The best of our tradition teaches a mature understanding of just how morally ambiguous we humans can be. Contrary to popular belief, Christianity should not lead to fanatical self-righteousness, or, at the other extreme, to a miserable obsession with our own wretchedness. Rather, the wisdom of the Way of Jesus is both clear-eyed and tender-hearted about our moral complexities, our brokenness, our blind-spots, our beauty, our great capacity to harm others and to harm ourselves, and our great capacity to love. For this reason, mercy, humility, courage, and compassion are some of the qualities that grow when we offer ourselves to Jesus’ guidance. But what also can grow is a vision that our world can indeed be more just and peaceful, even as we feel the pain of how far we can be from that. 

Grace takes the sting out of those tough moments when we have to admit something about ourselves that we’d rather not. Grace takes away the sting of judgment that we can dish out on ourselves, the judgment we can dish out on other people, the judgment we fear from others and fear from God, the judgment that can make us so reactive and defensive that we can be in denial about our moral shortcomings.

Grace frees us from all that. Grace frees us so we can see ourselves and see other people more clearly and honestly, see our flaws and our shortcomings, as well as the things that are wonderful and beautiful, all by the light of all of our belovedness before God.

The freedom here comes from knowing we are loved unconditionally. God’s love is simply there for all who realize they need it and want it. We are each and all beloved – in our limitations – as children of God. And “All” here truly means “All” – even, or especially those whom we are inclined to judge harshly, or whose humanity and dignity we are inclined to ignore or deny.

Now, we say we like to say we’re beloved as “children” of God, but God’s love challenges us to mature beyond childhood. And grace helps with that, helps us grow up, helps us grow into the more ethical and gracious and courageous ways of being to which the reality God truly does call us.

This is true not only of us as individuals, but also as communities.

The experience that Jesus offers of God’s universal and unconditional embrace of humanity has been a very important historical force in the evolution of what we now call human rights. This is the hard, and fraught, and uneven process of helping humanity mature morally. Jesus and his most faithful followers through the ages have been agents for the recognition that everyone has fundamental dignity and worth. This is why Jesus made a big point of identifying with those are rejected, shunned, condemned, discarded, trampled.

At our worst through history, Christians have been agents of the opposite – violence, oppression, dehumanization.

As individuals and as communities, Jesus can help us become aware of our own moral blind-spots, aware of the ways we can be harm others, aware of the ways we value some people’s lives and well-being more than others.

As Christians, we get to face these challenges in the midst of grace. We get to begin with grace and we get to end with grace, thank God. 

Now, Thanksgiving is coming up, and the holiday season. One of the many challenges that many people face this time of year is gathering with family where there are fraught political differences, in our overall social climate where there is little grace. 

This year when families gather, there may be tense or bitter argument about the current horrific crisis of violence in Israel and Palestine.

There’s heightened anger and division, heightened outrage over the consequences of whose lives and deaths matter to whom, and whose lives and deaths don’t matter to whom.

It’s important, I believe, that we continue to stay with the heartbreak of it all, and to not let our hearts be hardened … and that we stay rooted in our shared human need for God’s Grace, which is at the heart of how our faith has faced the reality of human hate.

How much is this at the heart of our faith? Let me tell you a story about Jesus.

This is a story where Jesus does not seem to be the perfect moral exemplar we want him to be.

Now, some preachers do all kinds of gymnastics with this Bible story to make it out so that Jesus is the unfailing, flawless authority here. But for me the human limitations of this ragtag holy fool of a Messiah is part of the whole point of what’s revealed through him.

Jesus is so poignantly human. That’s what makes his divinity so startling and captivating. That’s what makes Jesus such a powerful manifestation of salvation by grace, how through his humanity, God’s grace gets through to all humanity.

So, here’s the story:

Jesus is in the thick of his ministry, going from place to place, teaching and healing, when he is approached by a woman who, we are told, is a Canaanite. Now, I’ll talk more in a minute about what that means. First, let me just go through the story. This is the according to Gospel Matthew (Matthew 15:21-28), There’s a similar story in Mark (Mark 7:24-30).

This Canaanite woman calls to Jesus and says, “Take pity on me, Master, son of David. My daughter is grievously possessed by a destructive, death-dealing spirit.” Now, this sort of thing has been happening since the word got out that Jesus is a healer – people have been coming to him with their healing needs.

But Jesus at first won’t even respond to this woman, he gives her the cold shoulder. And his disciples complain to him about how much she’s been bugging them. They want Jesus to tell her to get lost.

Jesus tells them, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Alright? Meaning, not to other tribes of people, like Canaanites.

But she persists in a strong but humble way. She comes up to Jesus and kneels and says again, “Master, help me.”

Jesus answers, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

To that she replies, “Yes, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”

This causes Jesus to have a change of heart. He says to her basically, “Wow, your faith really is strong. It will be as you wish.”

And her daughter is healed.

Now I imagine many of you who hear this story will feel at least a little uncomfortable about the fact that Jesus here, our dear Jesus, basically calls a woman a “dog” because of her ethnicity. At first, he doesn’t even dignify her with his attention. But she manages to get a response from him, he basically says, “You dogs don’t get the good things God has to give.”

Now, Jesus here is behaving like any Hebrew man in authority would at the time if approached by a Canaanite woman with a request for help. There’s both ethnic and gender prejudice and privilege at play here.

So, let’s talk about the Canaanites.

The Canaanites are the broad category of people who were basically the tribes who were indigenous to the Holy Land. Many, many, many generations before Jesus, when Moses led the Hebrew people out of bondage from Egypt and they wandered through the desert led by God’s promise of a promised homeland for them, and when the generation after Moses the people entered that promised land and claimed it as their own, that promised land was not uninhabited. There were other people already living there enjoying that milk and honey who were not inclined to give any of it over to these people who just showed up.

Those are the Canaanites.

They then become the mortal enemies of the Hebrew people who set about conquering them. The books of Joshua and Judges in the Bible tell the story of that conquest, and it involves a lot of horrible violence on both sides, and ultimately the Hebrew people manage to dispossess the Canaanites, as, they believed, was ordained by God.

Now, it’s important to note that in our history in North America, many of the European Christians in the first several generations of colonizing this land saw themselves as the “new Israel,” they saw this continent as the new promised land, and they saw the various tribes of Native Americans who have been living here for countless generations, as the new Canaanites. We hear a lot about Canaanites from early American preachers who are conjuring up justification for the killing and dispossession the Native Americans. European settlers were not actually like the Hebrew people of Moses’ time, fleeing from slavery and in desperate need of a homeland. But it’s all too common through history for people to make religious justifications for their own self-interested prejudice.

Anyhow, back to Jesus and his times.

The Canaanites were still very much around and in the mix. Historians of the Middle East are clear that the Canaanites were never close to decisively conquered. The Holy Land has always been a complex mix of many different kinds of folks – the whole fraught and at best creative life of a cosmopolitan multicultural world is nothing new.

Anyhow, I hope you’ve got a sense of the relatable tension at play in this first century encounter between a Canaanite woman and a Jewish Rabbi who had been taught that the Canaanites were an especially accursed and wicked race (Wisdom of Solomon 12:10-11).

It’s also breaking proper protocol at the time for her, as a woman of any ethnicity, to approach a male authority of any ethnicity, with a request about her family. A man is supposed to do that.

Jesus’ initial reaction to all this is the socially conditioned response. She’s being rude and she’s from a lesser race. She doesn’t deserve God’s grace. God’s grace is for the chosen people, who come from the right stock and know how to behave properly.

But she won’t accept that.

She answers back to Jesus. She answers by saying: God’s grace is for all who need it and want it.

Now, she doesn’t challenge the racism (for lack of a better term), she stays within the racist image in her response to Jesus, but she does it in such a way – it’s clever – to challenge the very premise of the prejudice. She says, basically, “C’mon, we both know that God’s grace spills over the boundaries that humans set. It’s for anyone who needs it and wants it. Who are you to hoard it?”

This is how she changes Jesus’ heart, with her boldness and persistence, her quick wittedness, and with her clear understanding that the sustaining bread of God’s grace is for all people.

And Jesus admits she’s right. He admits her humanity, her dignity, her belovedness as a fellow Child of God. He has a change of heart and grows in mercy and compassion and courage.

It’s very important that this is the story in Matthew and Mark that takes place before miracle of the loaves and the fishes, which we’ll talk about next week for Thanksgiving weekend. The Gospel story goes from a woman talking Jesus into giving up some crumbs from the table to in this awesome display of loaves upon loaves upon loaves pouring out for any and all who need it and want it.

See? Jesus was willing to grow through this tense encounter that exposed his prejudice and his privilege, exposed his blind spots about whose lives and needs matter. Jesus was willing to grow into being a more open vessel for the boundless abundance of God’s grace.

I hope this is encouraging to us, to have grace and courage in our own engagement with our own moral blind spots, and those of others.

Even Jesus had to be confronted with his own racism. This was key to him letting go of the boundaries set by human prejudice and power, and allowing God’s boundless grace to abound. May it be so for us.

Thanks be to God.

Delivered Sunday, November 19, 2023, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge

Image: Detail from “Christ and the Canaanite Woman” – c.1784 Germain-Jean Drouais. Note: the European complexions are historically inaccurate