Sermon, August 13, 1978
Trinity United Methodist Church, Atlanta, Georgia
Matthew 15:21-28
One of the values of a lectionary is that it forces us to listen to the word of God even passages which make us uncomfortable. I was somewhat dismayed when I saw what the lesson for today was. The New Testament lesson for today grated on me when I first read it because of the harsh words Jesus spoke to the Canaanite woman when he referred to her as one of the "dogs." But it is often at the points at which we squirm and are most uncomfortable that God speaks to us with clarity and force in a way we need to hear.
In this passage we find Jesus on the borders of Israel. It is not clear what he is doing there, perhaps things were getting a little hot and he needed to withdraw and stay out of the way of the authorities who were increasingly more and more upset with him. At any rate he is in a region populated by non-Jewish People. The woman who approached him was a Gentile, one who did not share the Jewish tradition and expectations.
Evidently this woman was desperately seeking help for her daughter who was ill. She cries out "have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely possessed by a demon." The Jesus whom we usually think of as being sensitive to the needs of people, particularly people who are suffering, responded to her with silence. In the gospel of Mark the story reads that Jesus wanted to be left unrecognized. So he may have been annoyed.
As we know from other parts of the Gospels Jesus' silences were often filled with reproach. Perhaps in this case he was pondering how to respond. The disciples had already made up their minds that this woman was a nuisance. Matthew tells us they begged Jesus to send her away as she was shouting after them, causing a scene, so to speak. Jesus sounds as if he was about to oblige them as he said, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." In language we often use, he wa, in effect, saying "healing your daughter isn't my job."
I'm reminded of an experience in my pastoral counseling practice. A young woman recently came seeking help after having been turned away by several agencies. One place she had called could only see people who lived in Fulton County and she lives in DeKalb County. Another place charged more than she could afford and had no provisions to see folks who are poor. In our day of specialized jobs it is not uncommon for people to be refused help because they don't fit into the right categories or for people to refuse to do a job because it isn't in their job description. It may be wise in some ways to focus our energies on helping a few and not try to spread ourselves thin by trying to meet the needs of everyone who comes. But there are demonic aspects to this specialization if it becomes rigid because it denies people help who may not know where else to go.
Matthew presents Jesus' conception of his ministry on earth as confined to Israel. In another part of Matthew Jesus had sent his disciples out saying very clearly "Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans but go rather to the list sheep of the house of Israel. There is biblical justification of this attitude because it was Jewish expectation that the redemption of the world would come through the tribes of Israel. This is offensive to us in the 20th century church which understands that Jesus came to save the world. And at the end of the gospel of Matthew we hear the great commission given to the disciples after the resurrection "go therefore and make disciples of all nations." If we read this back into the passage we have read this morning we are offended at Jesus' implication that the "children" referred to is Israel and the "dogs" are everyone else.
The question we ask of this passage then is what led Jesus to extend his compassion to one outside the Jewish fold?
The woman is persistent in her efforts to seek help for her daughter. We can hear her anguish as she kneels before Jesus and cries again "Lord, help me." We can feel the risk she is taking. We all know the despair of being disappointed in our hopes, of being desperate for relief from our burdens and being turned away by those we thought could help. This woman is taking the final risk. By her words we know that she believes Jesus is the Messiah, the one who saves, even though she's not Jewish, and if he cannot save her daughter who can?
If we put ourselves in this woman's place we feel horror at Jesus' harsh answer to her plea for help. "It is not fair to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs." How many of us would have stuck around after that? Most likely we would have gone off in a huff, hurt and bitter and would have denounced Jesus as being cruel and insensitive to our needs.
This woman had guts! She was alwo capable of thinking quickly and skilled in repartee. She came back at Jesus with "Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table." Her response proves to be the turning point in this encounter. Jesus then answered her: "O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire." And her daughter was healed instantly.
As we look at this moving encounter as a whole, there are two points that speak to me.
First of all, this story represents Jesus as acting as a radically free person who breaks through all of our expectations about God. It is this freedom which made Jesus a scandal to the religious authorities of his day. Jesus took the obligations of the Jewish faith seriously and we have seen that his concept of his mission as presented in Matthew is one in line with Jewish expectations that the Messiah would come to liberate Israel. It was within that context that Jesus first responded to the Gentile woman and what led the disciples to urge him to send the woman away. He took seriously his task to bring Israel to faith. Yet we also see that when confronted with a person who had trust and confidence in his liberating power that he broke free of this role. We can imagine the scandal of his freedom only if we also are confronted with the ways in which God's liberating power breaks through our ideas and wishes about God. We are no longer surprised or offended that Jesus would extend his ministry outside Israel. What are our expectations of God? What would offend us?
An experience out of my life may help make this concrete. Six years ago my younger sister was stricken with a disease called lupus erythematosus. It is a disease which inflames the connective tissue of the body and which can destroy many of the organs of the body. It is a painful and progressive disease for which there is no cure. One of the results of the disease was that her kidneys were damaged and she was forced to live dependent on a kidney dialysis machine. She was angry and bitter about the limitations placed on her and the severe pain she suffered. To all of us who knew and cared for her the disease seemed unfair and cruel. The plans and hopes she had for her life seemed over. Doctors did not anticipate that she would live more than three years. Many people prayed for her cure but she was not healed. If our expectation of God was that God responded to suffering with physical healing, as he did in the gospel story, then our hopes would have been dashed. But in God's freedom Rebecca's life was transformed. From an angry and resentful person she became one who received strength to live with her pain and limitations and to come to terms with her death. She began to reach out to other people, especially others who were handicapped and limited in their living. She found the freedom to respond in unexpected ways to the situation in which she found herself. In spite of all that went wrong in her life and all the disappointments that she had, she had a firm trust in God's presence with her, even when there was little evidence for it. She died this year on Good Friday, but her life became a witness to the unexpected ways God responds with power to free us from despair.
Jesus, in his life, revealed God as one who is foreign to our usual expectations. Jesus was obedient, finally, only to God. He obeyed human laws, but was also free to break them. He was free to bring God's word into the lives of those he met in unusual and unexpected ways. We are startled in reading this morning's lesson because at first it seems not to fit our picture of how Jesus would have acted. So we are forced out of our own preconceptions of God and forced to confront the reality of how God comes into human life. We are also called to live as free persons--free to respond to God's word as it presents itself in our lives even though it goes against [our expectations].
The second point which this story attests to is that we have no claims on God. It is not the woman's need, but her faith which compels Jesus to expand his ministry beyond the boundaries he had set. She had trust and confidence in the power of God. She did not demand that her needs be met. She did not ask for her daughter's healing on the basis of any merits her daughter may have had. She did not say "but my daughter is a good person and it's not fair that she be sick." Her statement "yes, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table" is a startlingly humble response.
Do you remember where we have heard similar words? In the Methodist communion service we say "we do not presume to come to this thy table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gether up the crumbs under thy table." Perhaps we often cringe when we say these words, because we feel we are worth more than that. Our day is a time of asserting human worth and rightfully so. But these words are based, not on our natural achievements, but on our relationship with God. God's faithfulness is not based on our goodness, or right ways of living, nor is it based on what we think we need. God's promise is that he will be our God above all that seeks to destroy or enslave our lives. We have no claims to make as everything has already been given. We have only to respond with trust and confidence in the power of God and to remain open to the ways in which God breaks into our lives to set us free.
Benediction: Go now into the world in trust to serve God and to love your neighbor, rejoicing in the power of the Spirit which sets us free.