One of the things that I so enjoy about the study of God’s Word is how it is knitted together so finely that there is nothing that doesn’t fit, nothing that is out of place. Our story today demonstrates this quite well indeed.
Preparing for our time together today, I ran into a problem that occurs quite frequently for me: what to title the message. Today’s lesson cost me a bit more time and energy than usual, though.
There are a couple a very strong but different messages that could come from our study of this passage. Let me share them with you, and perhaps we can kind of knit them together and get some real understanding of a passage that has caused a lot of anxiety over the years.
The first title I came up with was, “The Miracles of Christ Know No Prejudice”. Let’s look at that one first.
What do you know about prejudice? Have you ever experienced it? What was that like? Have you ever been guilty of it? Be careful how you answer – you might be surprised at the truth.
Prejudice is a disease of the mind that affects the heart. Prejudice is, literally, a pre-formed opinion, usually unfavorable, based on insufficient knowledge, irrational feelings or inaccurate stereotypes.
Now, there are times when having a pre-formed opinion of someone would be considered wise. A good example would be a known sex-offender who is moving into your neighborhood. If you are prejudiced against that person on a way that has a burning desire to see them kept away from children, then that prejudice is not bad.
There are many times when prejudice or “pre-judging” is not a bad thing. Prejudice against fried foods or a brand of automobile or against foul language is not bad. When prejudice crosses into bigotry, however, we go down a road that Jesus Himself never walked.
If we are following Jesus, we have no business going where He did not and would not go.
What is bigotry? Bigotry is a strong form of prejudice that is hateful and will not be persuaded to see things differently. No amount of reasoning will change the mind of a bigot.
In our every day life, we easily find ourselves being prejudicial towards other people, and that is usually because of some former experience in our own lives.
Let me give you a personal example. For many, many years, I had a problem with anyone with the name of “Larry”. All of the Larry’s I had known in my life had been men who were hateful, selfish and a whole lot of other not-nice things. It was the most natural thing in the world for me to curl my lip whenever I heard that name.
Eventually, I grew up and matured and learned how to take people at face-value – for the most part. But, I still find that there is a tendency to lean a certain way in my thinking if I hear negative things about someone and then am presented with meeting that person for the first time.
We are all familiar with what is called racial prejudice. More accurately, it should be called “ethnic” prejudice, since there is only one race, and that is the human race – but that’s another study for another time.
We are all also familiar with what I call “regional” prejudice. We still see it today between the “Yankees” and the “Southerners”, and that war was over more than 140 years ago.
In Jesus time, there was a very strong prejudice among the Jewish people toward Gentiles. There were a whole lot of reasons for this, most of which had to do with Jewish ceremonial and dietary laws that the Gentiles did not observe. Circumcision was a big one; eating pork was another. There were many, many more.
There was even a short prayer common in those days that went like this: “Lord, thank you that I was not born a Gentile, a woman or a tax collector.” How’s that for prejudice?
In our story today, Jesus comes up against the prevailing attitudes and prejudices of His day regarding the Gentiles, and He deals with it in such a way that it should have settled the matter forever. It did not. Even a casual reading of the remainder of the New Testament will show this to be true.
This is what happened. Let’s read Matthew 15:21-28.
Okay, the area that Jesus has traveled with His disciples to is way up along the Mediterranean coastline, quite far from Gennesaret where we left Jesus and His disciples last time. It is also Gentile country.
This area had been Canaanite for a couple of thousand years. The Phoenicians, the first ocean-going people, were from this area. Later, the Greeks under Alexander the Great conquered and repopulated the area. It had long been a major area of trade and commerce. You may recall some of the broader details we discussed when Tyre and Sidon came up in our study of Matthew 11.
The fact that Jesus has purposefully left the land of His own people, the “lost sheep of Israel”, as He will refer to them in a moment, is significant, I think, and it is a key point in helping us unpack this story.
Jesus has traveled into a completely Gentile area. The Greeks were prominent here in many ways. Judaism was faintly in the background. Perhaps He withdrew to let things cool off for a while after upsetting the prevailing view of what was clean and what was unclean – at least, that is what some commentators have put forth.
After much consideration of this passage, I believe that Jesus was motivated to travel deep into Gentile territory for two reasons. One, Jesus is demonstrating with His very life the very thing that He had battled the Scribes and Pharisees over in our last study. Jesus was proving out that God’s view and man’s view can often times be completely at odds.
In our last study, Jesus made it clear that what the Jews traditionally held to be unclean and, therefore, unacceptable, was not so in God’s eyes. Perhaps this will be reminiscent for you of the account of Peter and the centurion Cornelius from Acts 10. This is one of those places where the Word of God is so finely woven together that it seems obvious that no human being could have do this so purely and seamlessly.
It had always been promised that the Messiah was to come through the Jews and to be a blessing to all peoples (Isaiah 49:6; Luke 2:32; Isaiah 9:6-7; Isaiah 60:3).
This, I believe, is the second reason that Jesus was motivated to travel deep into Gentile territory: to initiate the fulfillment of these prophecies. This was another reason that I considered “The Miracles of Jesus Know No Prejudice”, would have made an appropriate title for this study.
Jesus did not come into the world only for the Jews, although, as He Himself stated on more than one occasion, He was sent to the house of Israel first and foremost. One of His strongest statements about His purpose for being among us is in Luke 19:10: "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." That means all the lost, not just lost Jews. That alone should give everyone a great amount of hope and encouragement.
Something else that should be of great encouragement to those of us are non-Jewish is the number of “whosever’s” there are in Sacred Scripture. Dozens of times, God has made it clear that His commands, His blessings, His promises and His warnings are addressed to “whosoever”, not just the Jews alone.
As we delve into the meat of this story, as we look at the interaction between Jesus and this Gentile woman, I am sure you will easily see why I considered entitling this study, “The Power of Persistence”.
Have you ever had a child, family member or even a very close friend who was in desperate straights and their condition, their need seemed to fill your waking and your sleeping hours?
I remember a time many, many years ago when my youngest became suddenly and extremely ill. As I drove him to the hospital, I cried and prayed to God, telling Him that He could have the son He had loaned to me back if He wanted, but I really would like to hold on to Him for a while. That son just returned from Iraq two days ago. I can understand this mother’s heart and mind a bit.
This woman, this mom, has a deep, agonizing and consuming need in her life when she comes across Jesus and has opportunity to watch Him and listen to Him. Her daughter is “cruelly demon-possessed,” and she is beside herself with worry and grief.
When this Gentile woman, whom Matthew refers to as a Canaanite and Mark calls “a Gentile, of the Syrophoenician race (Mark 7:26),” has heard Jesus speak, she becomes convinced of Who He is and what He can do. Nothing is going to stop her from grasping the thread of hope that she sees and tugging on it with all of her strength.
She obviously is a woman of class and good humor, despite her lot in life. Let’s look at the interchange between her and Jesus.
"Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed (verse 22)." First, she addresses Him as “Lord”. The Greek word here, kurios, is a word used for a human master and lord of great prominence, and is most often used for God. How is she using it? The next title she addresses Jesus by tells us, “Son of David.”
Son of David is a title used exclusively for the promised Messiah. Do you wonder how and why she knew about the Messiah? What was it that caused her to recognize Jesus as this Messiah?
Do you think perhaps she had some Jewish neighbors who had shared their faith with her and, even though she may have thought it was just another myth of a people different from her own, she had felt a little of that hope and that excitement that often has accompanied the stories of the Messiah down through the ages.
And, maybe she had paid more than a little bit of attention to those stories. Perhaps her neighbors didn’t even realize what kind of seed was being planted when they did share their faith. Yet, their faith was so much a part of their lives that it became the catalyst for what we see happening in this story today. Obviously, this part of what I am saying is merely conjecture on my part, but I believe it is highly probable that such may have been the case.
To go on…how did she open her petition to Jesus? “Have mercy on me.” “Eleeō,” she says; “Have compassion, have pity, show me mercy.” Well, we have already seen the kind of compassion Jesus has on those in need.
The really interesting thing in this is that this woman, who has absolutely nothing in common with Jesus, has no real claim on Him from all outward appearances, approaches Him and speaks to Him as if she were one of His own.
A heart that is truly seeking after God, hunger-thirsting after Him, will push aside convention, push aside preconceptions and the opinion so of others and grab onto Him when they come face to face with Him. For He Himself has promised, “You will seek Me and find Me when you search for Me with all your heart (Jeremiah 29:13).”
This next section is the part I mentioned before that has been the cause of much concern and much conflict over the years. At first glance, it seems as if Jesus is callous, uncaring, even bigoted against this woman, all because she is not Jewish. Nothing could be further from the truth, but some have attempted to use this text to show that Jesus was just a man with the same sinful nature and problems with prejudice that the rest of us face.
But, with a little intellectual integrity and a smidgen more thought, it becomes obvious that Jesus is testing and teaching at the same time.
He is testing the woman’s faith for her own sake, and He is teaching the disciples the truth about who salvation is for and what it costs those who receive it.
Jesus ignores the woman. The disciples petition Him for her, but not out of any real concern or sense of mercy – they just want Him to get rid of her. They know He can cast the demon out, even from this far away from where the girl is. They have witnessed it many times. They want Him to do it for her because then she will be quiet and leave them alone.
When they say, "Send her away, because she keeps shouting at us," they know that just telling her to go away won’t do any good. Jesus is going to have to actually do something. They know that’s how He is anyway, so may as well do it and be done with it.
So much for Christian compassion. Before we judge too harshly, however, we need to think of how often we have been irritated by the yammering of someone in need instead of feeling real, ongoing compassion for their circumstances. It seems that some people can talk of nothing other than the trouble they are having. How do we respond? Hmm – something to think about.
Instead of responding to them, Jesus speaks to the woman in what seems, at first, to be cold and callous and not just a little prejudiced. “But He answered and said, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel (verse 24).’"
She doesn’t miss a beat. Her heart for her daughter and her certainty about Jesus will not let her be put off. “But she came and began to bow down before Him, saying, ‘Lord, help me (verse 25)!’" She throws herself at His feet, worshiping Him and demonstrating that she believes in Who He is and what He can do. Her faith is solid so far. Will it last, however? Is it a real, saving faith?
What this shows us is that, from Christ’s perspective, a person must be truly and fundamentally broken before the Lord in order to be heard and received by Him. Not something that is a popular teaching, but true nonetheless.
Does Jesus relent? No; instead, he says, "It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs (verse 26)." Now that sounds pretty harsh and bigoted, does it not?
The Gentiles were often called “dogs” by the Jews. It was and is a statement of the highest contempt. Muslims and Jews still call each other “dogs”, even to this day.
When Jesus says, “the children’s bread,” He is using a figure of speech that would be immediately recognized by His disciples, who were themselves Jews. The Jews had always considered themselves God’s children – after all, He had chosen them from among all the peoples of the world to be His own.
Essentially, Jesus was saying this: “You are a woman and Gentile; I am a man and a Jew. We have nothing in common. We should not even be speaking. The Jews call themselves children of God. They belittle and mistreat you, calling you a dog. Are you willing to ask a Jew for a favor? Are you willing to submit to this bigoted name-calling in the hopes of perhaps receiving some act of kindness from someone from that nation that so despises you for who you are? Are you willing to subject yourself to the possibility of gross ridicule by admitting that you are dependent on a people that so despise you?”
Her response? Irony and humor. Weird as it may seem, this woman is so not concerned about herself and how she looks to people because of the hope that is in her that she banters a little with Jesus.
Jesus did not use the common word for dog as Peter does in 2 Peter 2:22, when he says, “It has happened to them according to the true proverb, ‘A DOG RETURNS TO ITS OWN VOMIT,’ and, ‘A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire.’"
The word Jesus uses is the common word used that meant “puppy”. Takes on a little different meaning, doesn’t it? Jesus wasn’t insulting her; He was testing her faith.
She responds in kind: "Yes, Lord; but even the dogs [puppies] feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table (verse 27)." She will admit to being beneath the children of the house, in this case, the Jews. She will concede that she is not worthy to dine at the Master’s table. She knows that heart of the Master, however, and she is willing to accept the “leftovers’, knowing that the leftovers from this Master’s table will meet her every need.
Verse 28: “Then Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed at once.” The heart of the Savior is overcome by the depth and authenticity of this woman’s faith.
The word used here for faith is pistis, and it refers to the kind of faith that is fully convinced, firmly persuaded, rock-solid in it certainty. The kind of faith that any who are true disciples of Jesus Christ have and live by.
Jesus looked at this woman and knew that she had full and unflinching faith in Him – His true identity, His character, His love, His compassion and His mercy. How did she know? Her heart had been prepared in advance to recognize Him when she saw Him and to respond to Him in trust and humility. And, she wouldn’t take an apparent “No,” as a final answer.
This helps us see how to pray for friends, loved ones, coworkers, neighbors, enemies, our national leaders, the friends of our children and anyone else who comes to mind that is not walking in close fellowship with Jesus Christ, saved or not. Ask Him to prepare their hearts to recognize and respond to the truth of Jesus Christ in trust and humility, whatever it takes.
What do you think will be His response? Is your faith in Him as strong for the salvation of those you know and love as this Gentile woman’s was for that of her daughter? Then Jesus will say, “O child, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.”
This is why I chose the title, “Christ Plays No Favorites.” Anyone with an eager belief in God, in Jesus Christ, brings joy to His heart and a fulfillment of our every need, our every God-given desire.
Let’s pray.
