Matthew 15.21-28
“This is the story of a man, and how he came to love God.”
So begins the short story “Hell is the Absence of God” by the science fiction writer Ted Chiang, who authored the tale upon which the film Arrival was based. As with many of his stories, Chiang takes a Christian claim and posits an imaginative alternative. What if, when people died, we knew immediately whether they went to heaven or they went to hell?
In “Hell is the Absence of God,” everything about contemporary American life resembles our reality except that angelic visitations upon the earth are commonplace. However, these angelic manifestations are harrowing rather than comforting, destructive as often as they are delivering. They happen like car crashes or squalls at sea, causing sudden random damage and death. The story opens with the narrator, Neil Fisk, explaining how the angel Nathanael appeared in a downtown shopping district accompanied by an irruption of light and a curtain of fire. The angel performed six miracles, including four dramatic healings, yet the visitation also occasioned eight casualties, including Neil’s wife, Sarah, who was lacerated by flying glass as Nathanael raptures out of the world.
Sarah’s death coincided with the refrain which serves as the benediction for every angelic apparition, “Behold the power of the Lord.”
Sarah’s tragic demise devastates her husband. Even more than her absence in his life, Neil deeply grieves her presence in heaven, which he can see with certain clarity. Long angry with God because of a birth defect, Neil had resigned himself to the fact hell would be his fate. In Chiang’s story, hell is not a place of eternal, conscious torment. The residents of hell are simply disconnected— absent— from the rest of creation, cursed to watch life and loved ones continue without them. For Neil, this prospect is a terrible torture. If Sarah is in heaven, then he will never reunite with her. Thus Neil embarks on a quest to force himself to love God in order to get to heaven—a task made nearly impossible by his bitter anger at the God who allowed if not willed Sarah’s painful death.
Neil travels to a desert holy site where angels sometimes appear. In Chiang’s imagined version of our world, those caught in an angel’s departing light are blinded but guaranteed entry into heaven; therefore, Neil resolves to risk everything for the chance to reunite with his love in heaven. In pursuit of a departing angel named Barakiel, Neil crashes his car, an accident that mortally wounds him. As Neil dies, he repents. He repents of his selfish motives. As he had hoped, Neil finds himself caught in the departing angel’s glorious illumination. The light— the incomprehensible love of God— transfigures Neil. Overwhelmed by his sudden and life-altering love of God, he renounces all his former anger and ambivalence. Faithful at last, Neil is finally worthy of salvation. But the story ends with devastating, arbitrary twist.
Chiang writes:
“And God sent him to hell anyway.”
“Behold the power of the Lord.”
I start with a summary of Ted Chiang’s short story because I suspect many Christians claim to love the LORD in the same way that Neil determines to force himself to love God. That is, if we are honest, we think our God is every bit as arbitrary as Neil’s God. “God’s ways are not our ways,” we intone without daring to dwell on the implications of what we are saying. Like Neil our hearts may have been transfigured in the light of Jesus, but we nevertheless believe his Father— the God of the Old Testament— is a God whose ways are inscrutably unreliable, whose will is ultimately mercurial, and whose acts are not only often at odds with the Son but evil. Indeed some believers point to those acts and call wicked good simply because the acts allegedly belong to God.
“God must have needed them in heaven,” I once heard a eulogist speculate at a funeral for four teenage girls who died in a car crash the night of their high school graduation. And the gasp I heard erupt from the agonized lips of the four sets of fathers and mothers in the pews is proof that it is ultimately impossible to love— truly love— such a God.
This is not science fiction!
I have been a preacher for twenty-five years. I can testify that much of pastoral ministry is simply the work of assuring believers that the God whom they struggle to love is a God in whom I do not believe; that the God they no longer love is a God the church has never confessed; that the claims to which they believe the Bible commits them are not actually the teaching of the scriptures.
Almost two years ago, I received an email from a former youth. When I saw Deanna’s name in my inbox, I immediately recalled laying my hand on the tight, dark curls of her hair at her confirmation nearly two decades ago. A Palestinian Christian, Deanna and her family had come to the congregation by way of the Greek Orthodox Church.
On All Saints two years ago, Deanna wrote to me:
“Hi Jason,
I hope you and your family are well. I can’t believe I am now the age you were when you confirmed me. I’ve sort of fallen away from the church but not from the faith. Or at least I didn’t think I had given up on Christianity until recently. Maybe you saw it in the news. A couple of days ago, Benjamin Netanyahu gave a speech on television. In it, he made a comment I didn’t immediately understand. He said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you.” I’d never heard of Amalek before and had to Google the name. Not only did I learn that he is the ancient enemy of the Israelites, the search took me to the Book of Deuteronomy (which I’d never read before). I did read it. I assume you know, Jason; in Deuteronomy God commands the Israelites to “blot out” all the Amalekites from under heaven, to genocide them. And now it’s being used to justify what’s happening in Gaza. Jason, a cousin of mine was found beneath rubble in a refugee camp. My family can’t even bury her in all the chaos. Maryam was in the third grade. How could a good God command such evil? Forgive me for saying so but the last few days I have found myself angry at you and angry at the church. You gave me a Bible in the third grade, but you never taught me how to read it.”
She did not sign the letter.
She let the indictment be her last word.
Here in the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus has just been in Gennesaret where a Pharisee’s question about handwashing leads him to declare, “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person.” Unlike the Pharisees, the disciples do not understand Jesus. “Explain to us what you said,” Peter asks Jesus. Instead Jesus takes them on a field trip into Gentile territory. Tyre and Sidon are in Lebanon. By automobile from the Sea of Galilee, it is a seven hour trip. This is a deliberate journey, not a detour. Despite what appears to us as his reluctance to minister to Gentiles, Jesus does not make such an expedition without that very expectation. When they arrive in the pagan district, a woman immediately encounters them.
“And behold,” Matthew writes, announcing her appearance into the story.
“Behold the power of the LORD.”
The woman “cries out” to Jesus. And the Greek word is ekrazen, meaning “to shout.” Across ethnic lines, across religious divides, across gender boundaries, she shouts at Jesus. She is uncouth; so much so, you would expect that what comes out of her mouth is defilement. Instead, her utterance is a miracle, ”Have mercy on me, O LORD, Son of David.”
This is the most precise confession of faith in Matthew’s Gospel.
She addresses him as both her Maker and Israel’s Messiah.
What is this confession of faith doing here, of all places?
In the Gospel of Mark, this encounter happens in a home into which Jesus has snuck. “But,” Mark reports, “Jesus could not be hidden.” How did she find him at that place, inside that particular home? Remember how she addresses him. Jesus is God. Jesus is God living the human life. Jesus is one person— God the Son— in two natures, human and divine. Therefore, this mother has not found Jesus; he has hidden himself in order to be found by her. He’s calibrated this long journey and arranged this encounter for us.
When she pleads with Jesus to deliver her daughter, he initially answers her not a word. As always, the disciples rush to fill the silence and what comes out of their mouth is defilement, “Send her away, for she is bothering us.” But she does not move. She remains fixed before him as though she knows him better than the disciples do. Next Jesus announces, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And whether Jesus says it to her or to us, Matthew does not reveal. Not only is not clear to whom Jesus is speaking, it is not true. Already in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus has healed a Roman centurion’s child. Don’t forget— Matthew begins his Gospel with a long, unconventional genealogy that includes in it names like Tamar and Rahab and Ruth, pagan names— Gentile women without whom there would have been no house of Israel. Just as Moses is an Israelite with an Egyptian name. the house of Israel is itself both Gentile and Jew.
The determined mother responds to him not with words but with her body. She prostrates herself before him, a posture that matches her confession. “LORD, help me,” she replies. Again, she knows Israel’s Messiah is also her Maker, and she persists like she’s completely confident about his character— like she’s known him her whole life. What Jesus says next is exactly the defilement in his disciples’ hearts, an ethnic slur. “It is not right to take the children’s bread,” Jesus says, “and throw it to the dogs.” But she does not miss a beat. It is as if she knows not only his identity but his nature. She comes right back at Jesus, once again calling him LORD. “Yes, LORD,” she replies, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
In other words, “even if I am a dog, I am your dog— I belong to you.”
The apparent insult obscures something incredible.
This Canaanite woman knows, with absolute, rude conviction, that she belongs to the God of Israel.
This is surprising and quite the miracle given the fact that the Hebrew Bible says every last one of the Canaanites had been “utterly destroyed” by the command of Israel’s God. According to a literal reading of the Old Testament, this encounter, which nets this mother a miracle for her daughter, should be an impossibility. The exorcism itself should not be necessary because there should exist no Canaanite daughter to be possessed by a demon in the first place. Somehow there is not just this Canaanite woman but a Canaanite girl and, presumably, a Canaanite father. Maybe there are even Canaanite grandparents on both sides, siblings of the girl even. Somehow there are at least three (perhaps as many as seven or more) Canaanites.
This is surprising because the Bible says there should be zero.
I became a Christian before I so much as touched the scriptures. I was seventeen years old. After a few months of forced worship attendance at an ordinary suburban church, I reluctantly came forward for the sacrament when suddenly the hands holding out the bread to me were not the hands of the man whose name I knew to be Steve. And Steve’s face, for an instant, was the face of another. Steve was no longer Steve. I do not know how I knew that it was the Risen Jesus who encountered me at the table; I only know that I knew as surely as the woman in Sidon and Tyre knew.
And I still know.
But here’s the truth: the experience unsettled me.
It frightened me because I didn’t yet love or trust Jesus. How could I? I did not know him. In many ways, it was a stranger who met me in loaf and cup. Just so, in the weeks after my insufficient conversion experience, I stole a Bible from the sanctuary and took it home. Not knowing how to handle it, I opened it at random and read.
The passage was from the Book of Joshua where the LORD gives the Canaanites over to the Israelites who have just crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land. “In all the cities of the land the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy the Canaanites as the LORD your God has commanded you.” And according to Joshua, God’s people heeded the LORD’s command, “They utterly destroyed all of them, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and asses, with the edge of the sword.”
Incidentally, this is the exact passage the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins cites as a reason for atheism in his book The God Delusion. The God of the Book of Joshua, Dawkins writes, is a “vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser.”
And he’s right!
Not sure I would be able to find the passage again, I dog-eared the page of Joshua chapter six. And I took the Bible to the pastor of the church, troubled at the notion that the God in the text bore no resemblance to the God who had met me at table.
Even then, I knew I could not force myself to love such a God.
I didn’t even explain my problem. I simply handed him the pilfered Bible, which he opened to the creased page. He read for a moment and then nodded, not at all unsettled by my disquiet.
Closing the book, Dennis handed it back to me and he said matter-of-factly, like this was no real problem at all, “Not to read the Bible in the proper manner is not to have read it at all. The scriptures are not rightly read if your plain reading contradicts the character of Christ.”
In the second century, a bishop of the church in Sinope named Marcion rejected the Old Testament out of revulsion at the violence attributed to God in Israel’s scriptures. Convinced that the God who ordered genocide could not be the Father of the LORD Jesus Christ, Marcion not only struck the Old Testament from his canon but also deleted any apostolic passage that struck him as too Jewish. In short order, the church excommunicated Marcion and named Marcionism a heresy.
But herein lies the key insight.
In condemning Marcion as a heretic, the church did not repudiate Marcion’s conviction that a God who commanded genocide could not be the Father of the LORD Jesus. On that point, there was no disagreement. Rather, the ancient church rejected Marcion’s insistence on reading the Bible literally. What the church fathers excommunicated from the body was Marcion’s refusal to read the Old Testament spiritually.
So the church taught us to read Israel’s Scriptures in Christ, not against him.
I realize it confutes how many modern believers think they are meant to read the Bible, but it is not an exaggeration to assert that there was no early Christian— not one— who simultaneously acknowledged the authority of the Old Testament and interpreted it literally. The Old Testament is Christian scripture because the ancient church insisted on reading it in a manner opposite many Christians today.
For example, Origen, the first Christian theologian, interpreted the Book of Joshua, with its troubling account of genocide, as an allegory of the life of spiritual warfare which follows after Christian initiation. Joshua— he has the same name as Jesus— is a Christ figure. The Jordan River which Joshua and the Israelites cross over into the Promised Land is the water of baptism. Crossing over into newness of life, the believer immediately faces conflict and battle, not against flesh and blood but against the “principalities and powers.” Thus, Origen says, the Canaanites the LORD commands his people to destroy without remainder— they are not creatures whom the LORD has made and for whom he cares as much as his own people; they represent the sins and passions and demons that divide the soul and impair the likeness of Christ in us.
You don’t have to force yourself to love God.
The Father of the LORD Jesus is Good.
God’s ways are not our ways because God’s way is Jesus— always, yesterday and today and forever.
As Origen writes in his Homilies on Joshua, “God, who is just, placed the antidote beside the poison.” He means that, yes, there are troubling passages in the scriptures, but you have the cure. Listen! I neglected to teach this to Deanna, but I can hand it over to you. You have the antidote to the poison. Christ is the key that unlocks those troubling texts so the LORD might speak gospel to you.
Again, I realize this may strike you as an odd way to read the scriptures. We are incredibly literal people and we are also increasingly poor readers. But notice in the passage, this is precisely how Jesus interprets the scriptures. In Matthew 15, Jesus enacts this very way of reading the Bible. At the top of the chapter, the Pharisees ask Jesus a loaded question about why his disciples do not wash their hands before supper. Why do they provoke this confrontation with Jesus? Because they read their scriptures literally. Evidently, the disciples do as well given that Christ’s response goes completely over their heads. So what does Jesus do next? He drags them all the way out into pagan territory in order to meet a woman who should not exist according to their way of reading the scriptures.
And not only does she exist, she already knows the LORD Jesus. She knows Jesus better than his own disciples do. She knows him so well she refuses to budge. God has already been at work in her life. The scriptures do not report God already being at work in her life. But we can know that God has already been at work in her life because the scriptures are how God is at work in our lives.
“Behold the power of the LORD.”
I chewed on Deanna’s email to me for a few days until I finally replied:
“Dear Deanna,
First, I’m sorry. You’re absolutely right. We hand out Bibles but just assume people will know what to do with them. There is a reason we call it delivering a sermon. God intends for it to be labor. It is difficult to interpret scripture because the difficulty is precisely how God sanctifies us. This means that whatever first occurs to you when you read a text is very likely wrong.
Second, if it’s not too late, here is what I should have taught you. The scriptures are in-spired only when we interpret them spiritually. The Bible is not an artifact. If the Bible were merely an historical record of deeds God once did in the past (but does no longer), then the world today would be no different than hell.
The Bible is not a museum. This is good news because it means we don’t have to bother removing parts of it that offend our sensibilities.
The Bible is not a museum. It is a means of grace. It is how God happens to us, and the lens through which you read it is the heart of Jesus. And Jesus never permits us to call evil good. As a teacher of mine says, “Those who read the Bible literally make a strong case against their own faith.” Something wicked is never good simply because we think God said it or did it. If a passage appears to contradict Jesus’ cruciform love, then there is yet a different spiritual lesson God intends with it. Sit with it. We call them passages of scripture because if we attend to them patiently — like Moses in the cleft of the rock— the LORD will pass through them.
And it sounds to me he did pass by you and bless you because the feelings for your young cousin and your horror at the evil of war just are the tears of Jesus. God used that troubling passage, in other words, to share his own heart with you.
— Jason”
When the apostle Paul cites the Book of Deuteronomy, he tells the Corinthians something as surprising as that Canaanite mother. Paul says that Moses “certainly speaks for our sake, that Deuteronomy was written for us.” Not for the Israelites, not for Amos or Isaiah, not for Mary or Joseph or Origen— they were written for you. As the Book of Hebrews puts it, the scriptures “are living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword…piercing to the soul…and discerning the intentions of the heart.”
The world is not hell. God is not nowhere in the world. He makes passages through our midst all the time. The scriptures are how he loves you. And his love is the antidote that enables you to love him. The scriptures are not simply about God’s love; the scriptures are how he loves you. They are the means Christ shapes you into the likeness of his Beloved.
Just so, this encounter between Christ and the Canaanite mother is not a fossil. It is not an item in Jesus’ history. It is not an exhibit in a museum called the Bible. It is an event. It is how he happens to us.
It was written (back then) for you today, for your sake.
This text was written for you— for the moment you see someone you love (a daughter or a son or a spouse) bound by what you cannot fix, for when you see a situation that nothing you say or do can solve. It was written so you would know what to do next.
Take your burden to Jesus and refuse to budge.
This story is meant for you.
This gospel is God’s invitation to grapple with him until mercy emerges.
Talk back to him even. Insist that no matter what others might call you, you belong to him and he owes you a portion of his goodness.
This story is for you, for you to notice that this Canaanite mother does not try to fix her daughter or correct her daughter or convince her daughter out of whatever ill spirit has come over her (and we live at a time when an ill spirit has possessed many people). This is for you, for you to see how this mother leaves her daughter alone, and she goes— not to Facebook, not to Instagram, not to her likeminded neighbors— she goes to Jesus. She accepts what she cannot change herself, and she takes the burden on her heart to Jesus. And she refuses to be sent away.
This text was written for you, for you to know that in a world of rubble and recrimination, where so many wield God’s name like poison, God is so good it still has the power to surprise you.
This passage is God’s word for you.
This is not science fiction; this is the mysterious way he moves.
“Behold the power of the LORD.”
