rich’s blog

Actual Message

 

Preface:

So we’re continuing to look at difficult or seldom seen passages.  Lately we’ve emphasized the difficult.

 

But I hope that we’re just more likely to deal with the Bible now than we were when we started talking about these things.  I hope we’re realizing that it’s a tough little library; it can handle itself.  If we look closely at things and ask hard questions the bottom doesn’t drop out of our faith; in fact, it gets stronger, becomes a better foundation for our lives.

 

Introduction:

Today, we’re looking at–surprise–the passage that was read to us earlier.  And it’s a difficult passage.  We see Jesus acting in a way that we aren’t used to him acting, a way we don’t dwell on.  And I think there are valid reasons for what we see in this passage. We’ll  talk about them this morning.

 

But I also am sure that there are some really important and also some really worthwhile ideas we can take from this, integrate into our living, and as a result become better positioned for a life like Jesus’ own.

 

Let’s pray.

 

Prayer:

(prayer)

 

Noting Things: Matthean Distinctives

So remember that we have four gospels for a reason.  They’re like multiple facets on the surface of a diamond; diamonds wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful if they just had flat tops, right? And the picture we have of Jesus wouldn’t have nearly as much depth and character and fullness if we only had one gospel that we could learn about him from.

 

And Matthew gives us a picture of Jesus as the Son of David, “an authentic king…the long awaited Messiah, David’s ultimate successor,” as Hale says. (Matthew; Interpretations, 6). And more than this, Matthew highlights Jesus’ nature as the “Son of God,” the one who has all the attributes of God, and is in fact God.

 

Jesus is an Israelite in all the gospels, of course, but Matthew reveals for us Jesus’ special concern for Israel. It’s directed to Jewish Christians in particular, although Matthew isn’t unconcerned with Gentile believers.

 

And it’s a book that really does intend to present a new sort Scripture for this group of Christians he is writing to.  Scholars have noted the way it’s bracketed by the words “the beginning,” and “the end,” and it contains 5 long speeches of Jesus–which are meant to echo the first five books of the Bible, The Law–sometimes called the “Pentatuech”–which surprisingly means “five books”–Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy.  Matthew intends for us, as his readers, to see the way Jesus is re-visioning what it really means to be a part of God’s People, and Jesus is at the center of it.

 

Noting Things: Geography & Ethnicity

And because this gospel is so strongly oriented toward a Jewish Christian audience, it also is deeply concerned with geography & with ethnicity.

 

So the fact that this woman is called a Canaanite, that this is what we know about her, is important. It marks her as an outsider, “one of them.”

 

As Malina & Rorhbaugh note, at the time of Jesus, “The geographical division of the house of Israel…was Judea, Perea, and Galilee.” (SSC on the Synoptic Gospels, 373). These are regions that sort of make up much of the area called  Palestine.  Jesus was of course Galilean, and so were the twelve disciples.  Jerusalem was in Judea, and filled with Judeans.  But to those outside Israel, as Malina & Rorbaugh note, they were all just Judeans (cf. 374).  All Israelites became Judean.  And later on,

 

And this still happens right?  All “Latinos” end up “Mexican?” Do we ever do this? It’s not best practices.

 

But this Canaanite lady is most certainly not Israelite–Perean, Judean, or Galilean–she’s an outsider, even though she grew up down the road. She’s not part of the House of Israel. In fact, the Canaanites weren’t supposed to be in Palestine any more; they were supposed to have been removed by Israel generations ago, but weren’t.

 

And when Jesus and his disciples roam through the region of Tyre & Sidon, they are roaming in an area that Israel has history with.  It’s “outside Israel,” non-Isrealited, Gentile, Enemy territory, even though a bunch of Israelites may have lived there. But as Kingsbury notes, “Jesus’ visit [to here] portends the Gentile mission to come.” (Matt as story, 29).

 

So this Canaanite woman–a historic enemy of the Jews, in this region that is an enemy territory–this is significant.  This woman is an outsider in every sense, right?

 

Noting Things: Narrative Context

And our passage takes place in a part of Matthew that really is presenting people’s reactions to the things he has been teaching and doing.  People are reacting to Jesus, and we see this in all sorts of ways.  He’s been introduced, he’s given his Sermon on the Mount and done a ton of miracles, and we see in this part of Matthew all the different ways people react to him and his works and his message. Soon after this, he’ll start winding his way to Jerusalem, continue preaching & doing good things there, and then die and come back to life.  (M&R, SSC SG cf. 19-22).

 

Noting Things: Language

And there are some language things we should note before we really talk about this passage, words and phrases that are tossed out there that we think we know until someone asks us what they mean.  We’ve already talked about Canaanite a little, talked about what it meant that this woman called Jesus the “Son of David.”

 

But of course, the meaning of a word isn’t always in its definition, right?  If you called me a tool, you probably aren’t trying to praise me for my usefulness.

 

So we need to what it means, maybe, that this woman is this woman is more or less compared to a “dog,” a “kunarion.”

 

And this word can mean “little dog,” and sometimes people will try and soften the tone of this passage by saying that Jesus used a gentler word for “dog” than he could have used.  And that might be true.  We see him in chapter 7 of Matthew Jesus saying not to “give to dogs what is holy,” and the word he uses there is a different word, a word that implies an unclean dog, a wild sort of dog that runs around and eats whatever nasty stuff it can find on the street.  Jesus doesn’t use that word here; so maybe he’s trying to be gentler than he could.

 

But honestly, the word he uses for “dog” here can simply mean, “house dog,” a smaller size dog, as opposed to the larger working dogs of the fields & cities. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything gentle or sweet.  And honestly, when you’re talking about crumbs & tables, you’re talking about an indoor, smaller dog, right?  Not a mastiff, usually.

 

So we should always be cautious of trying to stretch the meaning of words too far, but we should be aware of them.

 

A Difficult Passage: 

So.  Let’s look at this again; and shake off the morning and our shorter nighttime, and welcome whatever the Spirit brings to our attention.  Remember, if you can, the things we’ve just noted.

 

The Set-up: 21-24

Jesus is walking with his disciples. He is in the region of Tyre & Sidon, where many Israelites did likely live.  And an Canaanite woman is crying out to him, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David, for my daughter is severely demon possessed.” Maybe she’s followed along for a while, realized this isn’t a bad way to go if you want Jesus to hear you.

 

But he ignores her.  And apparently she keeps it up. And she gets a little annoying–I’ve wondered if this is where Jesus got the persistent widow parable from–and the disciples come to him and they say either “Send her away, because she’s crying after us.” Or “Satisfy her, because she’s crying after us.” The word they use here can mean either of these things.

 

And Jesus answers them.  At this point, there’s a scene, right? If they were walking, they aren’t now. He answers them, “I was I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And this answer that he gives should lead us to suspect that they were asking him to meet this lady’s need, not just get rid of her.  But he doesn’t want to.

 

He’s also making a pun; the word for “satisfy” or “send away” shares a similar root to “lost.”  He’s saying, “Why should I help this lady lose her problems when I’m supposed to deal with lost sheep.”

 

The Set Up: Flash Back

More than this, though, as Jesus says “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” this phrase would remind us of something we’ve seen earlier, in Matthew 10, when Jesus sent out the twelve disciples.  He told them, when he did this:

 

“Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of Israel.” (10:5-6 nrsv). 

 

This is a directive, right?  This is a strategic order.  When we read Jesus’ words in today’s passage, we’d remember that Jesus sent out his disciples only to Israelites, not anyone else.  And he’s reminding his disciples of this, pointing out that their mission was the same as his.

 

 

The Set Up: v25

But after he has said this, and reminded them of what he sent them out for, and reminded them that the rules he set up for them are the same ones he’s playing by, the Canaanite woman runs to him.

 

“Coming, she kneels to him, saying, “Lord, help me.”

 

And this “bows,” or “kneels,” is the same word that elsewhere in the New Testament is used for worshipping–when Jesus walked on water and Peter tried to in Chapter 14 of Matthew, and when they’re all back in the boat and we read, “they worshipped him,” this is the word they use.

 

This woman, this Canaanite lady, has followed him, has called him “Lord,” has called him “Son of David,” confessed him as Messiah, and she has knelt worshipfully before him and calling him Lord again, asks him to help her.

 

The Knock-Down: 

But he still doesn’t.  I mean she has done everything that he could possibly want, right?  Everything he has asked from those around him.  And this is why this passage is so difficult; because even after this he doesn’t help her, not yet anyway.  He tells her instead that:

 

“It’s not good to take up the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”

 

Thank you Jesus.  Hard stuff.  I mean, he might just be grasping for an allusion, here; but unless he was drawing a complete blank, he could have chosen something better than a statement that compared her to a dog, right?  I have a gut-level “uch” with this sentence, with this whole thing.  Now we know that Jesus can speak straightforwardly. Douglas Hare, in his commentary on this book, points out the way Jesus says earlier in Matthew, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.” He is capable of hard sayings.

 

And maybe he was simply reciting a common expression, a little saying that everyone knew, a proverb. But he still turns to this woman who is on her face before him in need and calls her a dog.  And this woman hears him say this.

 

And she answers “True, Lord.”  She doesn’t disagree with his statement at all, doesn’t get in a huff and leave because of the allusion.  She just says “Yes.  Indeed.  It’s true, Lord.”

 

But she goes on: “But even the dogs eat the falling crumbs from the table of their Lord.”  Most of our bibles translate the word she uses as “Master,” but it’s the same word–”kurios” that she has used throughout this passage.

 

The Knock Down: Crumbs 

And she isn’t talking about “crumbs,” but the tiniest crumbs, the littlest bits.  I have dogs, you know–three of them.  House dogs! “kunarioi!”

 

Carolyn and I eat a tasty treat called “Cheddar Bunnies,” which are like Goldfish crackers, little cheesy crackers.

 

(pic)

 

If I have eaten every Cheddar Bunny in the box, and even removed the plastic, you know, to eat the extras that fell down the sides–this is how good Cheddar Bunnies are–if I’ve eaten every last one and all the biggest crumbs, and all that’s left is this like, orange dust, if I pour this powder on the floor, my dogs will spend minutes licking at the food dust.  The smallest crumbs.

 

This is the image she’s using, she uses a word for the tiniest bits, tiniest crumbs.  And this is also, by the way, that I suggest people keep their shoes on when they come over. But back to it:

 

The Knock Down: Giving In

Even though Jesus has ignored her, talked about her when she’s right there, used a saying that places her in the same camp as dogs, she turns the statement he makes around.  She basically aligns herself with the dogs, but then still points out who Jesus is and what she should get.  She functionally says, “Fine. But if I’m a dog, you’re the lord of my table, and I should at least get to eat the tiniest crumbs that you drop.”  And I don’t need to point out, probably, how cleverly persuasive she is right here, do I?

 

And in doing this, of course, she implies that healing her daughter is nothing to Jesus, it’s the smallest crumb.  And she is desperately hungry for it and desperately sure he can give this to her, if he only would.

 

And he finally does. He says yes after having said no over and over “O woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you wish.”

 

And the last line of this passage tells us that from that very moment, her daughter was healed.

 

And she becomes, for us, the model of the church to come, a gentile choice that, as Paul says, is grafted onto Israel. We forget this, but we shouldn’t.

 

Pause & Questions:

And even though this passage has a happy ending, a Disney-style ending.  It’s hard.  It’s hard that Jesus ignores this woman, talks around her, says no to her, compares her to a dog.  It’s hard.

 

Answer: 

So what could we say about why Jesus acts the way he does?  We could say, reasonably, that Jesus can heal whoever he wants to heal, right? God can do whatever God wants to do.  But this points to the whole problem of this passage: doesn’t God desire that “all people be saved” as Paul says? And the picture we get of Jesus in action here does conflict with what we see of Jesus in so many places, where he stands with an attitude of encompassing and ingathering love.  So what’s up, right?

 

And various answers are suggested. One scholar suggests that Jesus was simply uncompassionate, and this woman really put him in his place, reminded him who he is supposed to be; and he remembered, and healed her. Another scholar suggests that Tyre & Sidon, where this woman was from, are wealthy and “privileged” and economically suppress Galilee—and Jesus is making an economic point in this passage, that sometimes the poor people should get some bread!  (Pregeant, Matthew, 122-123, summarizing Sharon Ringe & Gerd Thiessen, respectively). Okay.

 

And clearly, clearly, as Russel Prageant points out, Matthew wants us to notice the “great faith” of this outsider compared to the “little faith” of Jesus’ own disciples, especially the doubt and the “little faith” that Jesus says Peter has just a chapter before this scene.   We’re supposed to notice that this outsider, this non-Israelite Gentile is declared to have more faith than Peter, the most vocal of Jesus’ disciples, who only a chapter later (16:13-20) declares boldly that Jesus is the Messiah, the “son of the living God.”

 

Sometimes those people over there, that we all avoid, they show us up and show us how we should be acting.  And we need to acknowledge it. Matthew’s first audience of Jewish Christians would need reminded of this, especially as more non-Israelite believers joined them. (cf. Pregeant, 123.)

 

Another answer is that God is working in an orderly way.  In God’s effort to redeem humanity, He’s working in an orderly way. And critical to this orderliness is God’s intention to work through Israel.  We can trace this all throughout the Old Testament; God’s calling of Abraham and his intention to make Abraham a blessing for all nations, the special relationship God commits to with Israel, and the way God gives them the law so that they–and others–can join to God, and of course, when it’s painfully clear that the babysitter–the law–just won’t cut the mustard, God gives us a way to be adopted into his family through Jesus, redeemed totally and completely by him, and gathered into his people.

 

But there was an order to this; first Israel, then the rest of the world.  And Jesus, honestly, was just keeping the rules, holding to the script.

 

All the refusal, all the language that was harsh, harsh–the “gentler word for dogs” doesn’t fly.  If you call someone a bulldog instead of a mastiff it doesn’t sting less–all of this strong resistance on Jesus’ part to grant this woman favor, and answer her plea, simply points out how deeply and utterly committed Jesus was to working with the mission he had.  Which was to go to the lost sheep of Israel, right?  And then, once the Holy Spirit had been sent to them, then send those same lost sheep, now gathered up, out into the world to get the rest of us.

 

Does this make sense?  There was an order, a mission, that Jesus was following.  He was following through on an ancient promise that God had never given up on, which was to work through Israel to redeem all creation.  And he held to this.

 

And maybe it pained him, maybe it pricked his heart.  We could infer from a thousand other passages it must have, to ignore this woman: but we couldn’t infer it from this passage.

 

So one answer is that God is working in an order.

 

The church started with Israelites, God was working through Israel, and there was supposed to be an order for things; first Israel, then the rest of the world.  And Jesus was just keeping the rules, keeping to the mission he was sent for, doing what he could to prepare his people, so that they might become more perfectly God’s People, and be better prepared to come after the rest of us.

 

And what we see here may seem cold, seem very harsh.  But it might, if we looked at it another way, seem like an incredible act of mercy.

 

 

Considerations 

Because, honestly, Jesus breaks the rules.  Jesus interrupts the plan, pauses his mission.  Sometimes mercy breaks the rules.

 

It was God’s intention that redemption start with Israel, and move out from Israel after Jesus left, and the Holy Spirit came.  But Jesus interrupted this order, interrupted this plan and his own mission, for this woman who just wouldn’t quit pursuing him, claiming his lordship over her life, asking for mercy.

 

And we should consider some things.  We should consider, of course, that sometimes acting mercifully interrupts our plans.  Sometimes being merciful means we disregard the plan, ignore our mission for a moment, and intercede for someone who has need of us.

 

All of us will find ourselves in positions where we are on a mission, we are faced with rules, we are pursuing a plan; and we may need to pause our mission, disregard our plans, or ignore the rules for a moment, so that we can act with mercy.

 

But we should carefully consider along with this how reticent, how unwilling Jesus was to do this.  The order that God had set up was important to Jesus, Matthew shows us that it was built into his mission.  The promise to work through Israel to redeem humanity was a promise God didn’t make lightly, and Jesus held to it.  He resists breaking what God had orchestrated.

 

So if we are fairly certain that we are acting in line with God’s will–we’ve sought the counsel & wisdom of one another, we’ve been in prayer, been guided by scripture–then we should be very careful about interrupting the missions and plans we find ourselves on.

 

Conclusion:  

So mercy breaks rules, interrupts plans; but not quickly. And especially not when it is clear that that the things we’re interrupting are orchestrated by God.

 

As we find ourselves living, just living, we need to be people who are doing what we can to discern the purposes God has for us in the places we find ourselves–but we also need to be ready to interrupt the many plans and missions we find ourselves on, even those God has sent us to do, in order to act merciful to those who need the help we can give them.

 

We need to remember that sometimes we can learn from the examples of those who have great faith in the Lord; but aren’t like us, aren’t part of our group, are different, and “other.” They might be “them,” instead of “us,” but their faith is great and we need to learn from it, be challenged by it.

 

See, we can read today’s passage and see a harsh, forbidding Jesus, who doesn’t care.  Or we can see Jesus, the Son of David, the Messiah—God and man both–who interrupts the mission he’s on to redeem all humanity, for the sake of this one, desperately needy outsider who has such great, persistent faith.

 

This is grace.  The grace of the Lord.  Let’s try to live in it, with great faith, and offer as much of both as we can to those who need it.

 

Prayer:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Does this passage seem “difficult” for you? Why?

 

Give summarizing this passage a shot.

 

Describe this woman; what do we know about her? What do the key words “Tyre & Sidon,” & “Canaanite” reveal to us?

 

How does Matthew 14:22-33 inform our reading of this passage?

 

What do we learn about Jesus’ mission & his commitment to it in this passage?

 

What do we learn about his attitude toward interrupting this mission?

 

How can we apply this difficult passage in our lives?  (Faith…Mission…Interruption…“Us” vs. “Them”–do these words trigger any “application ideas” for you?)

 

Today’s passage is a hard one.  Jesus seems cold & harsh– if not downright mean–and the happy ending doesn’t seem to make up for dismissive stuff that gets us there.  As we read & discuss this scene, try and see it for the first time.  Think about what Jesus is doing, who this Canaanite woman is, and what is remarkable about his actions toward her…and hers toward him. Too, let’s not just try to understand this passage, but figure out a way it can help us live better in the world.