Deuteronomy 7.1-4, Matthew 15.10-28
Aug 17, 2014,Trinity 9, Queen Camel w. West Camel, Corton Denham w. Sutton Montis
Determined to destroy all the inhabitants of their enemy land, the invading forces entered the first city, massacring every man and woman, young and old, and all their animals, in brutal fashion. They destroyed that city and all its contents with fire. In the next city, the forces killed 12,000 men and women and executed their head of state. The troops progressed in this way throughout the territory, utterly destroying everyone and everything in them. They justified their actions on religious grounds, on their conviction that God told them that this was the way that they should deal with their enemies. [1]
Do you recognise this description of a genocide? It might have easily been culled from news reports of events in Iraq or Palestine this week, but in fact it is a summary of the actions of the ancient Israelites against the Canaanites, and their neighbours, from the book of Joshua. According to that book, 1400 years before Christ, Joshua’s brutal forces wreaked havoc in a relentless drive to reclaim the so-called Promised Land for their own possession. This was vengeance against their enemies on a terrifying scale. The ruthless demolition of Jericho was just the start of it. And Joshua’s actions were directly inspired by the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 7, in which God orders his people to clear away their enemy nations – the Canaanites and others – saying ‘you must utterly destroy them. Make no covenant with them and show them no mercy.’
This is the way that Joshua deals with his enemies – mercilessly.
If he could answer to us now, Joshua would probably say that the Canaanites had it coming; throughout the Old Testament these people stood in the way of his people, the Israelites. They occupied their land, and lived wickedly on it. Sodom and Gomorrah were Canaanite cities – need we say more? The Canaanites were very wicked and deserved what Joshua gave them; and today, those who assert Joshua’s status and follow his example as a man of God, unquestionably justify this Canaanite genocide, saying that punishing evildoers is not unloving; that God sometimes kills Israelites, too, when they do wrong; that this is all part of God’s mysterious ways and we shouldn’t question it. [2]
On his website recently the author and pastor John Piper responds to the vexing problem of God ordering the mass killing of every Canaanite man, woman, and child by stating that ‘It’s right for God to slaughter women and children anytime he pleases. God gives life and he takes life. Everybody who dies, dies because God wills that they die.’ [3] This is the Joshua way of dealing with our enemies. And it’s still prevalent today.
Now although the Canaanites feature prominently in the Old Testament, as enemies of God’s chosen people, by the time of Jesus, and the time of Matthew, the term Canaanite had dropped out of everyday usage. Although the Old Testament ‘makes frequent mention of ‘Canaan’ and ‘Canaanites’, [it does so only] as a land that had become something else, and as a people who had been annihilated.’ [4]
1400 years after Joshua’s reported destruction of Jericho, it would have raised the eyebrows of Matthew’s contemporaries to read in his gospel that Jesus was met by ‘a Canaanite woman’. [5] Nowhere else in the entire New Testament does this phrase occur. It’s strange, and so it’s significant. It’s rather like a present-day writer describing a Norwegian woman as a Viking, and we must assume that Matthew’s reasons for describing that woman that way was to provoke his audience to recall the troubled relationships of the past, between the Canaanite people and the Israelites. The term Canaanite is to Matthew’s audience a sort of stereotypical expression, which to them would mean ‘an enemy of Israel’. [6]
When Matthew’s audience heard the word Canaanite, they would recall the words of Deuteronomy, God’s command to ’utterly destroy the Canaanites’, to ‘show them no mercy’, they would recall the actions of Joshua and his troops in ruthlessly executing this order. And now Matthew’s audience picture this Canaanite woman confronting Jesus and shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.’
Show them no mercy – have mercy on me.
What happens next is crucial for anyone who is concerned to work out a faithful Christian response to the troubled relationships between peoples in our world today. For after reminding us of the way that Joshua deals with his enemies, Matthew then shows us how Jesus deals with them.
This is a remarkable passage, for in it we see Jesus seeming to struggle with the woman’s request for him to help her and her troubled daughter. It’s as if he’s finding it difficult to shake off the heavy weight of his faith tradition in the face of an enemy of his people.
To the woman’s initial request for help Jesus ‘did not answer her at all’. Then, when his disciples urged him to send her away, he answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ This theme recurs throughout Matthew’s gospel, from the visit of the Magi to the Christ child, to the Great Commission at the end of the gospel – the question of, what is the scope of Christ’s mission? Is his gospel for Israel alone, or does it extend to the gentiles too?
Here, Matthew stretches the theme further as Jesus struggles to see how his mercy should extend to a gentile enemy of his people. His protest couldn’t be starker: ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,’ he says. But when the woman persists, returning his insult with self-deprecating humour, saying,‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,’ then Jesus acknowledges her great faith, has mercy on her, and heals her daughter instantly.
There is no doubting how powerfully this story would have impacted on those who heard it first. For in it, Jesus turns the Canaanite genocide on its head.
Show them no mercy – have mercy on me. Joshua was merciless towards his enemies. But Jesus had mercy on this representative of his people’s bitterest enemies.
We might do well to reflect on what we should do with this revelation in these highly-conflicted times. For the question of how we deal with our enemies is surely one of the most critical ones we face.
And it may be hard for those of us whose understanding of Christianity comes from Sunday School renditions of songs like ‘Joshua fought the battle of Jericho, and the walls came tumbling down!’, making the act of genocide sound like a walk in the park; for those of us who still sing hymns like ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and even the one we began with today, ‘For all the Saints…’, full of aggression against the enemy – it may be hard for us to come to terms with the tension in the scriptures between the actions of Joshua and a Jesus who deals with conflict in a very different way.
But I think it is critical for the future of Christianity that we rekindle our interest in properly understanding the scriptures, that we make ourselves open to correcting our misreading of them over the centuries, to unearth the Christ we have lost. We have to face the possibility that for centuries we have been following Joshua rather than Jesus, and that is why we have lost our way as Christians, that is why our faith has lost credibility in the eyes of the world.
It’s illuminating to remember that the bible isn’t a monolithic volume with one author and one voice, but that it’s a library of books written over many centuries by many different people, each with their own perspective on God and his ways; a library of books in conversation with each other, sometimes agreeing, sometimes provoking questions because they differ. It’s heartening to realise that just as we know that we can learn more about a story by reading different accounts of it between the BBC and Al-Jazeera, the Guardian and the Telegraph, so our understanding of Jesus is enriched by the four gospels with their quite different points of view. It’s helpful to read each bible book with an understanding of its historical context, as we would say, Shakespeare, or Wilfred Owen. Or the Book of Common Prayer.
So reading Deuteronomy, and Joshua, we acknowledge ‘that the Israelites were an ancient tribal people [who] thought of God the way other ancient tribal peoples did – as a fierce warrior who goes to battle with his people, assured of victory if they are on good terms with the deity but suffering defeat if not.’ [7] That takes us a long way towards understanding why they told the story of Jericho and the Canaanite genocide the way they did. It’s interesting to note that archaeologists now agree that the destruction of Jericho in 1400BC did not actually happen: it was a story told by Israel in later years to assert itself over its enemies, to show that God was on their side and they were on God’s. [8] Interestingly, other scriptures show that God did grant Israel the lands formerly occupied by Canaan; but did so in less confrontational ways, over longer periods of time. [9]
Reading Matthew, we sense that Jesus’s mission is to introduce to the people a new way of perceiving God, and thus a new way of living, with friends and enemies alike. This got him into trouble, of course, with those for whom the Joshua way was still the way. This trouble led to his execution – but this, as Brian D. McLaren says, was also ‘his most powerful lesson’:
By being crucified, Jesus exposed the heartless violence and illegitimacy of the whole top-down, fear-based dictatorship that nearly everyone assumed was humanity’s best or only option. He demonstrated the revolutionary truth that God’s kingdom wins not through shedding the blood of its enemies, but through gracious self-giving on behalf of its enemies. He taught that God’s kingdom grows through apparent weakness rather than conquest. It expands through reconciliation rather than humiliation and intimidation. It triumphs through a willingness to suffer rather than a readiness to inflict suffering. In short, on the cross Jesus demonstrated God’s non-violent non-compliance with the world’s brutal powers-that-be. He showed God to be a different kind of king, and God’s kingdom to be a different kind of kingdom. [10]
How do we deal with our enemies? By embracing the way of Jesus, as taught in the Sermon on the Mount – by loving our enemies. praying for those who persecute us. [11] This is a crucial insight for us today, especially as we decide whether to side with Joshua or walk with Jesus in our approach towards those of other religions.
Through the centuries, religions have repeatedly divided people. Religions – including the Christian religion – have too often spread fear, prejudice, hate and violence in our world. But in [Jesus’ merciful treatment of the Canaanite woman] we can see a better way – a way Jesus himself embodied and taught as a man. [This story reminds us] that members of earth’s religions don’t need to see their counterparts as competitors or enemies. Instead, we can be open to learning from them and sharing with them. Instead of looking for faults and errors by which other religions can be discredited, insulted and excluded, we can ask other questions: What good can he discovered in this religion? Let us honour it. What treasures have they been given to share with us? Let us warmly welcome them. What dangers do they face? Let us protect them. What gifts do we have to share with them? Let us generously offer them. [12]
When they come to ask us for mercy, let us embrace them and heal them.
Notes
[1] A summary of Joshua’s actions against the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, from the book of Joshua, rewritten from an article which leads to a very different set of conclusions from my sermon: Eric Lyons, God’s Just Destruction of the Canaanites, Apologetics Press, 2012.
[2] Justifications from Lyons, above, and Peter Enns, The best way of getting out of the whole Canaanite genocide thing, and it comes right from the Bible (but you may not like it), Pantheos, October 18, 2013.
[3] Peter Enns, John Piper on Why “It’s Right for God to Slaughter Women and Children Anytime He Pleases” and Why I Have Some Major Problems with That, Pantheos, July 17, 2012.
[4] Wikipedia: Canaan, citing Drews, Robert (1998), “Canaanites and Philistines”, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 81: 39–61.
[5] Matthew 15.22.
[6] Here, I become indebted to Paul Neuchterlein, in his Opening Comments on Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary, PROPER 15 (August 14-20) – YEAR A / Ordinary Time 20, which point the reader towards Grant LeMarquand’s online essay, The Canaanite Conquest of Jesus. Neuchterlein writes that ‘Matthew’s Gospel story of the Canaanite woman has become one of the most important biblical stories to me, one that I raise often when seeking an example of how Jesus reinterprets his own Jewish faith’, and cites LeMarquand’s reading as being ‘groundbreaking’, as I now also do. Much of the following sections of this sermon, I owe to LeMarquand.
[7] Peter Enns, The best way of getting out of the whole Canaanite genocide thing, and it comes right from the Bible (but you may not like it), Pantheos, October 18, 2013.
[8] Wikipedia: Battle of Jericho.
[9] Eg, Exodus 23.30: ‘Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land’ – for this and other examples see Peter Enns, The best way of getting out of the whole Canaanite genocide thing, and it comes right from the Bible (but you may not like it), Pantheos, October 18, 2013.
[10] Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, p.127.
[11] Matthew 5.44.
[12] Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking, p.102.
