Cory Rice—Year A Proper 15

Anthony: Yeah. Our next passage is Matthew 15:21–28. It is the Revised Common Lectionary passage for Proper 15 in Ordinary Time, August 16.

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²² 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.” ²³ 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.” ²⁴ He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” ²⁶ He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁷ She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ²⁸ Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment. And her daughter was healed from that moment.

Seems like there’s a lot going on there. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” Isn’t this the cry of every human heart, whether they know it or not? Tell us more, Cory.

Cory: Yeah. Man, I get lost in listening to you read. I think you should read the entire Bible so we can all listen to the ear candy that you have when you read the Scriptures. I love it. Man, of course, this is the cry of every human heart. I see this in daily counseling sessions. I see this in myself all the time. And whether people use religious language or not, humanity longs for wholeness, healing, belonging, mercy, you name it. So, I think every human is searching for the God that they already belong to.

What’s beautiful to me in this story is the woman refusing to disengage even when everything and everyone around her appears silent or resistant.

Anthony: Preach.

Cory: So, she already determined in her mind that something in Jesus is worth pursuing, and I love that. And so, to me, mercy is restorative compassion. It’s the heart of the Father always moving toward suffering people, which I think a lot of us can relate to that.

Anthony: Can you talk a little bit more about pursuing as it relates to relationship? Because it seems like love always moves toward the other. We’re in Christ and he is in face-to-face relationship with the Father. He’s pursued us. He continues to pursue us by the Spirit. Anything else you’d like to say about just the act of God’s pursuit and us pursuing others in relationship?

Cory: Yeah. I think it just comes to awakening to the reality that’s always a constant thing.

As you know, I grew up in a very religious setting, even went to a lot of schools where you learn only one lens to look at, and so I totally understand people in this approach of, “Can I even approach God? Is he distant? Is he disappointed?” Because he’s either distant or disappointed in most Christian circles.

And so, to catch the revelation that when God looks at you, that he’s actually smiling, is a wild experience. That was one of my first, in my first counseling sessions with my counselor, is getting this revelation that when God looks at me, he’s smiling, and that vision actually helped me understand his constant pursuit of me.

And so, it’s just been a continual awakening to the fact that God will always and has always been in love with me and pursuing me.

Anthony: I hope you don’t mind. I’d like to follow up on that a little bit, because you’ve talked about, just in passing, your past being, and I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but it sounds like in a legalistic environment, where having to unlearn that God is pure grace, God is pure love on God’s side. And many of our listeners around the world are coming from a very similar environment.

What would you … Maybe just tell us a little bit about how you came out of that kind of place of feeling like you had to maybe earn God’s approval, to win his love, to a place where now you’ve just been awakened to the goodness of God in Jesus. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Cory: Yeah. So, I have an “aha” moment. It came, I actually got to listen to Brennan Manning live before he passed away in 2011, I think it was, at the Brooklyn Tabernacle is when he spoke. So again, that’s my undoing of legalism started really in 2012. Now, I always pushed against; even in university I was known for, “That doesn’t make sense.” But I didn’t have like …

Anthony: Oh, that’s you.

Cory: I didn’t have the language for it, like the union it was first grace. You talk about grace all day long until you need it, right? And then it was into eschatology, and then it was really into this union message.

And I heard a lot of people, but it was Brennan Manning. He said something, I’m going to butcher it. I’m sure you can find it online, but it’s something along the lines of, he asked this question of, “What’s the only question you’re going to hear when you meet your maker face to face?” And he, his perspective is, he believes that question is going to be God saying, “Did you really believe that I loved you?”

And then he followed that up with a statistic, a percentage, 90%, and wherever he gets this number from. But 90% of Christians, he believes, will answer that question with a heartbreaking, “No, I did not truly believe that you love me.” And it was that moment, I remember sitting there listening to that. Kind of at this point I already had two masters, right?

So, I thought my relationship with God was in concrete, and that took me on a season of revelation, of learning to unlearn everything I’ve always thought I’d known. And then I moved to the church I’m at in 2012, and I began relationships with so many different people that I now have different ministry experiences with.

But it was really my lead pastor, Channock, and I, and our friend Reggie at the time, the three of us — just being able to ask questions without shame is really what started that. And so, that 2011 “aha” moment, then for the next eight years not necessarily finding answers, but being free enough to be able to ask them without shame attached to the response, is really what began that journey of undoing everything that I thought I knew and believed about God.

And I’m still on this journey. I think we would … The sexy term now is deconstruction, right? We’ve been doing this since, for us in our setting, since 2012. We just didn’t have the language for it, right? But becoming aware not only of our union, but of a God that’s way better than we thought he was.

And so, I think I’m going to die on that hill, or at least I’m going to live on it, is when people say a whole lot of things about our ministry and about what we teach is I don’t think that I’m going to get to heaven and God’s never going to say, “You know what, Cory? You presented me a little too loving.” And so, if that’s the statement, then I think that we can go all, as far as we want with revealing a God who’s better than we think he is.

Anthony: Yeah, and Karl Barth says as much. We can’t put any sort of limit on God’s lovingkindness. Thank you for sharing, and I’m so grateful for your journey. It’s very similar to a journey many of us have been on, and God is just so faithful. And we see it in this text.

And Cory, one of the things that grieves me is, we say we’re a Christocentric podcast. We focus on Jesus as much as we know how by the Spirit. But often when I hear texts preached, it’s human-centric. We go immediately, like in this text, we want to go immediately to this woman’s response, and it’s valuable. So, I want to or ask you this question: Did the Canaanite woman’s faith activate Jesus’ willingness to heal her daughter? I hear it read that way. Tell us about the theological implications one way or the other.

Cory: Man, I got a couple things — don’t know if they’re going to be good. Personally, I don’t believe that her faith changed Jesus’s perspective or willing or unwillingness to heal her. I think Jesus reveals the willing heart of God all the time. Otherwise, we risk creating a picture where God must be persuaded into compassion, and it naturally flows from him, right?

So, I think her faith allowed her to participate in what was already present in Christ, because faith isn’t earning. It’s trustful participation. But I also think that there’s something culturally profound in this specific story, more than even the miracle. It’s that Matthew’s intentional highlight of a woman and a Canaanite, and someone that’s considered outside the covenant story, at least in Matthew’s gospel presentation.

And yet, Jesus, in this moment, reveals that the heart of God extends beyond ethnic and religious boundaries. And so, in other words, grace is not expanding because God changed or because our faith changed him. It’s expanding because humanity is awakening to how expansive and inclusive God has always been. It’s just we’re catching up to that revelation.

Anthony: Yeah. Amen and amen.