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Location: Hattiesburg, Mississippi, United States

Sunday, August 14, 2005

13th Sunday after Pentecost 8/14/05 Text: Matthew 13:21-28 Title: Jesus sure put her in her place.

Date: 8/14/05
13th Sunday after Pentecost
Text: Matthew 13:21-28
Title: Jesus Sure Put Her in Her Place.

My fellow missionaries, please join me in prayer. Eternal God, pour out your Spirit upon us that we might be aware of your presence in our midst, that we might be attentive to your Word, and that we might be faithful always to your way, through Jesus Christ our Lord we pray. Amen
At first glance, our Gospel reading for today appears to be down right strange, for Jesus does not act as we expect him to. The woman calls out to him and Jesus appears to flat out ignore her. Then he tells her that she is not important, he has not been sent there for her. Then as if that is not enough, he calls her a dog, not worth giving food to, quite an insult at the time. That is pretty hostile.
Then there is the Canaanite woman. Talk about pushy, especially for a woman of that day. In those days you just did not do what she was doing. She was breaking some of the most important social rules of the time. As a woman she should not even have been talking to a man, much less to a Jewish Rabbi and his disciples. It just was not done. There is no doubt there were plenty of wagging fingers that day, as people called out, shame, shame, shame.
What is worse is that she uses Jesus’ own words to trap him into healing her daughter. It is pretty unsettling, isn’t it, for this particular story does not put our loving and accepting Jesus in a good light For her to approach Jesus the way she did was pretty shocking, but for Jesus to treat her that way is even worse. How could he do that to her? She not asking Jesus to do something he had not done before, and beside that she was not asking Jesus to help her, she just wanted him to heal her daughter.
And then there are those disciples of Jesus. They just wanted him to get rid of her. She was becoming a real pain in the you know what! Why we wouldn’t act that way if someone came bursting through the doors of our sanctuary asking for help, would we? We would not send them away, would we? We wouldn’t say, “Pastor, just give them some money so they will leave us and we can worship God in peace would we?
I remember when someone interrupted our evening service this past winter. Two people came in during the service, disrupting our time with God. There was confusion as we tried to figure out what they wanted. Should we just give them money so they would leave, or were they there to rob us, what should we do with them? Everyone was on edge that night.
During the sermon hymn I went over and talked to the man. I found out that he and his girlfriend did not want money, or food. They did not want to rob us. What they wanted was our prayers. They wanted to hear the word of God. They wanted spiritual and emotional healing. They wanted comfort in their grief. You see, their newborn infant had just died the previous week. After the service I spent some time with them in prayer letting God’s Word comfort them, and then they left as suddenly as they appeared.
Just like those that were there that night did not understand why that couple was there until I told them the full story, we too need to know what is really taking place in this particular Gospel story before we can understand the reason God had Matthew record it for us.
Let’s start at the beginning of the story, with verse 22, where we see Jesus ignoring her cry for help as she called out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terrible from demon-possession.” She must have been doing this for some time as they were walking down the street, for we see that the disciples were upset with her. It appears, because of his lack of action that Jesus does not care about her, but in Jesus silence we are seeing a loving God, for he knows something about her that we don’t know. He knows that she already has faith in him because she came to him in the first place. He knows that the only reason she was there that day was because she had heard of his great deeds; his healing of the sick and demon possessed, and believed he could heal her daughter. He knew that. Jesus was not being rude. Nor did his silence say that he would not help her. For in his silence he was doing what needed to be done; strengthening her faith.
It was only after the disciples wanted him to send her away that Jesus responded with, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” What he is saying is, “I hear your prayers, but only Israel had been given the promise of a Messiah.” Notice though, he did not tell her that he would not help her. He did not refuse her request. He only made a factual statement. Was he rude and uncaring? No, in fact, what he was doing was a loving thing, for Jesus wanted her to have faith in him, for who he was and not just because she had heard of his healings.
As we read verse 25 we see that she would not be stopped. She cried out, “Lord, help me!”, for you see even though she had not actually seen Jesus heal anyone, she would not let what he said to her stop her. She still believed in what she had heard. She knew that he had healed people who were not Jews. She knew and believed.
Jesus replied to her cry, with another odd, but true statement according to the popular Jewish belief of the time. “It is not right to take the children’s food and toss it to their dogs.” Toss it to the dogs. Wow, you have to admit that if someone said that to you it would be like they slapped you in the face. I think that most of us would have either slunk off, or we would have gotten really angry. But did Jesus mean to insult her, to turn her down? No, for even when Jesus made that statement to her, he still was not saying he would not help her, he was continuing to strengthen her faith.
She still believed that Jesus would help her, even if what he said appeared to be an insult. We read that she replied, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” What seems to us to be a shrewd answer by the woman, turning Jesus’ words back on himself, is not, for Jesus has finally put her in her place, the place where he wants all of us to be, a place of great faith.
Jesus does not want us to trust in him according to our feelings or what we think we know about him either. He wants us to trust in him according to his Word, the Holy Scriptures. For you see in this little story, we find that even though Jesus appears at times to not even hear our prayers, or that he is hardhearted, or non-caring, he does, and he will answer our prayers when the time is right, when he has us put us in the right place, the place he wants us to be in.
Do you realize that when we sing or say the Kyrie each Sunday morning we too are crying out to God “Lord have mercy.” just like that Canaanite women did so long ago,
I have always wondered what people are thinking when they sing “Lord have mercy.” I imagine there are some who are thinking, “Mercy, I really don’t need any.” Others might be thinking, “Mercy, there is probably not enough mercy for me, for I am such a sinner.” While others might be thinking, “Mercy, I am not deserving of any mercy”.
What are you thinking about when you sing “Lord have mercy”? Are you thinking that you don’t need any, or that there is not enough, or that you are not deserving of any? I pray that you are thinking that you don’t deserve any mercy at all, in any way, shape, or form, for it is only then that Jesus has finally put you in your place, just like he did to that Canaanite woman of long ago. Now as a child of God you don’t have to settle for the bread crumbs, for you are setting at God’s table, where you get to partake of the real bread of life, Jesus Christ. Amen