Wes Anderson, Aliens, and the Faith of the Canaanite Woman

A sermon on Matthew 15: 21-28

I’m a big fan of the movies of the director Wes Anderson , and I was excited to hear that his newest film was out, and showing at the Thornbury Picture House, which I’m also a big fan of.  I don’t know how familiar you are with his work, but he isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It can be a bit self-conscious, a bit stagey, a bit arch. It often feels like he is playing a bit of a game with you, which he doesn’t really spell out. The good thing about that, I think, is that he can then address some profound questions – the sort of questions that our culture has difficulty articulating in a direct way. The big question I took from watching Asteroid City was the biggest of all: what does it all mean? Is there a God, is there some plan? Is there some meaning to it all? In this world of grief and violence, is there something profound going on? One of the ways this was expressed in the film was through a surprisingly topical question: what would it mean if we were visited by aliens? I know this is all beginning to sound like the keynote at a sci-fi convention rather than a sermon, but bear with me. There have recently been hearings in the US government about UFOs, and amongst the usual sort of noise around whether governments around the world are keeping something from us, and whether or not that’s justified on national security grounds, but there are also voices with a much more primal longing. They want to know: are we alone in the universe? If there were some other species out there, then it would seem to fill an aching existential void for people. I’m personally not sure it would make all that much difference to the really big question of “why are we here.” I don’t think that even science advanced enough to cross the vast distances of interstellar space would be able to answer that because I don’t think science asks that sort of question. It really deals with: given that we are here, what’s going on? Though I do kind of love the idea of an alien arriving and presenting mathematical proof of the existence of God to a horrified Richard Dawkins.

Perhaps they would come and want go on retreat with us to make contact with a spiritual reality which their hyper-advanced society had lost. Anyway, I digress. The point I’m trying to make is that there is a hole in the centre of our culture, the famous God-shaped hole, and our desire to meet an alien and our hope that this alien would bring us the final and complete answer that we long for is part of that.

Aliens! Aliens have arrived, and perhaps we will be able to answer the big questions at last! Or, at least, we will be able to view the spectacle. But, in the film it is a complete anti-climax. The big questions remain unanswered. One of the characters expresses it well, when he goes to talk to the director of this play-within-a-play (it’s quite complex to describe, though it makes sense when you watch it.) He is playing one of the lead protagonists, and he asks the director: am I doing it right? And the director says, essentially, I don’t know. Just keep doing what you’re doing. In the world of the movie, with nuclear tests happening just down the road, Roadrunner wandering past, and a car chase of cops and robbers going through the one road of the town at regular intervals, we are obviously in a story, rather than something pretending to be real. But the underlying truth it tells is this: This is a world in which we are on our own. A world in which the best advice is “just keep doing what you’re doing.” A world of absurdity, from which God has died and left it up to us. The aliens come, and there is proof of it, and it makes precisely no difference to the world, no difference to how we live. The nuclear tests continue, the cops and robbers keep zooming down the main street, the protagonists continue to wrestle with their grief, guilt, and suffering. You may very well be wondering what all of this has to do with the story of the faith of the Canaanite woman. It’s a fair question. You will be pleased to hear that I don’t have an esoteric interpretation involving aliens, even if the story is quite mysterious. But I do think it does have good news for us here and now today. One of the things which struck me most about the story is that the woman is described as being a Canaanite. It’s striking, because there hadn’t been any Canaanites for hundreds of years by this time. It is like referring to someone as being a “Soviet” rather than a Russian. Or talking about the Great Golden Horde, who ruled over Ukraine and Southern Russia hundreds of years ago. In the other gospels where this story features, she is described as “Syrophoenician”, which seems to have been a much more up to date way to put it. So why use this archaic term of Canaanite? There is a broad narrative flow in Matthew’s Gospel. When Jesus is born he is called “Emmanuel”, which means “God with us.” The question is: Who is us precisely? As the story unfolds, Jesus, as he says in the passage goes to the lost sheep of Israel. But by the end of the book, the Resurrected Christ can say “go and make disciples of all nations.” The thing about the Canaanites is that they were the great enemy of the Children of Israel. This Canaanite woman – it’s like calling her a Nazi. The point seems to be to emphasize just how much of a Gentile this woman is. If God is with “us”, then this woman is very definitely not part of “us.” She is most definitely “them.” But she steps out of “them.” She is in desperate need of help, but she is assertive – she shouts, demanding Jesus’ attention. Even in our culture a woman who shouts is not well liked, how much more so in the deeply patriarchal culture of Jesus’ time? And she is witty. Jesus very rarely loses a battle of wits – his poise and deep sense of who he is and what he is doing normally means that he has the last word. But here, with the woman’s quick repartee, he is taken aback. This witty woman reveals to Jesus, and to the world, the new thing that God is doing through Jesus, this fresh revelation of God’s love for the world. That the story which, hitherto had been Israel’s story alone, was becoming all of our story. And this interplay of divine initiative and human action, this fresh revelation of God in the world is the good news our world needs to hear. Not just to hear, but to deeply feel. The world pictured in Asteroid City, with its meaningless game-playing, its unarticulated grief, its loss of God, this story with the God-shaped hole at its heart, is also capable of being reached in God’s big story. The woman, whose Canaanite story placed her at such a distance from the Gospel received what she longed for. Her daughter was healed. Jesus calls Peter, who really ought to have gotten it, “you of little faith.” But this person who Scripture is at pains to portray as coming from a place very distant from the story of God’s dealing with his people is proclaimed as having great faith. The Good News here is this: God is not in fact dead. The universe is not meaningless. The alien, the one from outside has in fact already come and visited us. But this one who comes from the outside has not come and been and gone. Rather, God, through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ has brought us the answer to the biggest question of all. That God comes, to those who receive him by faith. God’s story reaches out to include us, the last people who might expect it. Life does have a meaning and a purpose. That it is all held in the hands of the one who loves us individually and by name, and who will never leave us nor forsake us. The one whose word is trustworthy, the one who promises that, in the days to come, he will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and we will know, even as we ourself are known.