14 August

Dear Friends,

This Sunday’s Gospel reading, Matthew 15:21–28, is particularly challenging – one we might be tempted to overlook. A Canaanite woman approaches Jesus and begs him to heal her suffering daughter. What follows is upsetting: Jesus initially ignores her, then responds in a way that seems harsh and out of character: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” and “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

Did Jesus really call this woman a dog? Was he perhaps, as many commentators have suggested, prejudiced toward women? Toward Canaanites? Did Jesus really believe that his mission was only meant for the Israelites?

We’ll get into those details on Sunday. For now, I simply want to flag that this reading challenges us in how we think about Jesus’s divinity. It’s certainly not a new question. Already in the Apostles’ Creed, we see signs of how the early church struggled to make sense of a God who is both fully divine (We believe in Jesus Christ, our Lord…) and fully human (born of the Virgin Mary, suffered, crucified…).

I’ve grown up with a particular image of Jesus that said that Jesus is perfectly human. Indeed, without sin. Blameless. Without mistakes or vulnerabilities. In such a framework, where Jesus is “perfect Jesus”, readings like these become trickier to unravel and make sense of. If this is the image of perfect humanity, what does that say about our own prejudice, for example?

But perhaps this is also the beauty of the incarnation, of Jesus becoming a real human being. It challenges our images of perfect Jesus and invites us to consider the struggles we all face as humans. Our prejudice, our racism and pride. Our inability to be vulnerable and our need to be divine. Parker Palmer says it well. There is a certain risk to the incarnation, he says. There is a risk to God showing up in the flesh. The risk of being exposed. The risk of being vulnerable. The risk of changing our minds. For Palmer, this is a risk we all, like Jesus, need to face: we all need to learn, again and again, how to be fully human. Learn how to be embodied.

Denise Levertov beautifully illustrates the real sharp edges of genuine incarnation in her poem On the Mystery of the Incarnation:

It's when we face for a moment
the worst our kind can do, and shudder to know
the taint in our own selves, that awe
cracks the mind’s shell and enters the heart:
not to a flower, not to a dolphin,
to no innocent form
but to this creature vainly sure
it and no other is god-like, God
(out of compassion for our ugly
failure to evolve) entrusts,
as guest, as brother,
the Word.

Rev. Marius Louw