She Persisted!
Matthew 15:10-28
“Nevertheless, she persisted.”
These words are now a rally cry for women since a man first uttered them on February 7th of this year.
As Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke out against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, she criticized his record on civil rights by reading a letter from Coretta Scott King, written in 1986, arguing that Sessions, had “used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens…”
Her indictment of Sessions led first to a warning that she was in violation of an obscure Senate rule and eventually to her being silenced by her colleagues from across the aisle.
Following the party-line-vote in favor of silencing Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell uttered the words that would go on to launch a thousand tweets:
“Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Ironically, Warren had been addressing a mostly empty chamber, but by silencing her, they ended up giving her a megaphone. #backfire
And backfire it did. By the next morning, ShePersisted was among Twitters top-trending topics. And women, in particular, weren’t silent about it: reminding the world that being told ‘to sit down and stop talking’ was hardly unfamiliar to them.
“Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a battle cry for women everywhere because ‘women everywhere’ know what it’s like:
When McConnell, a man, silenced Warren, a woman it struck most women as all too common and rang familiar with many of us who have our own stories of being silenced.
In the story Noble just read, we hear of a woman silenced by Jesus.
She comes seeking deliverance for her tormented daughter, and yet Jesus calls her a “little dog”—a familiar and favorite insult Jews used for Gentiles—one that carried the same tone as if it were shouted today in a high school hallway.
First, Jesus is silent in the face of her hysterics—and the text is clear, she is shouting urgently at him—yet he refuses to even acknowledge her.
How can he be so callous when only a chapter earlier in Matthew 14, a woman who’s been menstruating for twelve years, uses every ounce of energy she has left to lunge at Jesus as he walks down a crowded street, managing to graze only the fringe of his garment. And with that insignificant, stolen touch she receives the healing she needs.
Yet today’s heroine isn’t so fortunate, her panicky outpouring earning her only a swift warning from Jesus’s security detail (AKA the disciples) that if she doesn’t leave Jesus alone, she’ll be removed.
Undeterred by their indifference, she keeps clamoring her demand, before finally crying out, “Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy!”—a prayer that rings down through the centuries, is chanted in cloisters, whispered in hospital rooms, screamed out on battlefields. It is the cry of the soul in extremis, a raw witness to the depth and misery of the human condition; and on this occasion, Jesus is silent in the face of it.
One commentator said of this astonishing scene that Jesus is simply “caught with his compassion down.” But Jesus’ strange attitude really should come as little surprise to us.
Not because he was acting appropriately for a man of his time toward a woman who had clearly violated social norms, and whose behavior warranted her no special consideration.
But because this is Jesus we’re talking about! Someone who rarely acts the way we want him to! Someone, who-I-have-to-remind myself of, is not my paid employee.
As familiar as we are with Jesus, we should never be comfortable with Jesus. He’s not our docile pet savior who comes when we call and makes us feel better when we need a cuddle.
We don’t have an unlimited subscription to spiritual support that auto-renews each month without us giving it a second thought.
Somewhere down the line we began to think of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a well-mannered Victorian family instead of as the outrageously creative and puzzling way God’s Spirit speaks and acts in and through this crazy world of ours.
Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite woman reaches beyond the pale when he finally does speak to her, yielding a narrow-minded explanation: “I didn’t come for you,” he says. “And to share the blessings of God with you would be to misappropriate God’s good gifts.”
And with that comment her manners shift; and she knells and begs, “Help me.”
Dehumanized and disgraced, nevertheless, she persisted, breaking every barrier and boundary separating her from the mercy she knows she deserves. Every cell in her body believes that she and her daughter are people who should benefit from God’s astonishing activity in the world; and so, she persists. And her persistence dramatizes for us what it means to have faith when the people who are supposed to care, don’t.
When leadership blames “many sides” instead of coming down hard on the side of mercy, she shows us what to do.
Persist.
The story of the Canaanite woman is not the story of a bothersome woman who pushed until she got her way, but of a woman whose singular belief that a crumb of God’s mercy was enough to save her daughter supplied her with all the courage and audacity she needed to override every barrier in her path.
What happened in Charlottesville was an atrocity, and the response of our government’s leadership is beyond shameful—it’s perilous to our common humanity.
In the verses prior to Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite women, Jesus is embroiled in a controversy with some Pharisees and scribes as they argue over what it means to be faithful.
For the religious leaders, faithfulness is measured in purity: the keeping of dietary laws and the maintenance of tradition. But Jesus argues that it’s not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles them, but what comes out of their mouths. He uses a crude example to make his point. Yesterday’s lunch is gone forever, he says, reminding us that what goes into the mouth enters the stomach and then goes out into the sewer where we never have to see it again.
But what comes out of our mouths: the careless words, the evil, and the lies don’t just evaporate into thin air but continue to be harmful. They fuel the dark forces of the world, the ideologies, the powers and principalities, the evil demons of racism, white supremacy, and the hardheartedness that values heritage over healing, history over hope for a more inclusive future. Our words and actions contain the power to pollute the world and damage lives, and the pain of those choices is not washed down the sewer like yesterday’s lunch.
But our words and actions also contain the power
It’s what the Canaanite woman shows us through her persistence—that there is a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the arduous and unrelenting pursuit of justice.
By the end of their encounter Jesus’s posture toward the young mother changes, saying to her, “Woman, great is your faith!”
She was giving a lengthy speech. She was silenced. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted—and she received the mercy she knew she merited all along.
Earlier this week another mother went to the mat for her child. Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, the young woman killed in Charlottesville. During her memorial service, Heather’s mom delivered a powerful eulogy, begging us not to allow her daughter’s death to be in vain.
“This is only the beginning of Heather’s legacy,” she said. “A legacy I don’t want to die. I want to see it spread.”
And then she told us how to do it.
“You have to find in your heart that spark of accountability. I don’t want you to turn away. You poke that finger at yourself and you make it happen. You take that extra step. You find a way to make a difference in the world."
Persist. Persist. Persist.
And when facing walls of prejudice, barriers of ignorance, and the failure of leadership, remember Heather’s mother telling us not to look away or point to someone else.
And remember, too, the Canaanite mother, who in spite of being told, “I’m not here for you” not only receives mercy but enlarges Jesus’s mission in the process. For by the end of Matthew, the gospel is for all nations.
“Go, therefore, making disciples of all nations. Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Persist. Persist. Persist.
This is the message of the Canaanite woman, and this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Amen.
Matthew 15:10-28
“Nevertheless, she persisted.”
These words are now a rally cry for women since a man first uttered them on February 7th of this year.
As Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke out against the confirmation of Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, she criticized his record on civil rights by reading a letter from Coretta Scott King, written in 1986, arguing that Sessions, had “used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens…”
Her indictment of Sessions led first to a warning that she was in violation of an obscure Senate rule and eventually to her being silenced by her colleagues from across the aisle.
Following the party-line-vote in favor of silencing Warren, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell uttered the words that would go on to launch a thousand tweets:
“Senator Warren was giving a lengthy speech. She had appeared to violate the rule. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”
Ironically, Warren had been addressing a mostly empty chamber, but by silencing her, they ended up giving her a megaphone. #backfire
And backfire it did. By the next morning, ShePersisted was among Twitters top-trending topics. And women, in particular, weren’t silent about it: reminding the world that being told ‘to sit down and stop talking’ was hardly unfamiliar to them.
“Nevertheless, she persisted” has become a battle cry for women everywhere because ‘women everywhere’ know what it’s like:
- to be talked over in meetings;
- to fight to be heard in male-dominated fields;
- to do valuable, meaningful work only to have people reduce us to our appearance.
When McConnell, a man, silenced Warren, a woman it struck most women as all too common and rang familiar with many of us who have our own stories of being silenced.
In the story Noble just read, we hear of a woman silenced by Jesus.
She comes seeking deliverance for her tormented daughter, and yet Jesus calls her a “little dog”—a familiar and favorite insult Jews used for Gentiles—one that carried the same tone as if it were shouted today in a high school hallway.
First, Jesus is silent in the face of her hysterics—and the text is clear, she is shouting urgently at him—yet he refuses to even acknowledge her.
How can he be so callous when only a chapter earlier in Matthew 14, a woman who’s been menstruating for twelve years, uses every ounce of energy she has left to lunge at Jesus as he walks down a crowded street, managing to graze only the fringe of his garment. And with that insignificant, stolen touch she receives the healing she needs.
Yet today’s heroine isn’t so fortunate, her panicky outpouring earning her only a swift warning from Jesus’s security detail (AKA the disciples) that if she doesn’t leave Jesus alone, she’ll be removed.
Undeterred by their indifference, she keeps clamoring her demand, before finally crying out, “Kyrie eleison—Lord, have mercy!”—a prayer that rings down through the centuries, is chanted in cloisters, whispered in hospital rooms, screamed out on battlefields. It is the cry of the soul in extremis, a raw witness to the depth and misery of the human condition; and on this occasion, Jesus is silent in the face of it.
One commentator said of this astonishing scene that Jesus is simply “caught with his compassion down.” But Jesus’ strange attitude really should come as little surprise to us.
Not because he was acting appropriately for a man of his time toward a woman who had clearly violated social norms, and whose behavior warranted her no special consideration.
But because this is Jesus we’re talking about! Someone who rarely acts the way we want him to! Someone, who-I-have-to-remind myself of, is not my paid employee.
As familiar as we are with Jesus, we should never be comfortable with Jesus. He’s not our docile pet savior who comes when we call and makes us feel better when we need a cuddle.
We don’t have an unlimited subscription to spiritual support that auto-renews each month without us giving it a second thought.
Somewhere down the line we began to think of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as a well-mannered Victorian family instead of as the outrageously creative and puzzling way God’s Spirit speaks and acts in and through this crazy world of ours.
Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite woman reaches beyond the pale when he finally does speak to her, yielding a narrow-minded explanation: “I didn’t come for you,” he says. “And to share the blessings of God with you would be to misappropriate God’s good gifts.”
And with that comment her manners shift; and she knells and begs, “Help me.”
Dehumanized and disgraced, nevertheless, she persisted, breaking every barrier and boundary separating her from the mercy she knows she deserves. Every cell in her body believes that she and her daughter are people who should benefit from God’s astonishing activity in the world; and so, she persists. And her persistence dramatizes for us what it means to have faith when the people who are supposed to care, don’t.
- When those who sit in the most powerful offices and highest towers withhold their great power to do justice.
- When leadership is failing us; abdicating decency and duty; unable to muster up one crumb of compassion on behalf of people who have no voice, no privilege, no power.
When leadership blames “many sides” instead of coming down hard on the side of mercy, she shows us what to do.
Persist.
The story of the Canaanite woman is not the story of a bothersome woman who pushed until she got her way, but of a woman whose singular belief that a crumb of God’s mercy was enough to save her daughter supplied her with all the courage and audacity she needed to override every barrier in her path.
- No one persists who believes it isn’t worthwhile.
- No one faces insult or injury or even death if they don’t trust that they’re on the right side of justice.
- And no one will succeed in changing the status quo who doesn’t have faith that their goal can be reached.
What happened in Charlottesville was an atrocity, and the response of our government’s leadership is beyond shameful—it’s perilous to our common humanity.
In the verses prior to Jesus’s encounter with the Canaanite women, Jesus is embroiled in a controversy with some Pharisees and scribes as they argue over what it means to be faithful.
For the religious leaders, faithfulness is measured in purity: the keeping of dietary laws and the maintenance of tradition. But Jesus argues that it’s not what goes into a person’s mouth that defiles them, but what comes out of their mouths. He uses a crude example to make his point. Yesterday’s lunch is gone forever, he says, reminding us that what goes into the mouth enters the stomach and then goes out into the sewer where we never have to see it again.
But what comes out of our mouths: the careless words, the evil, and the lies don’t just evaporate into thin air but continue to be harmful. They fuel the dark forces of the world, the ideologies, the powers and principalities, the evil demons of racism, white supremacy, and the hardheartedness that values heritage over healing, history over hope for a more inclusive future. Our words and actions contain the power to pollute the world and damage lives, and the pain of those choices is not washed down the sewer like yesterday’s lunch.
But our words and actions also contain the power
- to interrupt injustice without mirroring injustice,
- to disarm evil without destroying the evildoer,
- and to make peace without bowing to passivity.
It’s what the Canaanite woman shows us through her persistence—that there is a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the arduous and unrelenting pursuit of justice.
By the end of their encounter Jesus’s posture toward the young mother changes, saying to her, “Woman, great is your faith!”
She was giving a lengthy speech. She was silenced. She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted—and she received the mercy she knew she merited all along.
Earlier this week another mother went to the mat for her child. Susan Bro, the mother of Heather Heyer, the young woman killed in Charlottesville. During her memorial service, Heather’s mom delivered a powerful eulogy, begging us not to allow her daughter’s death to be in vain.
“This is only the beginning of Heather’s legacy,” she said. “A legacy I don’t want to die. I want to see it spread.”
And then she told us how to do it.
“You have to find in your heart that spark of accountability. I don’t want you to turn away. You poke that finger at yourself and you make it happen. You take that extra step. You find a way to make a difference in the world."
Persist. Persist. Persist.
And when facing walls of prejudice, barriers of ignorance, and the failure of leadership, remember Heather’s mother telling us not to look away or point to someone else.
And remember, too, the Canaanite mother, who in spite of being told, “I’m not here for you” not only receives mercy but enlarges Jesus’s mission in the process. For by the end of Matthew, the gospel is for all nations.
“Go, therefore, making disciples of all nations. Baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”
Persist. Persist. Persist.
This is the message of the Canaanite woman, and this is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Amen.