From Ugliness, A Beauty Emerges

This isn't my idea. This comes directly from Brian McLaren's "We Make The Road By Walking." I read this a couple of weeks ago and it's been stuck in my spirit ever since. And it's too good not to share.

"But don't need to stop there. We can turn to other voices in the biblical library who, in different circumstances, told competing stories to give a different - and we would say better - vision of God.

For example, take the passage in Deuteronomy 7 where God commands Joshua to slaughter the seven Canaanite nations. They must be shown no mercy. Even their little girls must be seen as a threat. Then we can consider a story from Matthews gospel that offers itself as a respond to the earlier passage. There, we meet a woman who is identified by Matthew as a Canaanite. This identification is significant, since Canaanites no longer existed as an identifiable culture in Jesus' day. Calling this woman a Canaanite would be like calling someone a Viking or Aztec today. She asks for the one thing that had been denied her ancestors: mercy...mercy for her daughter who is in great need.

Up until this point, Jesus has understood his mission only in relation to his own people. After all, they're pretty lost and they need a lot of help. So he hesitates. How can he extend himself to this Canaanite? But how can her refuse her? In her persistence, he senses genuine faith, and he hears God's call to extend mercy even to her. So he says yes to the mother, and the daughter is healed. From there, Jesus goes to an area to the northwest of the Sea of Galilee. He teaches and heals a large crowd of people there who, like the woman and her daughter, are not members of his own religion and culture. Their non-Jewish identity is clear in their response to Jesus' kindness: 'And they praised the God of Israel.' What was an exception yesterday is now the new rule: Don't kill the other. Show them mercy.

Then, Jesus repeats a miracle for these outsiders that he had done previously for his fellows Jews, multiplying loaves and fish so they can eat. In the previous miracle, there were twelve basket left over, suggesting the twelve tribes of Israel - the descendants, that is, of Jacob and his twelve sons. In this miracle there are seven baskets left over - suggesting, it seems quite clear, the seven Canaanite nations that Jesus' ancestors had been commanded to destroy.

Matthew's version of this story makes a confession: Our ancestors, led by Moses and Joshua, believed God sent them into the world in conquest, to show no mercy to their enemies, to defeat and kill them. But now, following Christ, we hear God giving us a higher mission. Now we believe God sends us into the world in compassion, to show mercy, to heal, to feed - to nurture and protect life rather than take it."