Bible Text: Matthew 15:21-28 | Preacher: Pastor Christian Preus | Series: Lent 2020 | At one point Martin Luther got so upset that nobody was coming to church that he just up and left Wittenberg, refused to preach, until his wife and his prince begged him and finally convinced him to come back. He was fed up. And he had every reason to be. Here the people could finally come and hear their forgiveness before God Almighty, with no strings attached, pure mercy from God Himself because of the blood of Jesus shed for them, no more having to work your way to heaven, no more having to pay for it with money, and they wouldn’t come. Here people could finally get actual, practical advice for life, they could learn that being a Christian father and mother, being a faithful husband or wife, working hard, being a good citizen, were just as pleasing to God in heaven as any work of any monk or priest. What beautiful news. But for the most part they didn’t care, didn’t come, didn’t change the way they lived. It’s very frustrating. Because you can’t just force someone to do what’s good for him. I mean you can do that with kids. You just spank them and discipline them and tell them they need to behave, and so long as you’re firm and loving and don’t back down, they will behave. But you can’t do that with adults, not unless you want a totalitarian state where everything is ruled by threat of violence. And of course the pastor can’t do anything like that. Neither can a Christian. We can’t take our members or our friends or our family members and force them to believe, force them to come to church, force them to start disciplining their children, force them to start being a better wife or husband. We can’t force it. We can only teach and preach and encourage and warn and correct and leave it to the Holy Spirit to convince.
What’s very comforting is that Jesus learned the same lesson. That sounds strange to say, right? Jesus didn’t need to learn anything. He’s God. He knows everything, he’s omniscient. But that’s the point – Jesus didn’t need to learn anything, but for our sake He humbled His humanity, let himself suffer as a man, as we suffer, but without sin, and He allowed Himself to learn hard lessons as a man. St. Luke expressly says this about our Lord Jesus, that He grew in wisdom. And this is how our Gospel begins too. Jesus is in the land of Tyre and Sidon. For those of you who are a bit rusty on your biblical geography, Tyre and Sidon are way up on the coast, way north of the land of Israel. Jews don’t live there, at least not many. It’s the land of pagans, of Canaanites, of unbelievers. But Jesus is there. This is an anomaly. Jesus never goes to Tyre and Sidon. He stays in Galilee where his fellow Israelites live and goes down to Judea, to Jerusalem for the big feasts. But He never goes to Tyre and Sidon. In fact, Jesus makes a point of saying this to the Jews, “If the works that were done among you were done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have long since repented in sackcloth and ashes,” Jesus says. But they weren’t. Jesus did His miracles in Jewish lands, not in Tyre and Sidon. But now He’s in Tyre and Sidon, he’s left the Jewish lands. And it’s because He’s fed up. He’s preached and taught and healed and cast out demons, and the people want a sign from heaven, more miracles, for Jesus to prove Himself. Only a faithful few listen to His words and cling to Him as their Savior.
So He leaves them for a time, He goes to the regions of Tyre and Sidon, and that’s where our Gospel picks up, with a woman, a woman that everyone in the world would think couldn’t possibly have faith, a pagan, a Canaanite, coming to Jesus and calling Him Lord and begging for His mercy.
Now this is the first lesson we learn today. Jesus literally left the Israelites. He just up and left. If we despise the Word of God, if we take it for granted, if we imagine that everything else in the world is more important, everything else needs our time and our attention more, the sports and the job and the Facebook and the TV, we will wake up one day and see that Jesus is gone from our lives. We won’t think of Him, we won’t care about Him, except maybe when things are really hard and we need a miracle from Him. Luther described the preaching of the Gospel, the preaching of Christ crucified to cancel all our guilt and make us children of God, He described it as a raincloud. It rains for a time on a land and then moves elsewhere. And history shows this is exactly what happens. Europe is no longer made up of religious countries, no longer filled with people calling themselves Christians, because they took Jesus for granted, didn’t go to church, didn’t fill their homes with prayers to Jesus and eventually but inevitably faith just died.
God help us never to allow this to happen in our country, in our state, in our city, in our homes, in this church. And I don’t want to lay this on us as some burden. It’s quite the opposite. Jesus removes our burdens. He carries our sorrows. We need Him. He’s our God. He made us and not we ourselves. When we sinned and fell away from Him and loved ourselves instead of Him, He didn’t abandon us or wipe us off the face of the earth, He came to us, He took on our flesh and carried our guilt, suffered our sufferings, died our death, and rose to give us everlasting life with Him. He has loved us so far beyond what we deserve, He has gone to such ridiculous lengths to make us His own and free us from the misery of sin and death. And He stands now for us still, He comes to us still, He forgives us and feeds us with His body and blood and promises us that He will be our God into eternity, that we will live with Him in righteousness and purity forever. Trusting in this God is no burden, praying to Him at home, reading His Word, seeking His mercy and His instruction here at church every Sunday, this is no burden. It’s the relief, the peace, the strength that Christian faith relies on.
And this is what the Syro-phoenician woman shows us. She’s so far from the apathy that drove Jesus away from Galilee. Apathy is the most destructive of sins. Apathy means not caring. The typical cool teenager attitude of, “Whatever.” That’s what apathy is. Whatever. It makes no sense. Does God exist? Did He become a man? Do we deserve His punishment for our sins? Must we suffer pain and death on this earth? Do we not hurt others and have others hurt us? Don’t we need forgiveness and don’t we thirst for some purpose to life? Is there life after death? Didn’t this God live our life and die for us? Do we see this? The almighty God died for us, shed God’s blood, suffered divine pain, for us, for our everlasting life. Apathy, not caring about this, is not only nonsensical, it’s simply horrible. No other sin can keep you in the end from Jesus, the worst sins of adultery and pornography and drunkenness and abortion and homosexuality and murder, His blood is enough to cover them, more than enough, one drop of it has power to win forgiveness for this world and all its sin. But apathy, not caring, brushing aside the blood of God as irrelevant, this chases Jesus away. God keep us from it always.
This woman is the opposite of apathetic. She knows what she needs. She feels it in every fiber of her being. She sees the pain in her own child. She knows she’s helpless to do anything for this girl for whom she suffered the torture of childbirth and whom she loves more than life itself. She sees the effects of sin. She knows she needs a Savior. And she knows who this Savior is. She cares, and her faith seeks Him out and will not give up. It’s tenacious, constant.
And then Jesus ignores her. He refuses even to look at her. He insults her. There are seriously few things more aggravating than when you talk to someone and he ignores you (keep that in mind, husbands). Or worse, and this is what Jesus does next, when you talk to someone and instead of talking to you he talks about you to other people with you right there. So that’s what this woman gets. Jesus first ignoring her and then talking about her to his Jewish disciples.
Faith is tested. This is the second lesson for today. If it isn’t tested it dies. The sword that isn’t tested breaks in battle. The car that isn’t tested drives people off cliffs. The faith that isn’t tested dies in apathy, in not caring. Faith needs to be tested to remain strong, so that we see that this Jesus is actually worth pursuing, that we’d actually go through shame and pain and doubt and uncertainty to arrive at the place where He finally answers us, because His answering us is worth everything. Without testing, without us needing relief from pain or from some nasty sinful habit or from the death of those we love or from sickness or from a guilty conscience, and God making us wait, not answering our prayer according to our time but allowing us to suffer with it, without this testing we lose sight of how much we need our God and how miserable life would be without Him.
And look at this woman. She’s already suffering. She already has a cross. Her kid is possessed by a devil. And Jesus still tests her. Still makes her wait. This happens. Bad thing after bad thing piles up, one after another, until we think God’s picking on us. Look at the woman. It sure looks like God’s picking on her, doesn’t it. But He’s not. He loves her. And the testing upon testing is for her good, and it’s for ours too when God sends us our crosses. Because it destroys our apathy. It makes it impossible for us not to care. Jesus tests faith, so that faith will never give up. It clings to Jesus’ words, makes Him own His promises, trusts that He will be faithful, because He must be, this is Who He is.
Jesus finally speaks to this woman. But here comes the hardest and the harshest test. It is not good to take the children’s bread and give it to the dogs, Jesus says. He calls her a dog. He says she’s unworthy of Him. She’s a pagan. He’s come for the Jews, for the Israelites. But she clings to his word. Fine, I’ll be a dog. I know very well I’m unworthy. I know my sin. I know my past. I know I couldn’t possibly do anything to deserve anything from You, the holy God, and I won’t try to say I’m as good as those other people, I’ll be the lowest of the low, a dog, only give me the scraps, the crumbs of Your mercy, give me what You promised.
You see what happens here. Jesus tests her to make her strong. And she doesn’t give up. She clings to His word no matter what. Because she knows in those words, even if it’s hidden, in those words are mercy and love for her and her daughter. And she stops Jesus, she stops God, in his tracks. The One who fled the apathy in Israel now can’t flee from the faith that won’t let go of Him. And He wonders at the woman’s faith. It gives Him great happiness, great joy to see it. And at long last He gives her what she needs, what her faith cried for, He gives her His mercy.
And that’s not the end. It can’t be. This woman goes home to a daughter who is healed. And she doesn’t forget her God. This isn’t a one and done. She tells her daughter. She tells her husband. She tells her neighbors. She prays to her Lord. She seeks after His word all her life. She learns what it means that the psalmist says, “A day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere…” And we learn the same thing. We come with our trials and our crosses, our need above all for our God’s mercy and forgiveness and the knowledge that He will care for us in this life and forever. A day here, where Jesus answers our greatest need, where He comes again to us, who claim no worthiness, who know our sin, who seek no sign from heaven, but instead cry only for His mercy, and He gives it, full and free, not the crumbs, but everything, Himself, His very body and blood, everything His precious life and death won for us, forgiveness, righteousness and innocence, and inheritance in heaven, the right to be called children of God, a day here in the house of God is better than a thousand elsewhere.
Faith is a stubborn thing. It knows what God has promised and it knows what it needs. Like Jacob at the river Jabbok, faith wrestles with God until he blesses us. And God will, our Lord Jesus will bless us, wait for it, it will surely come, because He has promised and He never fails, and what we have now by faith we will see forever in the resurrection. Amen.