Text: Matthew 15:21-28
Why doesn’t God make things easier for us?
Why does it take so long to become the person we know we’re supposed to be? To become the person we know God wants us to be? To be what we ask God to help us be? What we ask him to make us be?
It’s so amazing and encouraging to hear people’s testimonies of how they came to faith in Christ. To hear how God delivered them from addiction, from unbelief, or from self-destruction. When we meet someone whom God has healed miraculously from some illness, we rightly rejoice. It emboldens our own faith. We want to hear their stories again and again. We want other people to hear their stories, too, in hopes that they will grow in faith as well.
But the problem with testimonies is they can make it seem too simple sometimes. Even long, complicated testimonies usually have an “aha!” moment. “If only I’d yielded myself, trusted God, prayed with real faith,” etc., “I could have had this blessing from God so much sooner.” And it’s true, to some extent. We can all be our own worst enemies. And grace is very simple: God loves us. He pursues us in Christ. If we hear his call and turn to him in simple faith, we will find ourselves embraced by a God who has already accepted us. Simple.
But we are not simple. Life is not simple. Our souls, our fears, and our sins are not simple. And so most people’s testimonies, in actual fact, are not simple. The more I think about my own life, for example, the less clear it is when exactly I really became a Christian. I prayed for Jesus to come into my heart when I was five or six. The conversion that really “stuck” didn’t happen until I was 19 or 20. But I can think of a dozen little moments of true faith in between. And I can think of hundreds of moments since my conversion, if not thousands, where one could be excused for not really thinking that I’m a Christian—let alone a minister of the church.
And stories of healing always highlight the stories on non-healing, don’t they? The person miraculously delivered from alcohol addiction serves to highlight God’s grace. But their testimony also serves to cast a shadow over the person whose journey with alcohol has been three steps forward, two steps back, for twenty years. Not because the recipient of the miracle is somehow being self-righteous. Not at all. If they’d “done” the miracle themselves, it wouldn’t have been a miracle. And if it was a miracle, they didn’t do it themselves. So it’s really more of a mystery than it is a matter of saint versus sinner, or success-story versus story-of-struggle.
But God must have purpose in all this. He must have some purpose in seeming to not hear our prayers, even though we know that he does. He must have some purpose in entering into one life like a bolt of heavenly lightning, and another like little more than a still, small voice. God must have some reason for doing what he does, and for not doing what he doesn’t do. To borrow from Martin Luther, the gap God leaves between what he promises us in his Word and what he appears to do in this world is the gap that God leaves for our faith.
In our passage this morning, Jesus heads up north into Gentile territory. He is approached by a woman of Canaanite descent—that is, she’s descended from the nations the Israelites originally displaced under Joshua centuries ago, the people who proved over time to be such a snare to the children of God in the Old Testament, both morally and spiritually. The Gospel of Mark says she’s Syrophoenician and Greek. Her attitude toward dogs as pets, as we will see in a moment, hints that she is from the wealthier classes. But in our text, she’s a woman in need. Her daughter is harassed by the demonic, and “suffering terribly” (verse 22). This woman pleads her cause to Jesus. And Jesus…ignores her.
It’s a scene that sort of slaps you in the face the first time you read it. Jesus ignores this poor woman? He ignores her suffering daughter? He doesn’t even say anything? Everything we tend to assume about Jesus is suddenly challenged. He treats the woman like an inconvenience, a nuisance. Irritated at her begging, his disciples urge him to send her away. “She keeps crying after us,” they complain (verse 23).
“I was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” Jesus finally says, and we aren’t told to whom. Is his back turned to the woman? Is he saying this to the disciples? Is he saying it to her? What does he mean? He’s only here to help Jewish people? Didn’t he heal the servant of a Roman centurion way back in chapter 8 of this same Gospel? Isn’t this the Jesus who will end the book of Matthew by sending his disciples out to all the world?
“Lord, help me!,” the woman cries. “Master, teacher, rabbi: Help!”
How did this woman even know about Jesus?, we wonder. How did she know to call him “Son of David” (verse 22)? How did the knowledge reach her—way up on the coast, far north of Galilee and Judea—of this enigmatic teacher? How did she know he might be the Jewish Messiah? How did she know that he could heal and deliver her daughter?
We don’t know. But somehow she knew. And she laid it all on the line, when she learned this famous Jewish healer was in town. Her daughter, oppressed by evil spirits, now had hope. And this woman wasn’t going to let this chance pass her by. “Lord, help me!”
“It’s not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs,” says Jesus, the first words in this story that we know for a fact are directed at her.
Dogs. To Jews like Jesus and his disciples, they were dirty animals. Scavengers. Like crows or rats—or seagulls, if you live here in the Pacific Northwest. But to some Gentile cultures, especially among the wealthy, they could be pets. And what leaves Jewish lips as an apparently brutal dismissal, lands on Gentile ears as hope.
“Yes, Lord,” the woman replies. Or, as the NIV here puts it, “Yes it is, Lord.” Yes, the dogs do get to eat some of the children’s bread. If it falls off the table, where else does it go? Right into the mouth of the hungry family dog.
When Junior drops his Doritos, Fido gets a treat.
“Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
The woman’s response is brilliant. She knows enough about Jewish culture, we have to assume from her calling Jesus “Son of David,” to know what an insult the comment about dogs could have been. But dogs to this woman are pets. And the hands that feed them are the hands of their master. Her persistence, her humility, and perhaps even her cleverness, win the day. Jesus turns to her and replies,
“Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.”
“And her daughter,” Matthew tells us (verse 28), “was healed at that moment.”
All kinds of interpretations could be applied to this story. One famous book even claimed this as an example of Jesus having to repent of his own racism, which strikes me as more than a little far-fetched.
What we see, rather (I think), is an example that resonates at one time or another with all of our lives—all of our prayer lives, in particular. We pursue God in prayer and hear nothing. We pursue God in prayer and hear No. We pursue God in prayer and find ourselves instead somewhat humiliated—embarrassed that we prayed for something that didn’t happen, or that we stepped out on a limb in faith and wound up falling right off. God doesn’t seem kind in the moment. God doesn’t seem simple. This isn’t the Jesus we’ve been led to expect.
But is the issue really that God doesn’t want to help us? Jesus was truly sent to the lost sheep of Israel, as he says in verse 24. And he has wandered out of Jewish country really just to get a break from the crowds. But is the Jesus we see in Scripture really indifferent to the pain of the world? Is he really indifferent to the suffering of this woman’s daughter? Everything we read in the Bible tells us the answer is No, despite all the suffering we do in fact see in the world. Rather, Jesus must doing something here—we are left to guess what—and his exchange with this woman must be designed to bring about certain results.
For starters, this woman is descended from Israel’s enemies. From a first century Jewish perspective, Jesus’ initial response is just fine. The disciples, after all, don’t complain that Jesus isn’t helping her. They complain that she’s being so loud and annoying. “Send her away,” is what they ask, not, “Meet her needs.”
So this exchange, perhaps, is about God’s grace extending even to God’s enemies.
And the woman is persistent. You have to give her that. She’s desperate for Jesus’ help, and won’t even let insults turn her away. Her love for her daughter, and her conviction that Jesus can do something about their pain, are inspiring. She doesn’t even care if Jesus is kind. She just knows what Jesus can do, and that’s what she’s after.
There’s more than one lesson in that.
And the relation of the nations to God also comes up. The Jewish people are God’s children, everyone in our story agrees. And Gentiles (like most of us in this room) are, apparently, dogs. In Jewish minds of the first century, that means we’re scum and we’re filth. But to a Hellenistic woman like the one in our story, dogs are pets. They, too, belong to the master. They, too, eat his bread—even if it’s just crumbs from the table.
So the nations, too, belong to God.
The woman’s humility. The disciples’ irritation. The apparent callousness of Jesus that actually becomes mercy. The stories about Jesus, like the parables he taught, are so full of meaning. We could spend the rest of the day thinking about all this story means. But for now, let’s allow this story to remind us that God does hear us, that God does love us, and that he does desire to give us what we need.
We don’t always know what’s happening on the heavenly side of our prayers, but we know who Jesus is. And we can learn from this woman to keep pressing in.
Let’s Pray
Mikael Ivaska 