“Great Faith”

Matthew 15:21-28

August 14, 2005

There are those stories in the Bible which often times defies our expectations and leaves us scratching our heads not quite sure what to make of them. Often times we read these stories with a certain prescribed expectation of how people should act and how things should be. When it comes to the stories of the gospels, our expectations are in high gear. We expect the disciples to be slow at grasping what Jesus says, we expect the scribes and Pharisees to be upset and angry at what Jesus does, and most of all, we expect Jesus to be, well, Jesus. But sometimes we can let our expectations get the better of us. Sometimes we can let our expectations get in the way of hearing a fresh new word that transcends our narrow expectations and points us to that which is expansive and unexpected. This story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman is one of those stories.

Our story begins with Jesus having just left from a confrontation with the scribes and Pharisees over ritual hand washing. The scribes and the Pharisees were upset because Jesus and the disciples did not wash their hands before eating and therefore broke the tradition of the elders by eating with unclean hands. Jesus responded to them by telling them that what goes in a person does not make one unclean, but what comes out of a person, from the heart, that makes them unclean. As we expect, this offended the scribes and Pharisees, because Jesus was implying that Jewishness was more about the internal than the external. And as we expect, the disciples did not understand either.

For the scribes and Pharisees and the disciples, their Messiah would never speak out against the traditions of the elders, the traditions that had sustained the Jewish faith for centuries. The rituals and laws and traditions were the external acts that separated Jews from everyone else and showed God and others that they were God’s people. Their Messiah would not come and do away with the rituals and laws and traditions. Their Messiah, their Son of David, would uphold them. Once again Jesus has not fulfilled their expectations.

And so Jesus leaves having once more been frustrated by the lack of faith and lack of vision of those who should have known better. So Jesus leaves from Gennesaret in Palestine and heads north to go to the district of Tyre and Sidon two port cities located on the Mediterranean just west of Syria. Tyre and Sidon were not exactly pro-Israel. Although Israel traded with these two port cities, there was no love lost between them.

For the Jews, Tyre and Sidon represented all that was god-less and heathen, whose people were as unclean as the wild dogs on the streets. For Jesus to go to Tyre and Sidon was about as crazy as Jonah going to Ninevah. Imagine being one of his disciples and hearing that they were headed to the area of these two towns. Imagine being one of the children of the house of Israel and knowing that their Messiah was venturing out into hostile territory. Their Messiah would do no such thing, for their Messiah was just that – their Messiah, not anyone else’s, especially not a bunch of godless, heathen, dirty dogs.

Right on cue, a Canaanite woman comes to Jesus and cries out, “have mercy upon me, Lord, Son of David,” and wants him to heal her daughter. But Jesus does not answer her. The disciples then urge Jesus “to send her away for she is shouting after us.” Jesus replies, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” But the woman persists even bowing down before him in an act of worship saying, “Lord, help me.” But Jesus replies, “ I have only come for the stray children of the house of Israel.” When she persists with her plea for the Lord, the Son of David to help her. Jesus says, “it is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman does not let his harsh judgment stop her from calling upon the Lord for help. She says, “yes, lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

This week I have wrestled with this text like I have with no other. Several nights this week, I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this text, wrestling with the fact that in this story Jesus says some things that defy my expectations. No matter how I try to rationalize it, no matter how I try to explain it, Jesus is not acting the way I think my Jesus should act. But maybe that is just the point with this story.

The woman knows that Jesus is Israel’s Messiah, but she claims him for her own. She willingly admits and accepts her place and status, yet has faith enough in Jesus to know that these are not barriers to his work of healing. Jesus speaks to the woman and makes her articulate her faith, so that through her confession the disciples will hear what it means to have a faith that saves. Jesus speaks to the woman as if he is one of the disciples. He says what they are thinking. He puts himself in the place of the disciples in order to demonstrate to them that faith does not have boundaries or stipulations (ritual hand washing), it is not guided by race, origin, or history, gender, or status or birthright.

The disciples expected Jesus to turn away from the woman and put her in her place. The disciples expected Jesus to dismiss her because she did not belong to Israel and therefore he was not her Messiah. But she came with no expectations at all. She came to Jesus because he was the Messiah of Israel. She came with no pretensions about her place at the table. She came with only the hope that the Messiah of Israel would heal her daughter simply because he was the Messiah of Israel. She accepts her secondary status as an outsider, a Gentile, but takes the risk of remaining a petitioner. She knows her place among the Jews. She knows that she is undeserving of the Lord’s mercy, but she comes anyway willing to break through the barriers of nation and culture to call upon the one who can make people whole. In the end, this nameless woman becomes the model for the disciples about what it means to have faith in the Messiah of Israel, in the Savior of the world, a faith that Jesus calls great. Amen.