NINTH SUNDAY after PENTECOST

August 14, 2011

Text: Matthew 15:21-28

Pastor Dale G. Bauer

Who is my Jesus? I ask myself that question frequently. In agreement with missionary Paul, I call him Lord. He is the primary relationship in my life. As an orthodox Christian, I am Trinitarian. Jesus is God, as much God as the Father and the Holy Spirit. He is part of the godhead that created heaven and earth. Standing on the shoulders of the church’s fathers and mothers, I believe that he was at once both fully God and fully human.

My Jesus is gentle and compassionate. He is moved by illness and heals. He detests evil and casts out demons. He suffers quietly. At his trial he hardly objects to the distortions and lies. He dies saying really very little.

Unlike me, he is non-reactive. He doesn’t get defensive and uptight. He was a non-anxious,
well differentiated, presence. That is, he doesn’t fly off the handle in a panic.

So the Jesus I bump into as I read in the fifteenth chapter of Matthew surprises and distresses
me. He comes off petty and rude—not the Jesus I love so much. He is a “downer.”

Jesus is out of his homeland and familiar territory, Galilee. He’s headed about 35 miles north to Tyre and Sidon. They are ports on the Mediterranean Sea. They are major ports of a once great naval power, Phoenicia. What Jesus is doing there we are not told. But the geographical implications are incredible. Jesus has left the homeland of the Jews. He has left the area of the Promised Land given to the Hebrews by God. Jesus is in a pagan, non-Jewish area.

Big deal. It was a big deal. According to Jewish Law at the time of Jesus, recorded in the Mishnah, here’s what Jews thought of non-Jews:

Cattle may not be left in the inns of the gentiles since they are suspected of bestiality; nor may a woman remain alone with them since they are suspected of lewdness; nor a man remain alone with them since they are suspected of shedding blood. The daughter of an Israelite may not assist a gentile woman in childbirth since she would be assisting to bring to birth a child of idolatry, but a gentile woman may assist the daughter of an Israelite. (Mishnah, Abodah
Zarah 2.1)

Jesus is minding his own business when a pure pagan Canaanite woman shouts at him, Hey Jesus, help me. My daughter is possessed. Dear Jesus ignores her, even though she is still shouting. You know, when someone you don’t like says something you don’t want to hear, and you pretend you didn’t hear it. The disciples are annoyed by her shouting and ask Jesus to do something about it.

Jesus tells them that he is not interested in her, either, because his mission is only to the lost sheep of Israel, the twelve tribes, the sons and daughter of David. He’s got a focus, as all good
leaders do.

That doesn’t stop this brash woman. She gets in from of him and kneels before him, asking again—shouting again?—for help with her daughter’s condition. Now, that’s persistence on the woman’s part. Here’s where Jesus gets rude. He tells her that he is preparing a banquet for Israel and asks why he should share the children of God’s food and give it to a pagan like her, a dog.

She doesn’t give up. Still on her knees, she says she’ll take whatever the Jews and Jesus don’t want. Now that’s persistence. That’s bold persistence. And on the basis of the persistence her faith allows her, Jesus casts out the demon from the woman’s daughter.

Persistence Pays. Not always, of course. But trying over and over and over achieves
amazing things.

Persistence Pays. In God’s relationship to you and me. Really. He created us. We walked away. He taps Abraham on the shoulder, makes promises of a great nation to an infertile couple. He rescues those people in slavery in Egypt and forges a relationship with them. He gives them a promised land. When they walk away from him, he returns with prophet after prophet reminding them that he is God alone. In Jesus he forges anew relationship in the covenant of his blood.

Persistence Pays. In our relationship to God. Any relationship we have with God is a gift from him. It’s called grace. We appropriate simply by faith, by believing. But that faith is a growing, living thing. I love what this man said about our relationship to God in life:

This life, therefore, is not righteousness,

but growth in righteousness;

Not health, but healing;

Not being, but becoming.

Not rest, but exercise.

We are not yet what we shall be,

but we are growing toward it.

This process is not yet finished,

but is going on.

This is not the end, but it is the road.

All does not yet gleam in glory,

but all is being purified.

Persistence Pays. In our relationship to each other. Jesus reminds us to forgive others and we say that over and over again in the Lord’s Prayer. When Peter suggested that forgiving someone seven times was generous, Jesus suggested trying that four hundred and ninety
times.

Persistence Pays. Scholars make the case that the story of the Canaanite woman shifts Christianity from a sect of Judaism to a faith for the world. Peter calls Jesus, the Christ, in the most pagan city of Israel, Caesarea Phillipi. Missionary Paul takes it to an even greater level. And kept proclaiming the Good News even when he was thrown out of town after town.

Persistence Pays. A great source of reflection on Christian faith is a group of monks who lived in the Egyptian desert in the fourth and fifth centuries, A.D. One day a monk came to another monk and said,

“What shall I do, Abba, for I have fallen?” The old man said to him, “Get up again.” The brother said, “I have gotten up again, but I have fallen again.” The old man said, “Get up again and again.” So then the brother said, “How many times (should I get up)?” The old man said, “Until you are taken up either in virtue or in sin.”

Amen.