Sermon for Sunday, August 16, 2026 || Proper 15A || Matthew 15:10-28
This is going to be something of a slippery sermon. It’s going to be slippery because I’m going to be skating a very fine line when I talk about the difference between human rules and God’s commandments. I’ll make sure to warn you when I get to the slippery part, but first let’s talk about why this is our sermon topic today.
We just read the middle of the fifteenth chapter of the Gospel according to Matthew, which contains the controversial story about Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Buckets of ink have been spilled over this passage in the last two thousand years, much of it due to the fact that the woman seems to prompt Jesus to change his mind about something. “That can’t be right!” say a host of biblical interpreters across history. “Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. He can’t change his mind. He must have just been testing the woman.”
This argument springs from a desire to hold Jesus to one particular version of a divine standard, the standard in which divinity equals changelessness. But there are plenty of examples in the Old Testament in which God changes God’s mind about something: Moses pleads to God not to destroy the people of Israel in the desert and God relents; God regrets making Saul king of Israel and gets Samuel to anoint David instead; Jonah’s prophetic message succeeds in Nineveh and God decides not to destroy the city. With these and other examples from the Hebrew Scriptures, we can see that the people who wrote the Bible thought God could change God’s mind. And with the story of the Canaanite woman, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew stands in the same tradition as Jesus changes his mind about the diversity of people to whom he is sent.
But we have to back up to the start of Chapter 15 to get the bigger picture of what’s going on here. Jesus is up north, tooling around the Sea of Galilee with his disciples when a group of scribes and Pharisees, who have made the trek all the way from Jerusalem, confront him, saying, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands before they eat.” Jesus throws their question right back at them with a question of his own (and I’m paraphrasing here): “You want to talk about tradition? What about the commandment to honor yout father and mother? But you’ve made a loophole in order to enrich your own coffers, for you say its okay for people to take the money set aside for their aging parents’ care and give that money to God instead. So in making up a new tradition, you nullify God’s law.”
Then Jesus, as he often does in the Gospel of Matthew, backs up his argument with a quotation from the Prophet Isaiah: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”
Jesus goes on to address the scribes and Pharisees’ flimsy accusation about his disciples’ unclean hands: “It’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person because that just goes through the body and out the other end. But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, all sorts of evil intentions. That’s what truly defiles. But to eat with unwashed hands? Give me a break.”
After this mic drop moment, Jesus and his disciples head further north out of Israel and that’s when they meet the Canaanite woman who begs Jesus to heal her daughter. At first, Jesus parrots the party line, that the only people who matter are his people. But the woman persists, and Jesus realizes her faith has awakened something in her, and that faith then awakens something in him.
What did Jesus realize, I wonder? I think he realized that his assertion that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” was just like the Pharisees’ flimsy argument about washing hands. Here was a woman who needed help. And Jesus had to decide that helping her was more important – was, indeed, truer to his tradition – than adhering to the sanctity of tribal affiliation.
Perhaps those words from the Prophet Isaiah were still echoing around Jesus’ mind: “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.” Lines on maps are human precepts. Nationalism and tribalism are human precepts. But helping someone in need? That is God’s command.
I said earlier I’d warn you when we got to the slippery part of the sermon. Well, we just got there. I mean, who am I to tell you what counts as a human precept and what counts as God’s command? I’m human, so everything I think and say comes from a human point of view, including what I think are the commands of God. So part of me says its time to give up on this sermon and sit down, acknowledging the fool’s errand of reaching for the mind of the divine. But the other part of me says I still have three or four minutes left before you all start looking at your watches, so let’s see if we can get somewhere.
In Matthew 15 (again, also written by humans), we have two examples of human precepts and two examples of God’s commands. The human precepts are ritually washing one’s hands and adhering to the sanctity of tribal affiliation. God’s commands are honoring one’s parents and helping someone in need. With those as our examples, we can start to discern how to tell the difference between human rules and God’s dream for all of creation. Human rules often spring from those in power trying to maintain their power. Over time, these rules turn into systems that undergird the functioning (or really dysfunctioning) of society. Injustice baked into the system leads to the distortion of relationships up and down society. This distortion is better known as societal sin. The unjust status quo remains entrenched much like the tradition the scribes and Pharisees see themselves as protecting.
On the other hand, God’s commands work to repair the dysfunctional system. God commands us to love one another, serve one another, honor one another, tell the truth about big things and small things, and always to place our relationships with God as our highest good. God’s commands free us from the distortion of societal sin and help us to enliven our relationships through the practices of justice, truth-telling, and reconciliation. This is what Jesus tells the Pharisees when he castigates them over their treatment of aging parents. And this is what the Canaanite woman reminds Jesus when she pleads for her daughter’s life.
This week I invite you to join me in the slippery work of praying our way into God’s commands. We do this with a warning in our hearts, a warning that says it is way easier to pretend human precepts are God’s commands and then rubber stamp an unjust society as blessed by God. Rather, we take that warning with us into prayer and ask God for the grace to look deeper, to seek the truth of God’s own point of view. We ask: How can we work for justice? How can we enliven our relationships? What does reconciliation look like? In the asking of these questions, we discover that God gave us life in order for us to live our way towards the answers. With God’s help, we start move our priorities away from human precepts and towards God’s dream for all of Creation.
Photo by Victoria Shes on Unsplash.
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