Jesus, the woke police and a ‘hate incident’ near Galilee
by Julian Mann, TCW:
WOULD the Ministry of Wokery allow Jesus to say the words in the Book of Common Prayer’s Gospel reading for today, the 2nd Sunday of Lent?
The passage from Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 15, relates Jesus’s conversation with a Canaanite woman in the Gentile region of Tyre and Sidon, about 50 miles north of Galilee. Her first words to Jesus, ‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou Son of David’ (v22), showed that she had already defected from paganism. By calling him ‘Son of David’, the woman was acknowledging that Jesus was the Messiah (or Christ), the God-appointed King of Israel, as King David had been around 1,000 years previously.
Already aware of his divine power, she begged Jesus to heal her demon-possessed daughter. But Jesus told her: ‘I am not sent, but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (v24).
Speaking to a descendant of the pagan people who had lived in the land of Canaan, renamed Israel after Jesus’s forebears had conquered it on the Lord God’s command in around 1,400 BC, Jesus made no apology for his Messianic focus on the salvation of his own people, ‘the house of Israel’, the Jews.
Jesus then made an even stronger statement of his Jewish priority: ‘Then came she and worshipped him, saying, Lord, help me. But he answered and said: It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs’ (v25-26).
Fortunately for the woman’s daughter, there were no woke police to report a ‘hate incident’ to. But even if there had been, this woman would not have gone to them. She resolutely refused to take offence at Jesus’s use of a term by which Jews in the 1st century AD often referred to Gentiles. Instead, she turned ‘the dogs’ to her advantage: ‘Truth, Lord; yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table’ (v27).
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