, the healing word to one who is as foreign to us as a dog might be at the table of his master?”  And the woman responded, “But Jesus the message is so good that even if we get your left-overs it still would be salvation and healing for us.”

  And the parable is this: The foreigner had faith without pride.  It indicated the controversy of the Gentile mission but it indicated how desperate the Gentiles wanted the message of salvation.  The foreign woman simply wanted to go where she could find that clean and healed heart for her daughter.  The old generation of separation between Jew and Gentile was not be in the next generation of the church, as signified by the healing of the daughter.  So Jesus was saying: the act of faith is its own salvation heritage.  The act of faith is its own Jewishness.  The act of faith is what includes us in the line of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David and the Prophets.

  Having faith in the one who can bring us the experience of a heart made clean by God's mercy and forgiveness: This is what makes us worthy of the biblical tradition.

  Today, we invite everyone into the tradition of Jesus.  It is a tradition of learning to have faith and this is not automatic simply because we are baptized into the Episcopal Church;  it comes with the freedom to learn to turn toward Christ and ask him to create in us clean hearts.  Today we pray: “Create in us, clean hearts and renew a right spirit within us.”  The message to each of us is that we will always be invited to the faith of, by,in, and for God, as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.