Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish” Matthew 15v28
How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?
Our Lord praised the Canaanite woman for her thoughtful faith.
She got a hard run for her money. Few people in the Gospel get as hard a time as this lady. Think about the passage - at first Jesus doesn’t answer her request for her daughter at all. Then his disciples want him to send her away. Jesus goes so far as to tease her for being a Canaanite, thinking probably about his Jewish audience who in those days would have indeed wanted her sent away. They’d forgotten God’s promise we heard in that reading from Isaiah about his love for foreigners.
The woman argues on for attention for her daughter with a word play on the term ‘dog’ which was and is an abusive term for outsiders. ‘Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table’ she says, imploring Jesus.
The Lord gives in and heals her daughter and, exceptionally, gives a reason for answering this woman’s request: it was on account of her great faith; her great confidence that Jesus would grant her request.
There are a lot of questions you could raise about this Gospel passage but I want to look at the one I raised at the beginning which is really important in this day and age.
How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?
The woman was both educated and a believer. Often we don’t see the two together. A lot of education in our society seems to lack a spiritual component and a lot of religious people can have closed minds.
When Richard Dawkins wrote The God Delusion it divided Christians in my acquaintance. Some read it to engage with his criticism of religion. Others wrote it off without engagement. Most derided his arrogant tone forgetful that Christianity can also come across as arrogant.
That goes against advice in the New Testament in 1 Peter 3v16 to give clear answer for our faith to anyone who asks us about it ‘with gentleness and reverence’.
There is a second aspect of today’s Gospel as we respond to the appeal for Lebanon. This healing miracle occurred in the region of Tyre and Sidon in Lebanon where scenes of destruction in Beirut are fresh in our minds. That explosion was second only to those whose 75th anniversary we commemorated ten days ago, the nuclear blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Though loss of life was relatively small, the ammonium nitrate explosion has pushed Lebanon close to anarchy, such a beautiful land caught already in the dark storm of Middle East politics.
Few writers have wrestled with the challenge of suffering to thinking and believing more than the French philosopher Albert Camus in his book ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’. In Greek mythology, Sisyphus pushed a boulder up a hill, saw it roll down the other side and pushed it back up again, endlessly repeating that process. Camus compares search for the meaning of life in the face of suffering to the quest of Sisyphus. His conclusion is once you realise life’s absurdity you are forced to make protest at this. This voiced and acted revolt is like the hard work of Sisyphus, granting contentment, as for a tasked labourer in the face of a world devoid of truth, meaning or God.
You sense the protestors in Beirut have Sisyphus frustration as the only sense they can make of their plight is to protest it. A Nobel laureate, brought up in poverty, who fought for the French Resistance, charismatic and principled, Camus wrote his short book on Sisyphus during the bleakest period of the 1939-1945 World War. It presented a challenge to the Christian ascendancy of his day in affirming the reality of evil, its moral challenge and the need to counter the suffering of the innocent. An atheist, Camus once debated the resurrection of Our Lord with French Dominicans. He complained that the resurrection was an unreal, unsatisfactory happy ending. They answered by pointing to the wounds in the side of the risen Christ as evidence of God coming to share our suffering to expiate the sin of the world. No suffering we have to endure is now strange to God. As one of Wesley’s hymns puts it: Those dear tokens of his passion still his dazzling body bears. Cause of endless exultation to his ransomed worshippers. With what rapture gaze we on those glorious scars.
How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?
Well I’m trying to get some believing people to think here at Holy Trinity this morning, if you like! The moral strength of Camus in describing the enormity of human suffering and the associated problem of its meaning is widely recognised. His writings illustrate how the very capacity to reflect on suffering we have and human beings makes our suffering probably the worst in the animal kingdom. The ascent of human beings in the evolutionary chain is furthermore at the cost of suffering to that wider kingdom. If this process evidences the triumph of mind over matter in what sense does the mind triumph, i.e. make sense of the gravity of evil under God?
Wrestling with the Lebanon’s of our age half a century after Camus American Christian writer Timothy Keller points to an inconsistency among those who use suffering to shoot down belief in God. ‘If you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn’t stopped evil and suffering in the world… you have… a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can’t know... you can’t have it both ways’. Suffering is beyond the human mind but once we accept the sovereignty of the mind of God we humble our questioning. This humbling is represented in scripture where we engage with the revelation of God in the face of suffering. The book of Job starts with a vivid picture of suffering that makes no sense until Job is granted a vision of God, in a glimmer half way through and in fullness at the end of the book where he actually repents of his questioning.
How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think?
The book of Job reminds us of the importance of worship, of seeking God in a believing community as we are doing this morning. We believe - and worship strengthens belief - but we cannot escape thinking about Lebanon and the agony of humankind not least those whose lives and livelihood’s are in the balance with the Covid-19 pandemic.
Thought and prayer flow from reason and faith respectively, two wings of the Holy Spirit lifting us up to God, for God gave us both a mind and a heart. This means shaking off Julie Andrews ‘I have faith (confidence) in faith itself’ religion by doing more to explore our Christian Faith. For those who rely wholly on reason, by contrast, they need reminding how reasonable the holocaust was to those who approved and engineered it. Living as a rationalist can be as dangerous as living as a mindless fundamentalist.
This morning let’s seek for ourselves the great faith of the Canaanite woman, an educated faith, one that holds to the reasoned faith of the church through the ages. This is expressed in the words we are now to say in the Creed, the worship of the Sacraments, behaviour trained by the Commandments and prayer modelled on the Lord's Prayer. As priest, as writer and broadcaster, I’ve been engaged over the years in promoting thoughtful mainstream Christian belief. I want to leave you with the challenge to do something, read something, join a study group, talk to a priest, browse the internet, so as to help build a great faith true to a great God whose readiness to answer prayer exceeds our imagining.
How do we get thinking people to believe and believing people to think - we start with ourselves!
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