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Living the Jesus Creed: Believing and Abiding in Jesus
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Matthew 15:21-28 New International VersionThe Faith of the Canaanite Woman 21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”
27 “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
28 Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
Living the Jesus Creed: Believing and Abiding in Jesus
In his book, The Jesus Creed, Scot McKnight tells the story of Benjamin Franklin who “conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection” (p. 183). Franklin listed thirteen virtues: temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility.
Franklin set himself the goal of mastering one virtue per week. In other words he thought he could achieve a life without any faults within three months. In a journal he assessed his progress each evening, marking a ● for each failure in one or more of the virtues. Franklin lived with this system for a number of months until finally admitting, “I was surprised to find myself so much fuller of faults than I had imagined.” Ain’t that the truth!
The Christian life and spiritual maturity for a Christian then is not about a list of virtues or even about a series of laws to be fulfilled. It is about faith. I will explain what I mean by that by taking a look at the story of a woman who comes to Jesus seeking healing for her daughter. Having just heard the story, you know that if the story were told about anyone other than Jesus we would regard his comments as rude, intolerant and just plain nasty.
We took our text for today from Matthew’s telling of the story. When Mark tells the story he introduces it by implying that Jesus was looking for solitude, or a break from the demands of the crowds that gathered as he gained notoriety. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice… (Mark 7:24). This, at least in part, explains why the disciples asked Jesus to send the woman away. She was a bother to them.
If you have your Bible with you, turn to the text from Matthew 15. You can also find it on page 17 of the pew Bibles and it will be on the screen behind me. The story begins with some code words. Tyre and Sidon were actual geographical locations but they were associated in the Jewish mind with people who were pagans, those who, for the most part, would deny the truth of the Shema, that the Lord our God is one. Matthew could have then said a woman from that district approached Jesus but instead he tells us that she was a Canaanite woman, identifying her with the nation who were the most morally despised of Israel’s enemies in the Old Testament. The scene is filled with tension; this woman, a pagan enemy, demands that Jesus help her. What is he going to do?
The next thing to notice is what she is shouting at Jesus. “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” It is close to impossible for us to get a sense of how incredible these words are in the mouth of this non-Jewish female. Think about this: Matthew reports this confession of faith before he tells us about the confession of Peter, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). In other words this woman, this foreigner, this enemy, “gets” what’s going on earlier than one of the men who had the advantage of following Jesus around, listening to him and observing him on a full-time basis.
What does her confession mean? She calls him Son of David, which is another way of saying, Messiah. She acknowledges him to be the one in whom all the promises of God are going to be fulfilled. More than that, in telling him that her daughter is tormented by a demon she is saying she has faith that the power of God to heal is invested in Jesus.
There is no way for me to know what you, in your heart of hearts, believe about Jesus. But friends there is one thing it is impossible for me upon which to place too great an emphasis. It has been fashionable in my lifetime to downplay or explain away some of the claims made by Jesus or about Jesus in the gospels. When you come down to it, some say, Jesus is simply an itinerant preacher who taught some memorable lessons. Frankly, this is nonsense. We have a choice about what we believe is true of Jesus, but make no mistake about what the gospels claim. The woman in our text is held up as an example of great faith because she believes that in Jesus one finds nothing less than the promises of God come true and the power of God made known!
Jesus tests this faith. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” What can this mean? It may be that I am guilty of trying to put a positive spin on these words, but I think we have to look at the situation. This woman has made a confession of faith, but we do not yet know the full content of that confession. Was she willing to allow Jesus to be the one he had been sent to be? I think we see rather than hear the answer. But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” What her action says is this: I am not claiming you as one of many deities; I am not making you a member of the cast of gods to whom I give varying degrees of allegiance. To use a current image—she did not make Jesus an item in the religious smorgasbord from which she picked a slice of this and a dollop of that. She was telling Jesus she wanted to be included in the family of God that he was creating.
Jesus continued to test her. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” There is disagreement among scholars as to what this image means. Some have suggested that Jews referred to Gentiles as “dogs” and Jesus is picking up on that terminology. Craig Keener in his IVP Bible Background Commentary says this is not true. However, it is still a bit of an ugly image.
In Jewish culture dogs were not welcome as part of the household. They were scavengers. The law told Jews that food which was unsuitable for them to eat could be thrown to the dogs (Exodus 22:31). Not exactly the picture we get from ads featuring the latest in gourmet flavours for Lassie and Sylvester.
However, it may be that this woman was familiar with the Greek culture in which dogs were more and more being welcomed as pets in well-to-do households. Perhaps then we are to hear this exchange in this way.
“Food that is intended to nourish and strengthen the children of God cannot be tossed out on the street for the dogs to pick through.”
“But Lord, some of the dogs, as you call them, are now welcome to sit under the table of the children, and no one would deny them the crumbs that fall at their feet.”
Again, Jesus hardly needs me to defend him or put a positive spin on his words, but I do wonder if what we have here are not words that border on insult but rather Jesus elevating this woman by welcoming her into a lively and constructive dialogue dealing with the content and character of her faith. The result is this: “Woman, great is your faith!” What’s great about it is this: she recognizes that all the promises of the one and true God find their focus in Jesus and she is claiming a part in the family he is creating.
Do you have a place in the family? I did not ask if you are able to put a check mark beside one more virtue each week. Don’t misunderstand what I am saying. Lifestyle, ethical and moral choices are important, vitally important for the Christian. But faith is at the beginning and through its growth primarily a matter of relationship with Jesus and what within that relationship you trust Jesus for.
Now that you have a place in the family, now what? The key is again not regulations but relationship. Let me borrow a wonderful image used by Scot McKnight in his book The Jesus Creed. Not all of you have access to the internet, but I still think this image will give us a picture of what it means to stay in relationship with Jesus.
When we first got internet access for our home computer the only option available for connecting was dial-up. (Things change so rapidly in the world of technology, someone like our daughter Alison will remember those days, but someone just a few years younger will think we’re talking about ancient history.) Dial-up access, as the name implies, was through one’s existing telephone line or a separate line. It wasn’t on all the time. When one of us wanted to use the internet, we sat down at the computer and went through the steps of having the computer dial-in to the service provider.
Then came high-speed access which is on all the time. This is achieved through what is called a modem and a router and as long as you were sitting at the computer that was connected with wires to those hardware items, then you were on-line.
That, however, didn’t quite fulfill the needs of the growing number of people using lap top computers. After all, the whole reason for using a portable computer was to rid oneself of all those wires. So something called networks were created and routers and modems became wireless. Now don’t for a minute think that I have the first clue how any of this actually works. All I know is the computer I use is somehow connected to the office network and no wires are involved.
There are limitations however. Distance is a factor as is, I assume, the amount of concrete between the origin of the network and one’s lap top. For example, my computer has access to the network here in the sanctuary but not in the Friendship Room. We do not have a network set up at home, which has meant Alison and I could use our Mac Books but when we wanted the internet we needed to sit down at the desk top computer. That too is changing. Alison tells me her Rogers phone service will allow her to access the internet through her cell phone. Some day soon, no doubt, access to the internet will be as available as cell phone service. Pop open your lap top and you’ll be connected to the world.
Our connection to Jesus is meant to be like that. We are not to “dial-up” the Lord on certain occasions. Our connection to him is not simply for times of crisis and concern. This is why the church through the ages has emphasized the need for what are disciplines or devotional practices—reading the Bible, prayer, worship as part of the family of God, giving from resources of time, talent and treasure to the purposes of God. All of this was meant to nurture an on-all-the-time connection to Jesus.
I read recently about the publication of a book in 1863, Vie de Jésus by J. E. Renan. He claimed Jesus was “merely an incomparable man,” nothing more. There is no connection to keep if that is true. But if the gospels are true, if he is the Lord, if all the promises of God find their fulfillment in him, if he was raised from the dead never more to die, then an on-all-the-time connection with Jesus is not only possible, it is your source of life. Not a list to master, but a master to follow.
