Jesus’ Conversion Encounter
Have you ever had a remarkable, unforeseen encounter that really got your attention? Maybe it was the first time you saw the face of the person you love, and everything changed in an instant. Maybe it was the first time you looked into the face of your father or mother, and realized they are human. Maybe it was the first time you smelled your baby’s head, and realized her to be a gift from God. These are conversion encounters; we are converted in a moment, transformed, from who we are to whom we are meant to be in this kingdom of God.
I stood on a street corner one day, burdened with pressure and stress, when I saw a business card on the ground. Why did I feel compelled to pick it up? It said, “Be still and know that I am God.” I encountered peace, I encountered transformation. I felt converted from who I was to whom I was meant to be. Some people call these experiences “God shots,” when God sends us a shot of grace.
A friend of mine has encounters with street people. She’s had them for years and, since they always come with a message she knows is a God shot, she calls the street people her angels. One day, as she passed a street person, he said, “God loves you just as you are.” That got her attention. Another time the angel said, “You really DO know the honest action to take. And you’ll do it.” God shots: when was your last encounter with God? When will the next one be?
In our Gospel, a number of people have encounters with Jesus, and he is bad-tempered for every one of them. Crowds have gathered around him to learn and to be healed. Jesus is sharing a remarkable and important announcement: “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”
Before Jesus can continue his thought the disciples leap all over him. They warn Jesus that the Pharisees are angry about his remark….and then they ask Jesus what he means by it in the first place. I imagine Jesus rolling his eyes at about this point, wishing Tylenol had been invented. Instead, he tells them to disregard the Pharisees, and, exasperated, he runs through the teaching again: We aren’t defiled by the food we eat or the travels it takes in our bodies while nourishing us. That is how we are created, the way we are engineered. And God saw that it is good. What dirties us, what turns us from God, is what comes out of our mouths – in cruelty, in thoughts and actions that debase us or other people or anything in God’s creation. These are intentional evils, and it is with these we defile ourselves.
What happens next? Jesus and the disciples travel to the Mediterranean coastal cities of Tyre and Sidon. This is not simply a Gentile area; it’s a Gentile area with centuries of hatred and vicious warfare between Canaanites and Jews. In fact, Matthew’s use of the word Canaanite is an ethnic slur. Where Mark uses the neutral term Syro-Phoenician, Matthew wants us to recognize Canaanites as the scum of the earth, as defilement personified, as the enemies not only of Israel, but of God.
Enter the Canaanite woman. Witness her encounter with Jesus.
She is no shrinking violet, no groveling woman. She enters shouting, perhaps waving wildly. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Oddly, this enemy female is acknowledging Jesus as her Lord. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
What would Jesus do? What Jesus does is ignore her completely. She persists. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon. And [now] his disciples came and urged him saying, Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” But Jesus does more than send her away. He abandons her: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He insults her and he debases her: “It is not fair to take the children’s foods and throw it to the dogs.”
She speaks humbly but assuredly: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Her words are a God shot for Jesus, reminding Jesus of what he said so recently to the crowds: “But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.” She is saying to Jesus, “Do you hear yourself? Do you hear what is coming out of your mouth?”
In this amazing story, the woman is not being converted by Jesus; as a God shot, she is a conversion encounter for Jesus. Perhaps it is at this moment that Jesus comes to remember this morning’s words of Isaiah, and opens the doors of his Kingdom to all:
And the foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to love the name of the Lord…these I will bring to my holy mountain….for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.
Who will we encounter in our God shots? Will it be God? Will it be a person as unlikely as the Canaanite woman? Will we hear them as Jesus, finally, here’s her? Let us pray to be open to God’s message whatever its source. Let us pray to hear God and to live in response to what we hear.