So, a passage from Song of Songs comes to mind:
Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm;
for love is strong as death,
passion fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire, a raging flame.
And though these are words spoken between earthly lovers, I have seen its truth play out in other ways especially in the phrase: ‘love is as strong as death.’
Maybe even stronger than death.
It happened like this. Right before I came up here, I sat at a young woman’s bedside in the hospital. She had been unexpectedly diagnosed with a deadly cancer, which was not localized. Ten days later she would hear it was stage four. Five weeks after that she would die.
It was as though she already knew this on that first day. Because on that first day, when she found out, she said to me, “I am not afraid to die. I am afraid for my boys.”
What really struck me was that just about six months before I was in the hospital with a grandmother who said almost the exact same things. “I am not afraid to die. I am afraid for my grandchildren. They have already lost so much.”
Love is fierce. It is powerful. It protects, it nourishes, it encourages, it prods, it holds, it stops at nothing. For at its best and truest, love is as strong as death.
And to be sure, we see it again in today’s Gospel when the Canaanite woman is moved by such powerful love that she will stop at nothing to get what her tormented daughter needs. In fact, I think of her and of so many like her in the small piece of the world I have known, who are desperate for such healing. Healing which too often seems so elusive. Others who in their love for their vulnerable ones would stop at nothing for even a glimmer of the wholeness that we imagine came to this woman’s daughter in today’s Gospel.
But here's the thing. And I'm willing to bet it struck most of us here. It is a challenge to get to the healing in this story. Because Jesus’ words seem to contradict all that we know of him. It is as though even he does not yet fully comprehend the power he brings to the world as he speaks to the desperate woman kneeling at his feet.
More than this, his words sound bigoted and demeaning to our modern ears, and I'm willing to bet that they sounded the same in that time and place as well. And while I know that scholars throught out time, even to this day, have struggled to explain this in a way that jives with jeasus, I think that, this week, I leave it to those others to try to sort that out. Today I am just moving beyond it or around it to the wonder that is this Canaanite woman. And to what lengths she is willing to go for the sake of such love.
As Jesus did.
As Jesus did over and over again and most vividly on the cross.
As you and I are called to do the same. And not only for those we know and love, but for a world which is crying out for such profound healing as well.
Think about it. What did this woman set aside to approach Jesus? What did she have to endure?
How many times have we also seen this face to face in those we know today? Those whose loved ones’ illnesses suddenly shift every priority in their lives, when days and nights are spent in hospital rooms, or learning to provide medicine in a way they never imagined, in recognizing that death threatens, and in discovering that their love is even stronger than that?
I imagine many of you have found yourself in a similar place yourself. And if not yet, surely one day. How many of us know or ARE the Cannanite woman?
Because the Canaanite woman set aside everything that would normally take up her day: household chores, to be sure, and perhaps more than that. She abandoned other family and friends, to seek the help her daughter so desperately needed. She set aside that which would normally have held her back from giving voice to her needs as a woman in a male dominated culture...and as a Gentile approaching a Jew.
She pushed beyond the very vocal outrage of the disciples. And she even stared down Jesus himself, the one she knew held the gift she was seeking.
Her love was so great. Because love is as strong as death. Maybe even stronger.
It is sometimes believed that Jesus is, in a way, learning as he goes, as he makes the way to the cross. I can dig this because it seems that his eyes, his ears, his heart are always open to discover new ways in which to share the gifts of God to the world. We see this in his teaching, again and again.
And surely, he is taking all this in as well in this encounter with this desperate woman. Because in this Canaanite mother, Jesus recognized that faith is to be found in unexpected places. That God is already at work far beyond those Jesus first believed he came for. And he witnesses, as we all do, the strength of such love which gives it all away for the sake of the one so loved.
In the case of my friend who died so quickly, obviously love could not keep her alive, but that did not mean that death won. Her legacy lives in memory and in faith and in a thousand, thousand gifts passed on. And she died in the promise that Love held her then and always will. As it does and will her two sons.
This Canaanite mother is a powerful example of the strength of love. The sort of love we see on a daily basis, if we open our eyes. The sort of love which we recognize as always the love that is always of God.
I expect Jesus recognized this as well.