The Rabbi's Apprentice

The Venerable Joan Clark

Matthew 15:1-28

In our faith journey, we often think of ourselves as out there on our own doing our best to deal with situations out of our control. But this is not the kind of “discipleship” or “apprenticeship” relationship that Jesus expected from his disciples in his lifetime, nor is it the one He expects from us in ours.

In Jesus’ time, a disciple or apprentice to the faith was much like an apprentice in any other kind of learned skilled labour. You didn’t learn and then quickly strike out on your own. But a discipleship relationship was a year long endeavour, which involved literally following the rabbis every move, listening to him talk, watching him interact with others, listening and asking questions as he taught, sleeping, eating, and learning every hour of every day by his side. If you were a carpenter’s apprentice, you ate, slept, and worked side by side with the master carpenter.  If you were a builder’s apprentice, you ate, slept, and worked side by side with the master builder. If you were an apprentice of the faith, you ate, slept, and learned/interacted side by side with the master rabbi.

Jesus, able to make his own interpretations of scripture and call his own group of disciples, was a master rabbi in his day. And he would have expected his apprentices (disciples, that is “learners”) to follow in his footsteps wherever he went, to travel with him, sleep and eat beside him, learn from his interactions with people and from his teachings, and learn to imitate him so passionately that they would think and behave like him instinctively.

In a sense, apprenticeship is like learning a foreign language. At first, you need to think about each word or phrase, the grammar and the appropriateness of your response. But soon, your responses come naturally, your words flow easily from your mind, and fluency begins to emerge.  For some of you, the same might be true with learning an instrument. In learning an instrument, it’s not enough to learn notes from a page. You must sit with a teacher and learn how to play. Listen, imitate, practice, learn. Year after year, you sit beside the teacher until you begin to sense the music on your own.

This is apprenticeship. Faith in praxis at the feet of a master.

Because of the practice part of learning in an apprenticeship style, it’s not enough to sit with books. Discipleship is a “practiced” behavioural and relationship learning experience. It begins by building a relationship with the master, watching, listening, imitating, learning. It continues until the apprentice becomes a master. Even then, many masters still sit at the feet of their own beloved teacher.

Discipleship is a relational learning experience involving both head and heart, in which the apprentice passionately seeks to become so like the master that he or she will think and behave as the master does instinctively and intuitively.

Because this style of learning demands practice, much of an apprentice’s learning experiences come not from listening to words, but in experiencing “teachable moments” –times when the apprentice watches the teacher interact with others, when they interact along with the master to a degree, and learn from the master’s responses.

Jesus is master of the teachable moment.

And our scripture today demonstrates one of the greatest of these. Only in understanding the role of the apprentice can one truly understand this scripture. Those who merely seek to read the words will easily become confused. But place yourself into the story, into the role of apprentice, into Jesus’ teachable moment, and you will find yourself stunned and your worldview changed, just as theirs was changed.

For change, real change, the kind of heart shift that changes your whole world view, doesn’t happen by reading a manual. It only happens when you experience first-hand, a life-altering experience. This is a true apprenticeship event.  This is true discipleship learning.

Let’s think through the scripture again carefully, paying close attention to what’s going on. Place yourself as a disciple into the story. Watch the people around you. Watch Jesus interact. Listen to the interactions. And then pay attention to what happens next.

Jesus is talking to a crowd of people. He’s trying to teach them the importance of a loving heart and that a loving heart creates loving behaviour toward others. He is telling them that the Jewish purity laws, laws that require you to wash your hands before a meal, only to eat certain foods, to be careful about what goes into your mouth at certain times, are man-made laws and not God’s concern. Eating a certain kind of food is not going to contaminate you in the eyes of God.

Obviously, Jesus is making some pretty strong enemies of the Pharisees, the monitors of the purity laws, as he’s saying this.  But he goes on.

Then he tells them, what truly contaminates a person in God’s sight, the true “contaminants” of the heart are evil thoughts, thoughts of murder, adultery, theft, slander, and insults! When those kinds of feelings in the heart are acted out in word and deed, this is what harms us in God’s sight.

Now I want you to look at that list again. Look at the last two.  Slander.  And insults. When we harbor hate in our hearts, bias, judgments against others, and when those come out of us in the form of the way we speak to others, the way we treat others, the way we exclude others –this harms us in God’s sight.

Now I also want you to notice how confused Jesus’ disciples are by what he’s saying.  Remember that they, as well as he, are good Jewish men. They follow all of the laws and customs. They are extremely confused.  They notice how angry the Pharisees are getting, because Jesus is telling people that upholding their Jewish customs are not necessary for God’s affection and favour. They are worried at where Jesus is going with all of this. When they question Jesus, he replied, “Leave the Pharisees alone. They are blind people who are guides to blind people. If a blind person leads another blind person, they will both fall into a ditch.”

That’s some strong language directed toward Jesus’ peers. Peter asks him to explain further. This has shocked him and the others.

For us today it would be the same as saying, all of your customs, your church traditions, your liturgies, your rules, your ways of doing things, your great church attendance –they don’t matter at all to God. What matters is the hate, bias, judgments that you harbour in your hearts toward others, especially when they manifest in your behaviours toward others. Or your exclusion of others.

Jesus repeats again what he’s trying to say to Peter and the others: Eating without washing hands doesn’t contaminate in Gods’ sight. But what comes from the heart can. Your evil thoughts, false testimonies, insults. From there, Jesus went to the regions of Tyre and Sidon.

Now this is the most important statement in the story.

Jesus hasn’t ended the lesson. Jesus is now entering a teachable moment. He is continuing his lesson, which his disciples are having a hard time understanding and swallowing without an example. So, he leads them out of Jewish territory and into pagan territory, into the gentile regions of Tyre and Sidon, location of the prior northern kingdom, corrupted by Ahab, and his Syro-Phoenician wife, Jezebel. This is a region no self-respecting Jew would travel though intentionally. This is a region Jewish people avoided. The Syro-Phoenicians, also known as the former Canaanites, are heretics, a people whom Jesus’ disciples would avoid, deride, insult, exclude, demean, and look down upon.

They probably wondered where Jesus was taking them and why on earth he would lead them into unsafe territory, among “those” people. But Jesus does, and an important interaction ensues.

A Syro-Phoenician woman comes up to Jesus and shouts: “Show me mercy, Son of David. My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession.”

Jesus is with his disciples, no doubt watching for their response.  He doesn’t respond at first. He waits for his disciples’ reaction. Here is how they react:
“Send her away; she keeps shouting at us!”

They react, the way Jesus expects them to react. With derision, contempt, haughtiness, arrogance toward the Syro Phoenician woman. This is the way, as Jewish men, they were taught to behave.

So, playing along, Jesus responds as he feels his disciples would, saying, “I’ve been sent only to the lost sheep, the people of Israel.” (Now, remember, they are in the former northern kingdom, where “the lost sheep of Israel” reside.)

The woman comes and kneels before Jesus and says, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus replies again as his disciples might, saying: “It is not good to take the children’s bread and toss it to dogs.”

Now remember, Jesus has just taught his disciples and others that insults from the heart are what are not good in God’s sight. But the disciples still don’t get it. I imagine they are feeling quite justified at this moment as the conversation goes on.

The woman replies, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall off their masters’ table.”
Now imagine the disciples’ reaction, as Jesus replies:
“Woman, you have great faith. It will be just as you wish.”  And right then her daughter was healed.
The disciples must have been like, “Wait, what just happened!” “What did he say?” “Great faith?” That woman?

Jesus is master of the teachable moment, because he is master of what you might call “shock value!” If you are not shocked and confused by Jesus’ reactions, then you haven’t yet experienced the true impact of this story.

Jesus allowed his disciples to enter into the story with their usual biases, judgements, and reactions, and then he quickly twisted their minds to show them what it truly means to act with a loving heart that God would honour and bless.

It made no difference to Jesus whether they washed their hands before they ate or not. It would make a difference to Jesus how they would treat a woman, different from them, with different beliefs than them, who needed help, and turned to them for assistance.

Insults, judgments, exclusionary thoughts. These contaminate one in the sight of God. But a loving heart is pleasing in God’s sight.

Being the Rabbi’s apprentice is not about going about our own business, making our own decisions, retaining our own judgments, refusing to let go of our beliefs, our traditions, our rituals, and our learned behaviours.

It’s about getting our noses out of joint and our systems shocked into a new kind of truth, one that accepts people no matter who they are, and loves people as children of God, even if they don’t seem to fit into our own expectations of what a good person should be.

Discipleship is not about expressing our own opinions. But it’s about following Jesus so closely, paying attention to his interactions so carefully, imitating him so well for years on end, that we begin to respond as he would.
​
Now in the name of Jesus, go and do the same.