21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.
Matthew 15:21–28 (NRSVue)
[Editor’s note: This week, “Politics of Scripture” departs from the Revised Common Lectionary to offer a timely post on the political relevance of this scene from Matthew’s Gospel.]
The Bible is full of troubling texts, including what some call “texts of terror.” Sometimes these texts leave us scratching our heads as we search for meaning; other texts leave us profoundly disturbed by their violent, misogynistic, and even dehumanizing characters. The Bible is not an easy book, nor is it easily domesticated to “fit” into our modern cultural sensibilities. One of the most troubling texts in the New Testament is found in Matthew 15:21–28, when Jesus is confronted by a Canaanite woman whose daughter is being violently tormented by a demon.
The text troubles because up to this point in Matthew’s Gospel Jesus teaches and demonstrates radical neighborly love, including love toward enemies. One would think that, when confronted by a Canaanite woman (who was a historic ethnic enemy of Israel), Jesus would put his money where his mouth is and embrace her in her moment of need. But Jesus doesn’t do that. Even after the woman shouts, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David,” Jesus gives her the silent treatment and Matthew tells us that Jesus “did not answer her at all.” To make matters worse, the disciples rebuke the woman’s audacity to approach Jesus, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” Nevertheless, she persists in faith and kneels before Jesus, pleading “Lord, help me.” In the phrase, “Lord, help me,” we hear the desperation of a mother in distress; the cries of a vulnerable mom willing to risk everything for her daughter. How will the neighbor- and enemy-loving Jesus respond?
Jesus’ response to the woman’s moment of need not only surprises, but shocks. Instead of embracing her need, Jesus stays focused on his mission to Israel by reminding the woman of her subordinate place among gentiles in God’s cosmic hierarchy. But Jesus takes this thinking even further. He says, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” The passage is one of the most disturbing in the Gospels. It implies that Jesus thought of the woman and her gentile kin as subhuman creatures—or, as “dogs.” Here, it is crucial for us to recognize that Jesus does not directly call the woman a dog. Rather, he implies that all gentiles are dogs. This is a textbook example of what scholars of dehumanization call “psychological essentialism,” which is the idea that entire ethnic groups can be essentialized with a particular “essence,” or characteristics that make them not only less than human, but subhuman.
We know from history that bad things happen when people start thinking about other humans as subhuman creatures. In fact, animal slurs often precede direct violence, oppression, and even genocide. So, Germans essentialized Jews’ essence as rats in the months and years leading up to the holocaust. Hutus essentialized Tutsis’ essence as cockroaches in the months leading up to genocide. More recently, Ethiopian Evangelical Christian nationalists essentialized Tigrayans as hyenas in the months leading up to genocide. Zionists essentialized Palestinians as animals in the years leading up to genocide in Gaza. And, led by Donald Trump’s example, many American Christians essentialized Mexican immigrants as animals in the months leading up to Trump’s draconian child separation policy, during his first presidential term.
Here, it is worth stopping to reflect on the cause-and-effect relationship between Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and trickle-down bigotry. At several political rallies during his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump did a dramatic reading from the lyrics of a song called “The Snake.” As one rally goer put it, “It was like story time with Trump.” This was no children’s story time, though, as Trump built up to the reading with anti-immigrant rhetoric against Syrian and Mexican immigrants. After whipping up his audience’s fears, Trump read “The Snake” out loud, a story of a tender-hearted woman, who shows empathy to a half-frozen snake crying out in profound need: “‘Take me in oh tender woman, take me in, for heaven’s sake, take me in oh tender woman,’ sighed the snake.” The woman obliges and, after warming the snake up in her home, she strokes his skin and holds him tight, but the venomous snake proceeds to bite her.
The lyrics provided Trump with a kind of allusive allegory: the generous woman represents relaxed immigration policy; the snake represents poisonous immigrants. To loud cheers, Trump amplified the innuendo: “Does that make sense to anybody? Does that make any sense? We have no idea who we are taking in and we better be careful.” Ironically, “The Snake” was written by Oscar Brown, who was a member of the communist party, a Black nationalist, and a civil rights activist. One of Brown’s daughters likened the reappropriation of her father’s song to a “lynching scene” and observed that “[t]he elephant in the room is that Trump is the living embodiment of the snake that my father wrote about in that song.” Even after Brown’s daughters sent a cease-and-desist letter, Trump proceeded to read “The Snake” at a rally to mark his one-hundredth day in office.
Together, Trump’s animal metaphors contributed to trickle down bigotry and the largest spike in hate crimes since the 9/11 terror attacks (notably, according to Jardina’s and Piston’s research linked above, surges in crime were felt the most in counties where Trump held a political rally). Dangerous speech in Trump’s orbit can cultivate what psychologists call “moral disengagement” among consumers of animalistic dehumanization. As an extreme but relevant example, in August of 2019, a 21-year-old White man (and a self-proclaimed Christian, according to his Twitter bio) drove ten hours to El Paso, Texas and murdered twenty people inside a Walmart with an AR-15. Minutes before the terror attack, the shooter posted a 2,300-word hate-filled manifesto that mirrored Trump’s dehumanizing rhetoric of replacement theory. He wrote, “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.” Friends, trickle down bigotry is deadly.
The animalization of our perceived enemies has deadly consequences. In fact, scholars suggest that dehumanizing animal metaphors are like pouring gasoline on ethnic enmity. Animalistic dehumanization has an uncanny ability to hijack the moral inhibitions that hold us back from killing our neighbors. This latter point is worth pausing to reflect on. Normally, it is not easy for humans to kill one another. As a Christian and a pastor, I believe that’s because we all carry the image or essence of God in us. This point is well-illustrated in a 1947 book called Men Against Fire, written by a historian named General S. L. A. “Slam” Marshall. Marshall was a veteran of World War I and a combat historian of World War II. As an eyewitness of killing in war, Marshall writes that, “The average and normally healthy individual—the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance to killing a fellow man that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from that responsibility.…At the vital point he becomes a conscientious objector, unknowing” (79). Marshall’s observation of soldiers’ God-given inhibition to kill in war illustrates how hard it is for us to harm strangers, and why dehumanizing a perceived enemy is a necessary precondition for making killing easier.
The danger for us today is to assume that Jesus’ use of an animal slur represents the thinking of all Jews of his time toward gentiles. Many Christian pastors and scholars have made this case throughout history with the consequence of painting Judaism into a corner as an ethnocentric, racist, and misogynistic religion over against Christianity’s supposedly more inclusive outlook. We call this Christian anti-Judaism. Recent scholarship, in fact, suggests that we have little evidence that Jews of Jesus’ time thought of gentiles as dogs. Jesus’ use of an animal slur, therefore, is a Matthean Jesus problem, not a Jewish one in the objective sense. What do we do with Jesus’ seeming lapse in ethical judgment?
Thankfully, the story does not end with Jesus’ essentializing animal slur. The woman continues to push Jesus on the boundaries of his messianic mission, reminding him that even the dogs eat crumbs from their master’s feet. This saying is troubling (to put it mildly) and calls to mind oppressive hierarchies of power, along with the danger of pitting religious in-groups over against religious out-groups within discourses of dehumanization. Alas, Scripture is wild and cannot be contained; the woman’s response reflects her own embedding in these matrices of oppressive power. But somehow, in some small way, the woman’s response influences Jesus. In fact, this is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus is bested in an argument. The irony is that Jesus is bested not by elite Scripture scholars, but by a gentile woman and a historic ethnic enemy of Israel. The Canaanite woman teaches Israel’s Messiah something about inclusion in God’s family and he listens and responds by healing her daughter. In this way, the woman becomes the hero of the story and the exemplar of faith. As Jaime Clark-Soles observes, “By the end of this story, this woman has taught Jesus a lesson about his own identity and mission that even he himself didn’t know (let alone his ill-mannered disciples), that his mission was broader than he had realized….Her grit and wit literally saved her and her daughter. She is the only hero in the story. You might say she is a protofeminist” (34).
The Canaanite woman in Matthew’s Gospel models a bold human confrontation of the divine on behalf of the vulnerable. She also teaches us to confront dehumanizers—to remind the watching world that even outsiders carry God’s divine image and are of inestimable worth in the economy of God’s kingdom (a worth reflected in Jesus’ healing of her tormented daughter). In the context of the United States, we are living in a moment of ever-growing far right political extremism and violence toward immigrants. This behavior is aided and abetted by politicians and their followers who animalize immigrants to create the conditions for direct and structural violence. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, this anti-immigrant foment is especially present among … wait for it … White Christians. In fact, 81% of White adherents of Christian nationalism believe that “Immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic backgrounds.” As a White Christian myself, I find this public polling profoundly troubling and anti-Gospel.
You see, all human beings (including me) are capable of dehumanizing others. Moreover, all dehumanizers (including Jesus) can change their minds. But as we negotiate this moment of political extremism and Christian nationalism, it is crucial to avoid dehumanizing the dehumanizer, which has the effect of dehumanizing oneself. As Paulo Freire writes, “[a]s oppressors dehumanize others and violate their rights, they themselves also become dehumanized” (56). The Canaanite woman offers us a paradigm for resistance. Instead of retaliating by dehumanizing Jesus, she protests nonviolently, reminding Israel’s Messiah that even ethnic enemies carry God’s image within them and are worthy of God’s love and benefaction.
In the coming days and months, may each of us find the courage to imitate the Canaanite woman’s faith during this moment of democratic backsliding and dehumanization: to boldly confront God to intervene on behalf of the dehumanized. And may dehumanizers find a paradigm in the boundary crossing Jesus for changing their mind about belonging, ethnic enmity, and the extent of God’s love.
