A sermon on Genesis 45:1-15; Psalm 133; Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32; & Matthew 15:10-28 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.
The psalm we sang earlier in response to our first reading was not only a fun tune, but a beautiful image – behold how good it is when we live together in unity. A more literal translation would say how very good and pleasant it is when kindred live together in unity.
Kindred. Family. Not everyone has wonderful experiences of family relationships, but for those who do, it is a beautiful thing.
Last night, Margie and I had her sisters and their husbands round to dinner. Nothing unusual in that, but then for good measure, Margie and her sisters decided to catch up earlier in the morning for a walk and coffee together as well, because in their family, unlike mine, too much family togetherness is never enough.
I find it constantly bewildering, because it is so foreign to my experience of family, but I can see what a beautiful thing it is. If you could choose the family to grow up in, I’d choose Margies’ over mine any day, because they love each other and delight in spending time together, and it is a wonderful thing to behold how good it is when kindred live together in unity.
I’m going to come back to that, but let me first take what will probably sound like a very random detour into tonight’s gospel reading. This is a perplexing story, and definitely not one of Jesus’ finer moments. In fact, by the end of the story, Jesus concedes that he stands corrected by the Canaanite woman, and he changes his mind so comprehensively that you’d really have to call it a repentance. And if that sounds like a theological problem to you, I’m sorry but I won’t be unpacking that aspect of it tonight. However, I have done so before and you can follow it up here if you want to.
The reading we heard had two distinct halves, and in the first half, all is well. What Jesus has to say sounds especially good to those of us who have been beaten up a bit too often by Christians who think that faith is all about rigid adherence to rules. He takes the Pharisees to task for that kind of teaching, and is quite dismissive of the idea that people might be spiritually defiled by touching prohibited things, eating prohibited foods, or sleeping with a prohibited lover.
It is not what goes into your body that defiles you, but what comes out of your mouth, revealing what is in your heart, he says.
Now that’s all very well and good, and pretty comfortable ground for our kind of congregation, but just a few verses later, what comes out of Jesus’ mouth shocks everyone.
While travelling in Southern Lebanon, a woman approaches Jesus, asking him to heal her sick daughter. And instead of helping her, or even expressing some compassion for her, Jesus says, “You’re not one of us. I was sent only to my own people, my own kindred, the lost sheep of Israel.” And we are already squirming a bit awkwardly, but it gets worse. The woman doesn’t give up, but continues to ask for his help, and what comes out of Jesus’ mouth next is utterly shocking.
“It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” People have tried explaining this away as some kind of playful banter, but Israelites calling gentiles dogs was sufficiently well known that that’s no more convincing than a modern footballer defending a sexist or homophobic slur on the field as just a harmless joke. At best Jesus is dismissing her as an undeserving gentile dog, and at worst he’s saying “I’m not here to help a gentile bitch like you, no matter how sick your daughter is. I’m here for my own kindred, the people of Israel.”
All of a sudden, kindred living together in unity is a lot more prickly, isn’t it? Who is kindred and who is not? Where are the boundaries? And how do we treat those outside them? One minute Jesus is opposing the policing of purity boundaries, and the next minute he seems to stand condemned out of his own mouth. Instead of seeing a human being in need, he has seen an ethnic purity boundary and simply categorised her by what side of the line she fell. Kindred? Not kindred.
Now I can’t leave that story without acknowledging that this incredibly courageous woman presses her case even after that, and points out to Jesus that such categories should not mean that those who are not kindred deserve only to be shunned, displaced and deprived, and that Jesus concedes that she is absolutely right, repents on the spot, and heals her daughter. Which reinforces my point – this question of kindred is really important. As we sing of how good it is to see kindred living together in unity, who is our lovely unity overlooking and excluding, hidden from view. Even Jesus needed to be schooled on this.
Let’s turn back to the reading we heard from the book of Genesis, the story of Joseph and his brothers. What we heard was a beautiful story of a broken family reuniting and reconciling. That’s why we responded to it by singing, “O how good it is when we live together in unity.”
When WE live together in unity. But who is WE? Who is kindred?
The lectionary only gives us two extracts from the story of Joseph. Last week we heard of his brothers hating him and selling him into slavery. This week we hear how Joseph is gracious and merciful to them when the tables are turned and they come to Egypt begging for food during a famine, not realising that it is the brother they sold who has risen to be in charge of the entire food system of Egypt. But the story of Joseph actually runs for fourteen chapters, and I want to place this bit within its context to see more fully what is going on. Because if we don’t, we may be making that exact mistake of celebrating a unity while failing to think about who it might be overlooking and excluding.
Taken at face value and without context, this story is indeed a beautiful thing. Joseph had every reason to seek vengeance on his brothers for trafficking him into slavery, and indeed when they realise who he is, that is exactly what the brothers expect. But Joseph displays no desire for vengeance, and freely forgives his brothers and it all ends in a beautiful big group hug. O how good it is …
At that point we might be ready to celebrate Joseph as a Christ-like figure, foreshadowing the way Jesus returns after his crucifixion without even a hint of retribution towards those who had betrayed, denied and tortured him. But the story of Joseph goes on and takes a dark turn.
Even if you only know his story from the technicolour dreamcoat musical, you will know that Joseph provided a prophetic interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams, predicting seven years of bumper harvests followed by seven years of crippling famine, and became Pharaoh’s right hand man, tasked with devising and managing Egypt’s food security program. What you may not be so familiar with is what Joseph goes on to do with that power.
As the famine grips the land, Joseph uses his control over the food supply to dispossess the entire population of their lands, and then as the famine continued, to get them to sell themselves into slavery, just to buy back the food that their own land had produced in the previous seven years. The former slave devises a system of slavery far more extreme than the one he had suffered himself; the system that ultimately saw his own descendants reduced to slavery in Egypt a few hundred years later.
Now if your head is spinning there, and you feel like the ground is moving under your feet, don’t panic – that’s a normal reaction. We are hard-wired to interpret stories by sorting the characters in them into categories of good and bad. The heroes are good people, and even if they resort to extreme violence sometimes, it is by definition good violence, righteous super-hero type violence, used to put our world right again and protect and restore all that is good.
Our heads are spinning because tonight we have a story in which Jesus looks more like a racist, misogynistic, ethno-nationalist, and now I’m pointing out that darling Joseph who loves his family and forgives freely and tearfully without retribution goes on to devise and impose one of the worst, large scale human rights abuses in the history of the world.
Our brains want to categorise Joseph as either fundamentally gracious and loving or fundamentally nasty and exploitative. What we struggle to cope with is the reality that the line between good and evil runs, not between people, but right through the middle of each and every human heart. The architects and enforcers of South African apartheid were experienced by their family, friends and neighbours as loving, caring and generous. Love, care and generosity flow freely within group boundaries, and the boundaries remain invisible and unnoticed. So just like Joseph, kindred get mercy; strangers get processed and administered.
I remember enjoying breakfast at a delightful street café in Jerusalem three years ago, watching Israeli locals around me, full of life and love and joy in one another’s company. This was before the destruction of Gaza, but I found myself wondering how they could be so lovely and relaxed and seemingly so oblivious to what was being done in their name to their neighbours only a few kilometres away. But even as the question formed in my mind, I suddenly realised that I knew the answer because they were no different from me. I can enjoy breakfast with family or friends at a delightful street café in Melbourne, completely oblivious to the fact that I am sitting on land that was stolen from the Wurundjeri people by violence and fraud, and that in my name, Australia is locking up some of the world’s most desperately needy people in brutal immigration detention centres, because extending the concept of kindred to include them is not politically saleable. But when I’m sitting in the café, the victims of my comfortable life style are hidden, out of sight, out of mind.
Our psalm was not wrong to celebrate how good it is when kindred live together in unity. Margie’s family enjoying one another’s company around our dinner table last night is indeed a beautiful thing.
But this concept of “kindred” was never really an innocent concept, an innocent word. The concept of “kindred” has always concealed a practice of line-drawing, of ruling some in and others out, of deciding who gets our grace and generosity, and who gets processed. And because it is completely normal, we mostly don’t even notice that we are like Jekyll and Hyde depending on whether we are sitting around the table with friends and family, or casting our vote for the pollies who promise to harden the borders and keep us safe to enjoy our lifestyle in peace.
Even Jesus could get momentarily caught up in this when he was tired and under pressure. At least he had the grace to take correction and make a U-turn on the spot. But what Joseph was caught up in, and what we are caught up in, is systemic, institutional, baked into the very structure of our culture and our self-understanding.
It is a bit unusual for me to deal with all four readings in the one sermon, but the short reading we heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans can, I think, help us grasp where God is in all of this, and how God is offering to set us free and save us from being destroyed by it.
The context is that Paul is challenging an early form of Christian anti-semitism that said that the Jews were uniquely evil because they had rejected Jesus, and that therefore God had rejected them. “Has God rejected his people?” asks Paul. “By no means! I myself am an Israelite. God has not rejected his people. The gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
A very modern secular version of that same form of anti-semitism says that the Jews are uniquely evil because of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, as evidenced by the International Criminal Court having warrants out for the arrest of Israel’s own Prime Minister and former Defence Minister.
The reason that is anti-semitic is that there is nothing unique about such evil at all. As we have been seeing from the story of Joseph and even tonight’s story of Jesus, there is nothing the least bit unique about the ability to condone the perpetration of great evil against those who fall outside the boundaries that define “us”, our people, our kin, while still being lovely good people who are capable of great acts of care and generosity to those around us. That is actually a universal human condition.
But Paul responds to that by telling us that God does not leave us universally condemned, mired in our own complicity, and without hope of any way out. Instead, our universal failure reveals another universal – God’s universal love and mercy, God’s desire to embrace us all as beloved children, no matter who we are, which side of the lines we come from, or what we have done.
Paul is adamant that the Jewish people are still and always will be God’s chosen people. But what he says has been revealed is that chosenness doesn’t mean either more loved and accepted than anyone else, or more exempt from culpability for wrongdoing than anyone else. Instead, says Paul, Jewish wrongdoing has enabled us to recognise God’s love and mercy for Gentiles, but God’s love and mercy for Gentiles must similarly keep reminding us that God’s love and mercy always have and always will enfold the Jewish people too.
“All are imprisoned in disobedience,” says Paul, “so that God may be merciful to all.”
So in case it is not obvious, let me hammer home what is so important about this in relation to where we have come from tonight. It is sometimes joked that in funeral eulogies everyone turns out to have been a good person who loved their families and did the right thing by their neighbours. And that’s because it is, in fact, almost universally true. But what we have been seeing from these stories tonight is that our near universal tendency for goodness, generosity and grace actually runs along lines of kinship. And that it is supported by our equally near universal tendency to be blind and oblivious to the plight of those who fall outside our lines.
So what is most revolutionary about what Paul is saying here is that he is revealing a grace that refuses to distinguish between people on the basis of our kinship lines. God’s grace is an overwhelming flood that washes away our boundary lines and embraces us all in love and forgiveness without distinction.
The uncomfortable part of that is that it only makes sense when we realise that none of us are more good or less guilty than those who devise and perpetrate schemes of land dispossession, ethnic supremacy, and slavery. None of us are any less in need of grace, mercy and forgiveness than any of them.
The joyous and liberating part is that God’s grace, mercy and forgiveness are big enough to embrace us all. God is summoning us all to do what we saw Jesus doing in tonight’s gospel, to recognise our blindly mistaken application of the concept of kinship, and repent and change.
God is summoning us all to build a world in which we genuinely know and recognise everybody as kin, family, neighbours and beloved friends. To build a world in which our song will really mean what it was supposed to mean – O how good it is, when we ALL live together in unity.
Very provocative sermon, Nathan. Many will not like the interpretation of Jesus’ behaviour, but your case is certainly consistent with a face-value reading. The question of altruistic love extended beyond kindred is a crucial factor for me in distinguishing between humans and other creatures. Mistreating the other is quite normal and natural for all creatures and no doubt was the case for early hominids, but somewhere along the way, maybe in the change conveyed by the Adam and Eve in the garden story, God has beckoned humanity to rise above that, to be stewards of all creation, carers for all humanity, observers of justice and kindness to all creatures. It is the refusal to do that which constitutes ‘original sin’, in my mind.