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| For more information about United Methodist mission, check out the General Board of Global Ministries. |
The following post was adapted from my Interpreting the Gospels final paper from December, 2012. The inspiration for the exegesis of Matthew was reflection on the stated mission of the United Methodist Church as found in the 2008 Book of Discipline: "The mission of the Church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. Local churches provide the most significant arena through which disciple-making occurs."
The Gospel of Matthew gives a
sketch of how powerful intercultural exchange through a mission context can be.
Matthew portrays Jesus as the Jewish messiah who fulfills the Jewish
scriptures, and the Matthean Jesus talks clearly about the mission of his
disciples. There are two passages in Matthew where Jesus commissions his
disciples: 10:5-42 and 28:18-20.[1]
The important thing to note for this discussion is that Jesus directs the
mission to different groups in each commissioning.
The first is called the “Mission
Discourse” by New Testament scholars and is quite explicit in the narrowness of
its target. In fact, Jesus begins instructing the disciples with a prohibition:
“Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans” (10:5). Jesus
instead directs the disciples to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (v.
6). From this instruction the reader can assume that all of Jesus’ previous
instructions, from the opening proclamation to repent (4:17) through the famed
Sermon on the Mount (chapters 5-7), are addressed to Jews. Jesus seems to be
firmly positioning himself as a Jewish reformer concerned almost exclusively to
Jews. We will discuss the exceptions to this rule and their implications to
Christian mission later.
The second commissioning is
commonly called “The Great Commission”, and as it ends the Gospel, it broadens
the scope of discipleship to all nations. The resurrected Jesus tells his
eleven remaining disciples to teach the new disciples “to obey everything that
I have commanded you” (28:20), which seems to include even those commands that
were part of the narrow Mission Discourse. Assuming that the later Great
Commission supersedes the exclusivity of the Mission Discourse, then Jesus is including
the same people that he had earlier excluded from his reform movement. The
mission has apparently changed.
The major part of the commission
that changed is the attitude toward outsiders. If one sees Jesus of Nazareth as
a rabbi intent on reforming and purifying Judaism, then his attitude towards
outsiders seems consistent, even if it is intolerant of the cultural Other. The
one interaction with a Gentile prior to the Mission Discourse is with a
centurion who asks healing for his ill servant (8:5-13). Curiously, Jesus
responds very positively, offering to go and cure the centurion’s servant,
which would violate the later prohibition to ministry with Gentiles. However, we
know from other stories in the New Testament that centurions were not always excluded
from the company of Jews. The prime example is the Lukan account of Cornelius,
in whose house Peter has the vision regarding the new cleanliness of earlier
ritually unclean foods (Acts 10:1-7). With this in mind, then Jesus may be
following the tradition of Jews honoring righteous Gentiles. Considering the
centurion’s military authority, this Gentile is certainly not what could be
considered the marginalized of society.[2]
In contrast, Jesus acts very
differently when a Canaanite woman begs Jesus to exorcise a demon from her
daughter (15:21-28). While the woman is crying out, Jesus ignores her. He does
not respond until Jesus’ disciples ask him to deal with the woman so that they
do not have to. Whereas the politically connected centurion received an offer
for a house visit, the Canaanite woman is forced to shout after the disciples
who seem to be intent on keeping Jesus’ command to stay separate from the
Gentile woman. In fact, Jesus responds to the disciples by repeating the
exclusionary tactic from the Mission Discourse (v. 24). The Canaanite woman
seizes the moment and goes directly to Jesus, to which Jesus responds by
essentially calling her and her race “dogs”, a common racial pejorative in the
Jewish tradition. However, the Canaanite woman seems to know Jewish traditions
quite well, too, and she answers that “even the dogs get the scraps from the
master’s table” (v. 27). This may reference the rabbinic tradition of honoring
dogs by throwing scraps to dogs for not growling at the Israelites during the
10th plague of the Exodus (Ex. 11:7).[3]
No matter what the Canaanite woman may be referencing, she impresses Jesus
enough that he changes his mind, and he praises her faith in a way similar to
the centurion.
Beyond Jesus’ treatment of the two
Gentiles, there are two other important differences between the centurion and
the Canaanite woman. First, whereas the centurion’s origins are never
mentioned, the Matthean author is very clear about the woman’s ethnicity. She
is Canaanite, one of the races that the Israelites were commanded to
exterminate from the face of the Earth during the conquest of Canaan found in
the book of Joshua. Though the historical difference between Canaanites and
Jews is probably minuscule at most, the cultural differences lead to palpable
racial tension. Second, unlike the centurion, she is a woman. While it would be
fallacious to label 1st century Judaism as blanket misogynist,
Jesus, on the other hand, seems to treat her in a quite misogynist way. This
makes the interaction with the Canaanite woman all the more extraordinary in
the Gospel of Matthew, and it sheds light on the change in missional attitudes
from the Mission Discourse to the Great Commission.
Whereas Jesus’ interaction with the
centurion apparently does not change any of his ethnocentric attitudes (hence
the narrowness of the Mission Discourse), the exchange with the Canaanite woman
seems to have had a radicalization effect on Jesus. Shortly after the exchange
there is a discernible shift in Jesus’ ministry. Before the interaction with
the Canaanite woman, Jesus had only been leading a reform movement of Judaism
in Palestine. Afterwards Jesus begins taking a more messianic role. Jesus draws
out Peter’s messianic declaration (16:13-20), starts to speak of his death and
resurrection (16:21-28), and is transfigured (chapter 17). The interaction with
a man of authority, a bit like Jesus himself, allowed Jesus to remain narrow in
his scope. The interaction with a woman of a different ethnicity, who was quite
different than Jesus, forces Jesus to repent of his ethnocentrism.
This transformation of Jesus, whom
Christians call the Messiah, through his exchange with his cultural Other has
important implications for discipleship both in the 1st century
Mediterranean world and today. From the Great Commission, Christians understand
Christian mission to be global, and the words that end the Gospel of Matthew
are commonly used to commission missionaries for their service. However, what
missionaries and missiologists often miss is that the global nature of
Christian mission is a product of cultural exchange between different peoples.
Too often mission occurs from an imperialist motivation to impose 1st
World values on majority-world peoples, serving only the interests of the
already powerful in the missionizing group and the missionized (i.e. colonial)
group. Colonial action is often hidden in missionary action, and the wolves
often earnestly believe that they are the sheep they are impersonating. This
model of mission is uni-directional, where the missionary assumes that he knows
right and must provide for the missionized community.[4]
True mission, however, is not
uni-directional; instead it is mutual. This is evident in the exchange between
Jesus and the Canaanite woman. Jesus and his disciples do not even recognize
the exchange as mission work until the cultural Other breaks through their
dominant culture assumptions. When that breakthrough occurs, Jesus opens up and
fulfills his own unrealized missional purpose. While Jesus assumes that he must
remain within his stated mission (i.e. the lost sheep of the house of Israel),
the Canaanite woman is the truly active mission agent in the story. This
phenomenon is akin to the church group who returns from a mission trip and
reports that while they expected to bless others through their service (and
material resources), they were surprised that they received the greater blessing. While the experience is
powerful and important for the spiritual development of the missionizing group,
how weary the missionized group must get as they have to repeat the process
again and again!
It is important to note that the
cultural exchange that takes place between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is not
in an exotic, far-away destination which is often the center of short-term
mission trips. Jesus and his disciples are in “the district of Tyre and Sidon”,
which was the district next door to their native Galilee. The importance of the
mission experience was not the exotic location but the relationship with the cultural
Other that Jesus and the disciples encountered. Likewise, while Mission Central
sends flood buckets to inundated areas of the country and mosquito nets to
Africa, the truly transformative experiences will likely occur much closer to
home. Only by mutual exchange can transformative discipleship play out.
The first line of the Unite
Methodist Church’s mission statement is what often gets the prime space in
newsletters and websites, but the second part of the statement is just as
important: “Local churches provide the most significant arena through which
disciple-making occurs”.[5]
While the disciple-making process in the local parish can be a transformational
process toward greater personal and social holiness, it can be an oppressive
and alienating process. If the new disciples receive instruction like that in
the Mission Discourse, then many neighbors will be left to the margins and the
homogenization process of the church only accelerates. However, if local
churches engage in mutual mission work with cultural Others, then the disciple-making
process moves toward the salvific project that Jesus of Nazareth embarked on
after his exchange with his own cultural Other. The goal of disciple-making is
an opening up of the individual disciple and the discipling community, which is
a process that can truly transform the world.
[1]
All biblical references use the New
Revised Standard Version translation.
[2]
Kayama, Hisao. “The Cornelius Story in the Japanese Cultural Context”. Voices from the Margins: Interpreting the
Bible in the Third World, 129-141. Edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah. New York:
Orbis. 2006.
[3]
Ken Stone. “The Exodus and Other Pentateuchal Stories”. Class lecture at
Chicago Theological Seminary, Chicago, IL, Sept. 26, 2012.
[4]
Soares-Prabhu, George M. “Two Mission Commands: An Interpretation of Matthew
28:16-20 in Light of a Buddhist Text”. Voices
from the Margins: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, 331-346.
Edited by R.S. Sugirtharajah. New York: Orbis. 2006
[5] The Book of Disciple of the United Methodist
Church—2008, 87. Edited by Judith
E. Smith. Nashville, TN: The United Methodist Publishing House, 2008
