Have you ever been in a situation where it is clear that you really weren’t the first pick? Perhaps it was in the playground, playing cricket, and two captains chose the two sides, and you watched as everyone else got picked before you.
Or perhaps it was at that wedding reception, where you find yourself on the furthest table from the bridal table, behind a column, near the door to the kitchen. Or perhaps, more pointedly, someone else couldn’t make the reception, and you just got the invite to the church, but you get bumped up to the reception too, so that the spot at the reception center doesn’t go to waste.
What is your reaction as you think about those situations? You might think, “Oh well, I’d rather not be there! If I am just your last choice, forget about it. I’d rather wash my hair, or join the chess club at lunch time.”
But would your response be any different if the cricket team was the Australian Cricket team? You were the selector’s last choice, sure, but would you give back the baggy green cap? Would you tell the selectors, “Oh, no, if I’m not your first pick, forget it, I’ll play 5th grade in the park, thanks very much.”
Would it be any different if the wedding was Prince Frederick, Crown Prince of Denmark, to Mary Donaldson? Would you say, “Too bad! I was obviously at the bottom of the list. I’ll stay in tonight, thanks, and watch TV.” Or would you say: “Yeah, I’ll take the baggy green! Yeah, I’ll sit next to the photographer on the far away table, because I’m just glad to be here. The crumbs are good enough for me.”
Our passage today is Matthew 15, and essential to understanding Matthew 15 is understanding where you fit in the big picture. Are you on the B list, or perhaps the C list? And is that so bad? Is it so bad to be an also-ran? Or are the benefits in recognizing your mediocrity? Dirty Harry said, “A good man knows his limitations.” Is there something liberating in knowing your many limitations?
I don’t know about women, but I know that men naturally rank each other. We have a tape at home, and my kids like to remind me of it. They know about it. On the tape there’s a child’s voice that my mother assures me is mine. But more than that, I actually say, “Hi this is Matthew”. And of the many things I say is this, “At school, I am the second strongest, and you should see me muscles, on me legs and on me arms and on me… yeah yeah. And when you see them, you’ll be scared to death. So’s me mummy.”
How did I know I was the second strongest? Why not the first strongest? Because the process of ranking was going on. I think we all do it. I’m stronger than him. I’m faster than him. I’m pretty than her. I’m smarter than her. I’m richer than him. I’m more successful than her.
The Pharisees did it too. We pick up the story in Matthew 15 verse 1. The Pharisees and teachers of the law come to Jesus. And they used to rank themselves against others. “God, thank you that I’m not like other men, robbers, evil doers adulterers, tax collectors.” These are the original ‘Holier than thou’ people. When they saw others they thought, “I’m cleaner than him’. I’m purer than her. I’m more holy than him.”
This process of ranking underlies their question in verse 2. Chapter 15 verse 2:
Why do your disciples break the traditions of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat. (NIV)
The Pharisees here aren’t the hygiene Gestapo. They don’t check people’s nails before they tuck into a pie. They are talking about a ritual.
This was an old Jewish ritual, handed down from generation to generation. A person would go shopping in the market place, buying, selling, trading, going about their business. But before they would eat, they would take a handful of water. It was no surgeon’s seven minute scrub—it was a symbol. It symbolized that a person was cleansing themselves from the outside world, for everyone was in the market place, sinful people, gentiles, tax collectors, prostitutes, bleeding women, people with discharges. In the outside world, there were ceremonially unclean people, and these people were dangerous. They would make you unclean.
So what does this ritual of washing say? The enemy is outside. The problem is outside. On the inside, you are clean. If you were left alone, you would be clean. And if those nasty people weren’t out there, you would be clean. But because of them, you need to have a ceremonial washing. Clean the outside, and you are OK.
But their problem is like a man who gets up one bright Saturday morning, and decides to wash his car. He does the right thing, and takes out the bucket, the shammy, he drives the car on the grass, because we’ve got water restrictions, and he spends a morning washing his car. It looks brilliant on the outside. But then he decides to go for a cruise. It’s a nice clean car. But he notices some disturbing tendencies in his nice clean car. So disturbing that he takes his clean car to the mechanic. And as the mechanic hovers underneath the shiny, waxed, vacuumed car, he shakes his head, and he says, “I think you should sit down. I’m very sorry.” And then he starts speaking in a strange language, talking about head gaskets, burning oil, worn out rings. And the man only understands the mechanic’s concluding words, “It would be cheaper to get a new car.”
It’s no good for the unfortunate car-owner to protest, “But I just washed this car! It’s buffed, vacuumed, with nice car deodorant hanging from the rear vision mirror.” Washing the car won’t fix it. The problem’s not the dirt on the outside but the engine on the inside.
Eating with unwashed hands is not the problem. The problem is the human heart, and the evil things that come out of the heart. Look at verses 18 to 20:
18But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart and these make a man ‘unclean’. 19For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. 20These are what make a man ‘unclean’. But eating with unwashed hands does not make him ‘unclean’.
The heart of the problem is the problem of the human heart. Outside is not the problem. Inside is the problem. The problem is your heart and my heart.
Why do you and I say the stupid, sinful things that we say? We say them because those things are inside us, in our hearts. And when we say them, that is who we are on the inside. The sad judgement on our world is that God has given all people over to the sinfulness of their hearts. It has been so since Genesis 3. Genesis 6:5 is one of the saddest verses in the bible.
The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. (Gen 6:5 NIV)
There is a traitor in the camp. There is an enemy inside. It is your heart, and my heart, looking to betray us. That is the source of our uncleanness.
You don’t need to go beyond the first one on Jesus’ list: “evil thoughts”. We could talk about all the others: theft, murder, sexual immorality, false testimony. But they all start with “evil thoughts”, bad thinking, sinful hearted attitudes and beliefs. We may not have acted on all of them. We may not even have wanted them. But they are there. resident in our hearts. And I’m sorry to say it, but they will be there till the day each of us dies. And as you grow to know the Lord more and more, he will show us them, more and more. In the mean time, our job is to put them to death, and fight against them.
Friends, a great change happens in us when we become Christians. We receive a new nature, a new heart, and a new Spirit. We have new thoughts, new desires, a new purpose and new attitudes in life. But still, we must never deny this fact, that the heart of man is deceitful and wicked beyond cure. As Paul says in Romans 7, “When we want to do good, evil is right there with me.” Even when we love God’s law, there is another law at work in our bodies, waging war against the law of our mind (Rom 7:21-23). “Nothing good lives in me, that is, in my flesh, in my sinful nature, my flesh.” Circumstances may squeeze what is in us out. Pressure may bring it to the surface. Unlooked for temptations may coax these things from us. Anger may cause it to erupt. But this we must say: evil was always there, and at some level it will be there, until the day when Jesus returns and God makes all things new.
So, can you see what we are really like? We are sinful people. That is the first thing we must learn from this passage. And little religious ceremonies and rituals will not change that. And understanding this, perhaps we can better understand Jesus’ interactions with the Canaanite woman in verses 21 to 28.
Jesus moves from Galilee to Tyre and Sidon. Jesus has moved into non-Jewish territory. Tyre is in modern Lebanon, it was a city by the sea, a place where pagan worship was the native religion.
But Jesus doesn’t go there to do mission and preach the kingdom. No, it seems that Jesus’ is going for other reasons. Perhaps it was for a holiday, a bit of necessary rest and relaxation, perhaps he wanted to spend time with his disciples, to teach them.
But sometimes, even Jesus doesn’t get what he wanted, like when he died on the cross. It’s part of being human. It’s good for us to remember this when things don’t turn out our way. And Jesus’ happy seclusion is foiled, for a woman comes out to meet him.
This woman is like a heat seeking missile. Crying out, going straight to Jesus, we might describe her as desperate, even hysterical. She seems to be something of an embarrassment as she draws unwanted attention to Jesus, the disciples, and herself.
Matthew describes her as a “Canaanite”, in other words, a descendant of the ancient enemies of Israel. She is from a pagan culture, a religion full of idolatry and evil. But she knows something about Jesus, in fact, she knows more than the Pharisees. So she says in verse 22:
Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon possession. (NIV)
What do you expect Jesus to say? What do you expect Jesus to do?
Is not Jesus merciful and compassionate? Did he not come to drive out demons and heal the sick? Is this not Jesus, who went around doing good? Then be surprised by verses 23 and 24:
23Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.” 24He [Jesus] answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”. (NIV)
Here is a woman with desperate and legitimate need. She has a demon terrorized daughter. She comes to the one who can heal with a word. And Jesus refuses to talk to her.
He is fobbing her off so much that the disciples are embarrassed. “Come on Jesus, send her away. In other words, why don’t you just do what she wants! Get her off our backs. Look at the attention she is drawing to us.”
Jesus’ reticence to help her can especially be contrasted with his actions when he returns to the Jewish area, Galilee, where he is more than happy to heal. Look at verses 30 to 31:
Great crowds came to him, bringing the lame, the blind, the crippled, the mute and many others, and laid them at his feet; and he healed them. The people were amazed when they saw the mute speaking, the crippled made well, the lame walking and the blind seeing. And they praised the God of Israel.
That is what Jesus did in Jewish areas, but not in the “Canaanite” areas. Jesus doesn’t just do things for convenience, to get someone off his back, but Jesus by refusing to answer the woman is making an important point. Jesus “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
Jesus has good boundaries. He knows what was his job, and what wasn’t his job. And this woman’s request falls outside his job description. Jesus’ earthly ministry was limited to Israel. Jesus was sent to a lost world. The Jews were lost. The Non-Jews were lost. But since Israel was lost, and they were God’s special Old Testament people, there was more than enough work among the Jews. The Father did not send the Son to Canaanites. He came to Israelites, Galileans, and Judeans, his own people, the Jewish people, to his own race, the descendants of Abraham. And so Jesus gives the woman the silent treatment.
How do you go when you get the silent treatment, when someone decides that they won’t talk to you? Horrible, isn’t it? How do you think you’d cope with Jesus giving you the silent treatment? I’m sure I would have found it very hard to deal with.
Jesus does still give the silent treatment, because we can cry and cry to Jesus, and he just doesn’t seem to respond. He doesn’t seem to answer our heart felt cries. Lord Jesus, please save my mother, my father, my brother, my friend. We ask, and we are promised that we will receive, but what do we see? Nothing, at least, nothing yet, nothing we can see.
What do you do when Jesus sends you silence in answer to your cries? Do you stop crying out? Do you go away from Jesus? O well, Jesus has his favourites? He is not listening.
Not so this woman. So great is her need, so sure of Jesus’ compassion, that she continues to cry out to him. And she was right to do so, for while Jesus doesn’t answer, he has been listening. Verse 25 to 26:
The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord help me!”, she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.” (NIV)
The woman in desperation kneels before Jesus. And Jesus is prompted to an answer. And perhaps a more timid person might have preferred Jesus’ silence to Jesus’ answer. For the words are harsh.
It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs. (NIV)
It is not nice to be called a dog in any culture. I said once to a lady who was particularly determined to get something to happen that she wanted done: “you are like a dog with a bone”. She was not happy. “How dare you call me a dog.” In vain did I protest, “I didn’t call you a dog, I said you were like a dog with a bone with this.” “No, you called me a dog!” You risk great offense likening someone to a dog. And Jesus’ words do exactly that. The Jews are the children, the Canaanite’s are the dogs.
That is, it is Israel’s privilege to receive the ministry of the Messiah. It is wrong to then give those benefits to non-Israelites.
My father-in-law used to come over on Wednesday nights for tea. And Jazz is his little lap dog. That makes Jazz my dog-in-law. And Jazz loves ice cream. However, once I gave Jazz his ice cream before I gave the humans ice cream. And my father-in-law said, “No, he must remember his place. He gets it second. He mustn’t think he is top dog”. The dog eats after the children.
This is a parable. The children are the people of Israel. Jesus was offering them the bread. And the bread was the news of the kingdom of God. Jesus limited his own and his disciples’ personal ministry to the Jewish people.
But this woman is a careful listener. She doesn’t deny what Jesus says. She is happy to think of herself as a dog. “Yes, I am a gentile. I understand that I am on the B list”. But she realizes that even the dogs have a rightful place around the table. Verse 27:
Yes Lord, she said, but even the dos eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table. (NIV)
Like in that meat pie ad, where the dog hangs around waiting hopefully for the scraps, hoping that a family member will have had enough to eat. “Yes, that’s me”, thinks the woman, “Come on, do you have something spare for me—a crust, a crumb, a bit of gristle—the crumbs will be enough for me. Even your crumbs will satisfy.”
And so Jesus exclaims, “O woman, how great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” (NIV)
This woman is the example of great faith. She pushes and pushes and pushes and doesn’t give up. She is the model believer.
It is possible that pushy people are arrogant: but not her, no arrogance, but persistence. Her faith forced her way through the barriers that the Lord himself put up against her. She overcame even the Lord. She wrestled with God, like Jacob, and overcame.
Christians are pushy people with God. But we are not arrogant. We push forward to the throne of grace boldly. “Bold I approach the ever living God to claim the crown through Christ my own” Yet we do so humbly. “I have no right to be here. I am a dog.” Consider the Prayer of Humble Access, p125 AAPB.
This raises an important question. Most of us are Gentiles. So are we still the dogs of the Jewish race? And there is a sense that the answer is “Yes”. We are not the natural children. We are the ring-ins. We are the wild olive branches grafted into the cultivated olive tree (Rom 11).
But there has also been a change in God’s mission strategy, a change that God foretold long before, for God intended that his Messiah would be rejected by his own people. And God’s people killed the Messiah, by the hand of gentile soldiers. But God also raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus rose as King, not just of the Jews. But his resurrection and ascension marked Jesus out as the ruler of the whole world.
And it was then that the risen king, Jesus Christ, turned to consider us Gentiles. Good things are worth waiting for, and Jesus had a good thing in store for us, for he had a special plan.
For at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus said, “Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations.” Go to the nations. Disciple them. Baptize them. Teach them. For I now have authority over all the earth. Just as God said through Isaiah:
It is too small a thing for you to be my servant, to restore the tribes of Jacob and bring back those of Israel I have kept. I will also make you a light for the gentiles, that you may bring my salvation to the ends of the earth.” (Isaiah 49:6 NIV)
And the feeding of the 4000 shows that the crumbs of the Messiah are more than enough to feed the whole world. The feeding of the 4000 we read about is a foretaste of his heavenly banquet. And the leftovers from the Jews are enough to feed the whole world. The crumbs are enough for us.