The Edge of the Inside

The Pharisees are concerned with issues of ritual purity and cleanliness. Don’t eat with dirty hands, they say, as it will defile you. Jesus, on the other hand, is concerned with the words that come out of our mouths. These words come from our hearts, and if they are rotten, they are what truly defile you.

When we look closely, we can understand where both sides are coming from. I don’t know a parent who hasn’t told their kid to go wash their hands before dinner. And while ritual purity has deep religious significance, we can appreciate the practical and spiritual reasons for it. At the same time, I also don’t know a parent who, upon hearing something inappropriate coming out of their child’s mouth, hasn’t made a serious issue of it.

Jesus isn’t arguing against the need for ritual purity or clean hands. However, he is arguing strongly in favour of being pure in thought and in words. He is asking us to be aware that words and language have profound meaning and can cause real harm. It is this defilement, the harm we cause one another, that is of principal concern to God.

But then, just after teaching this, Matthew tells us a jarring story. Jesus travels to a new place and refers to a Canaanite woman as a dog. We struggle with this passage, and honestly, we should. Jesus has just instructed his followers about how to speak, and then he behaves in the exact opposite way, perhaps revealing his own humanity. As modern readers, we wrestle with the behaviour of Jesus here, and we try to develop ideas to explain away why he behaved this way.

But instead of explaining it away, what are the questions we should be asking of Matthew and his community? Why do these two stories—the teaching on defilement and the harsh encounter with the Canaanite woman—go together? What is the underlying message?

In his commentary, Richard Ward writes about the difficulty of this scene: “This scene is admittedly a hard one to preach. One may want to get Jesus off the hook and preserve the generic ‘good guy’ Jesus that drifts through tradition, even though this tradition is breaking open right before our eyes. This is who Matthew saw Jesus as being. He has been sent to the house of Israel to be the authoritative interpreter of tradition. The question is this: is Jesus, as the child of and bearer of traditional thought forms, capable of receiving ‘new wine’ as the ‘new Moses’ in his encounter with the ‘other’?”

As I’ve mentioned in previous weeks, Matthew is the most Hebrew of the gospels. When reading through Matthew, you can trace a narrative that mirrors that of Moses. This is the interpretation Matthew brings to his community about Jesus. The question Matthew is asking is: Can Jesus now eat his own words about defilement and see something new?

This is where these two passages meet and why Matthew has put them together. He is demonstrating something to us about Jesus, about growth, and about the possibility that others might understand our faith better than we do.

The tension occurs in the story when the woman, who is an outsider to Jesus and the disciples, addresses Jesus as Lord and Son of David. We must remember who this woman is. The Canaanites were ancient foes, the indigenous occupants of what became the Promised Land. This encounter is steeped in a long history of struggle and rivalry. And while she presents herself as a suppliant asking for help, objectively she is not a marginal figure in this moment, Jesus is on her home turf now. She is a historic rival standing her ground.

Yet, her respectful greeting isn’t enough to sway Jesus. It’s when she utters the line about crumbs from the table that Jesus truly sees her faith.

Scholar Andrew McGowan reminds us that just as she called him “Son of David,” fully acknowledging the historic gap between them, the woman does not contest the “dogs” characterization. McGowan notes, “Yes, this is how Gentiles and Jews relate and yes, the characterization would have been mutual. Yet there is more going on here than insults.”

She is hungry for healing and willing to eat from the floor, food that tradition would call unclean, in order to know God’s grace. Do you see what Matthew is doing here?

The Pharisees state that eating with unclean hands defiles.

Jesus says defilement occurs with what we say.

Jesus then says something which defiles him.

The Canaanite woman eats from the floor.

Only then does Jesus proclaim that her faith is great. His eyes are opened because of her graciousness and perseverance to know God. As theologian Eunyung Lim beautifully writes, “Matthew turns Mark’s exorcism story into a story about faith overcoming entrenched social divisions.”

This is a passage that starts out on the margins in every sense, but as we progress through it, we find ourselves closer to the centre of what faith really means. Again, Matthew sets us up. I don’t know how good your biblical geography is, but the district of Tyre and Sidon is on the outskirts, close to the wilderness. Jewish influence isn’t strong, and you have a mixture of cultures. Jesus is in foreign territory and remember he goes there by choice.

I suspect that this was a situation Matthew’s own congregation was beginning to experience. People from the outside were coming in, and deep-seated traditions were starting to be challenged. Matthew recalls a story about how Jesus was similarly challenged and recognized faith in someone who didn’t look, act, or worship exactly like him.

There is something deeply valuable about standing on the margins. In her book Holy Envy, Barbara Brown Taylor describes a concept she borrows from Richard Rohr called “the edge of the inside.” She writes, “When you live on the edge of anything with respect and honour … you are in a very auspicious and advantageous position. You are free of its central seductions, but also free to hear its core message in very new and creative ways.”

I believe this is what we are being encouraged to do through our gospel lesson this morning: To step back from the centre, find ourselves on the edge, and look back in. And here is something scary, while you are at the edge, peer over the wall to the place you are afraid to go. Then ask yourself the question: “Are you on the outer edge of the inside or the inner edge of the outside?”

This passage asks us to give our own traditions and assumptions a good shake. Why do we keep our traditions? Is it just for our own comfort and identity? Who or what do they serve? Do we maintain them because we’ve never known something different? Are we willing to cast our traditions aside, or modify them, for the sake of the stranger or the “other”?

What do we risk when we hold on to them tightly? The memory of what was. We risk clinging to institutional power, the lure of Christendom, nostalgia over full Sunday School classrooms, full sanctuaries, and familiar refrains. The ultimate risk of staying safely in the centre is complacency.

But what do we risk when we let go?

From the edges, the Canaanite woman pleads her case to Jesus. Through the scraps she has been fed, she has seen a vision of God’s kingdom—and in her bold demonstration of faith, she shares that vision with Jesus. She breaks down the boundaries of her day: gender, ethnicity, historic rivalry, religious tradition, and prejudice. Jesus can only see clearly when he leaves the centre and travels to the edge. Only when the encounter with this woman forces him to cast aside his own assumptions does he recognize her faith as strong, valid, and worthy of praise. It is the woman’s faith, not an act of healing by Jesus, which makes her daughter well.

What is the risk of moving to the edge and casting your glance about? The risk is an awareness of brilliant, beautiful new possibilities in God.

Amen.