The Power of Words

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The Power of Words

Matthew 15:10-28
August 14, 2011

Then he called the crowd to him and said to them, ‘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.’ Then the disciples approached and
said to him, ‘Do you know that the Pharisees took offence when they heard
what you said?’ He answered, ‘Every plant that my heavenly Father has not
planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind.
And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.’ But Peter
said to him, ‘Explain this parable to us.’ Then he said, ‘Are you also still
without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth
enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of
the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the
heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false
witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed
hands does not defile.’

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 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.’ 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.’ He answered,
‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and
knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take
the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even
the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus
answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you
wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.

I think I’ve shared with you the name of name of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the
Briish philosopher, in another context, in a sermon I preached some years.
Wittgenstein was born in 1889, the youngest of 8 children, to a wealthy
Prussian family, though it was troubled family–three of his four brothers
eventually committed suicide. He essentially trained himself as a philosopher
after World War I, inherited his family fortune, and subsequently gave it all
away. Wittgenstein wrote one or two major books, became an elementary
school teacher, and then eventually taught at Cambridge in England. Though
he was given a Catholic baptism and burial, he never practiced his faith, but
the language of faith always fascinated him. He believed that it was
important to pay attention to our language, to the way we humans use
words and the way those very words create worlds—emotional, spiritual, and
philosophical worlds. To pay attention to language, and to the human
language games we participate in, as Wittgenstein called it, is to pay
attention to the world itself, for the logic within the language creates the
world as each of us knows it and experiences it.   One of his more familiar
and famous sayings is this: “the limits of my language means the limits of
my world” and that if we want to understand the world, we must come to
understand the power of language as we humans use it to create meaning
for ourselves. And I’ve often said something similar when I do some training
around systems theory in congregations: give people a language and you
give them a world and way of understanding what is happening to them.

Now, It has always struck me as true, this understanding of the power of
language, though I am pretty sure I’ve not always understood or been as
self-aware as Wittgenstein was regarding the meaning-making power of
language. But it seems true, and our text from the Gospel of Matthew today
also seems to hint at that truth, that the words we use carry great power—in
fact, the language we use carries the power to change us, to transform us,
and maybe, most radically, maybe it even has the power to transform God. I’
ll get to what I mean by this in a second, but I want us to look at these two
texts before us this morning, one that specifically talks about the power of
language and words, and the other where we see words being exchanged
between two human beings, and the transformation that happens for both
Jesus and this strong-willed, powerful Canaanite woman in that
conversation.

In the narrative right before he begins speaking here, Jesus has taken on the
religious elders around him for being selective in the way they apply the
religious law they have been given by God, and he uses the example of how
parents are treated by some of these people, calling them out for being,
essentially, hypocrites. And yet, there seems to be a sense throughout his
criticisms of the religious elders in the Gospels that he doesn’t want to
eradicate the religious laws that formed much of Jewish life, as much as he
hopes to remind people that the point of following the rules is to transform
the heart, not to simply follow the rules. Jesus criticism’s here is nothing
new, and certainly was not extraordinary in the sense that Jewish thinkers
during Jesus’ time and subsequent centuries have always called people to the
heart of the matter, which is not the rules themselves, the religious law given
by and through Moses, but the truth behind the rules, what the rule itself
hints at, the life lived out in the following of the religious rules.

And yet here, Jesus seems to be challenging all of the tradition, by saying
that it is not what we put into our mouths that makes us unclean, that
makes us spiritually dirty, a belief that directly challenges the dietary laws of
his own tradition. Instead, he says, it is what comes out of our mouths, the
language and the words, that really expose our hearts, that exposes that
world within each of us, that place full of shadow and light, full of mixed
motives and good intentions, that makes us unclean.   And, as I hinted at
earlier, Jesus seems to be all over the map when it comes to religious laws of
his day, but here he is clear: the words we use, the language we employ to
tell our stories, or even to tell the stories of others, they reveal more about
us than even our actions in this world, what we eat, what rules we do follow
and don’t follow. Words expose our hearts, they reveal our insecurities,
they make known what we really think, what we really believe, beyond the
niceties and appropriateness of our actions—words, language, they reveal an
inner world, maybe the only world that matters, where both human
goodness and human evil dance together. The complexity of our lives, and
even the complexity of our motives, they get eventually get “outed” by our
words, our language, how we say what we say about ourselves, and about
others, even about the larger universe.

And that is a problem, isn’t it, this challenge to listen ourselves, to really
listen to the stories we are telling, so that we can see the world we are
creating with our words, to see the world inner world reflected in the words
we speak out into the universe. The good news is that we get an illustration
of how language is powerful and life changing right after Jesus words on the
power of language. What we have is this story of a woman who uses
language well—in fact, she uses so powerfully that it changes every one
around here, including this Jesus of Nazareth, this itinerant preacher who has
now found himself in her neck of the woods. She is a Canaanite woman—in
the Gospel of Mark she is named as the Syrophoenician women, which
automatically makes her an outsider to the Jewish people, Jesus’ people. The
narrator says she has come to out of the crowd, after this piece where Jesus
talks about the power of words, she comes out of the crowd shouting—and
that is right word here—she screams, she begs for the healing of her
daughter, tortured, she believes, by a demon, by something outside of
herself. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David,” are her words—these
words are familiar to us because they have been used for centuries in the
church’s Mass, to appeal to God for mercy and presence. She is bold beyond
her status—she is a woman, she has no right to speak to a man directly in
this culture, but this does not stop her—she does not whisper her request,
her demand is loud and annoying, her voice, her words, her language
trembling with desperation and emotion.

But more stunning than the loudness of the pleas is the silence that comes
from Jesus—he ignores her, and the narrator makes it obvious that he
ignores her because the disciples have to finally ask him to tell her to go
away—“if you’re not going to do anything, then get rid of her,” they seem to
be saying to Jesus. I mean, the picture of Jesus here in this passage is
disturbing, and yes, Jesus gives us a reason moments later for ignoring her—
his mission is first to the people of Israel, and then everyone else, the
Gentiles, an argument you see echoed in the later writings of the New
Testament, especially Paul’s letter to the church at Rome. Still, there is
something distressing here about seeing our picture of the gentle, loving
Jesus challenged by what we see here in this story, the seeming coldness of
Jesus’ reaction to this woman’s request to him to heal her daughter.

But she will not be ignored, she will not stop speaking, her voice and the
needs of her daughter will not be ignored, and she responds by kneeling
before him, begging him for his mercy—but, again, Jesus responds by
pointing out that his mission is to his people first, that to be fair, the best is
to go those whom he has been first sent to share the good news with, the
Jewish people—and the term he uses here to describe the non-Jews, the
Gentiles here, the word “dog” is actually stronger, more insulting than in the
original language than the English translation here conveys. But she won’t
give up—she responds with her own words, her own language—she fiercely
believes in the possibility of what this one from Nazareth can do for her
daughter—and she makes her case that even the dogs deserve the scraps
from the table. She challenges Jesus, she seeks to change his mind, she
argues her case, she uses language to change her world, and maybe shift
the world of this man from Nazareth, whose passion for his own people has
perhaps blinded him to the need of others, people who are in as much need
of good news and healings as the people who are his own. It’s a startling
moment, really, this conversation between Jesus and this Canaanite woman
because it reminds us of the power of language, and how powerful it may
really be in this world, in this universe.

Let me explain myself, if that really possible. Generally, in the Christian
tradition, it is believed that some sort of revelation happened in the life of
this Jesus of Nazareth, and though we Christians for centuries have
disagreed about what that revelation is and was—certainly, that diversity is
reflected right here in this place, at this church, in the many ways we
understand the life and meaning of this One we follow. But I’ve often
wondered if the revelation that has come to us through this Jesus didn’t
actually go both ways? I mean, what if we humans revealed as much to God
as God revealed to us through this Jesus, some two thousands of years
ago? What if God learned as much about us humans as we learned about
God in and through the life of this Jesus? To have a relationship implies the
possibility of change, for both sides of the relationship—in fact, there must
be that openness to change for anything to go forward in any relationship,
because life is change, good and bad, and usually both at the same time.
And if that is the case, what does this moment mean, this exchange between
Jesus and the Canaanite woman? I think it might mean many things, but I
do think, for me, it means this first and foremost: that language has the
power change the world, and most certainly it has the power to change our
lives, and it may even have the power to change God. Because this woman
will not let go, because she knows and believes that the gift of what this
Jewish preacher brings includes her, she has shifted the world, the universe,
for herself, and maybe even shifted and changed the world of the one she
kneels before—perhaps this Jesus too has been converted. “In the beginning
was the Word,” John writes at the beginning of his Gospel, and out of the
Word came all of creation—great power to create, to renew, to transform.

In the passage, this powerful woman, this outsider is credited by Jesus as
having great faith—her passionate words, her conversation with him has
convinced him that she has something he has rarely seen in his travels, and
that is faith—but here’s the kicker: is this what faith looks like—persistent,
demanding, relentless in the face of silence? In her conversation with Jesus,
in the words she has used and the world she has created by that persistent
demand to be in dialogue, to be in conversation with God, she is named as
faithful—not the disciples, she is the one named having the kind of faith that
can move mountains—maybe she even moved God. I don’t know, but I think
all of this should remind us that our words, and the lives we create by the
words we use, they need our attention. Language, words, this is powerful
stuff, it is the building block of creation, and if so, we ought to pay attention
to the world each of us creating through own words. Amen.