After nine months in the Old Testament reading about how undeserving and faithless we as a people are, it's hard to believe that now it's all about getting up enough faith to speak assertively to a Holy God. There must be something more that I haven't seen before, something that isn't contained within the few lines of this conversation between a Canaanite woman and a Master she has just met.
Jesus ignored her...."I've got my hands full dealing with the lost sheep of Israel....It's not right to take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to dogs...."
She was quick. "You're right, Master, but beggar dogs do get scraps from the master's table...."
Jesus gave in. "Oh, woman, your faith is something else. What you want is what you get." (15:23-28)Excuse me as I once again refer to King's Cross for insight. Many writers have given great insight into this short passage that adds such depth and richness to the gospel. Gotta share this with you!
"In western cultures we don't have anything like this kind of assertiveness. We only have assertion of our rights.... This is rightless assertiveness, something we know little about. She's not saying, 'Lord, give me what I deserve on the basis of my goodness.' She's saying, 'Give me what I don't deserve on the basis of your goodness - and I need it now.'
"Do you see how remarkable it is that she recognizes and accepts both the challenge and the offer hidden within it?
"James Edwards put it wonderfully, 'She appears to understand the purpose of Israel's Messiah better than Israel does. Her pluck and persistence are testimony to her trust in the sufficiency and surplus of Jesus...'
"Similarly, Martin Luther was amazed and moved by this encounter, because he saw the gospel in it. This woman saw the gospel - that you're more wicked than you ever believed, but at the same time more loved and accepted than you ever dared to hope.... See, there are two ways to fail to let Jesus be your Savior. One, is being too proud, having a superiority complex - not to accept his challenge. But the other is through an inferiority complex - being so self-absorbed that you say, 'I'm just so awful that God couldn't love me.' That is, not to accept his offer...." (Tim Keller)It's not about my faith, my rights, my low or high opinion of myself. It's about the One who mercifully extends redemption to me when I don't deserve a crumb. Closing today with a prayer based on this story, from the Book of Common Prayer,
"We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy." (Thomas Cranmer)
1 comment:
I had a hard time with those verses as well. Jesus does seem a bit curt and dismissive with her. Loved the perspective from Tim Keller, Staci.
I found Eugene Peterson's notes helpful as well:
"The incident Matthew relates about Jesus and the Canaanite woman is puzzling. We can hardly avoid being puzzled because Jesus is so rude. And so silent.
There's a silence that deepens relationships. It's a reflective silence. It's a silence that absorbs all that is being said by the other person. Intimacy is awakened in such silence. Experiencing such silence, I discover that I've been listened to, that my words have been taken absolutely seriously, that I'm being responded to as a unique person - too important a person to just be turned off with a phrase.
That's the kind of silence Jesus was expressing here. There's something of this in everyone who comes to God for help. And like the woman, we all tend to come to God with a note of last-resort pleading on the chance that some good might come from it. But that's a fundamentally false position in relation to God. He isn't around for our convenience. He isn't something we insert into our lives to help us through distress. He's our Lord. He's the center of our lives, not the periphery. He tells us what to do; we don't tell him. He examines us; we don't examine him.
Jesus didn't answer the woman's first request. He didn't reject it; he was just silent. And the silence was purgative. It cleansed the self-seeking part of her. In the silence the woman came closer to Jesus and changed her plea to a simple, "Help me."
God's silence gives us an atmosphere in which to change our prayers. We change our position, revise our petitions. And what comes out next is something much more simple and basic: "Help me."
We're puzzled initially by both the silence and the speech of Christ. Neither is what we expect of him. But that's because we don't know him very well. For when he is silent, he is still listening. When he rebukes, he is still loving.
He's listening to you now as you pray, even though he may be silent.
And he's loving you now, even though his answer may not be what you expected." Conversations, pg. 1512
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