Sunday Sermon 16th Aug 2020

 Matt 15: 21-28 16 August 2020

There are some stories which are common to each of the Gospels but

there are some events which we may only find in one Gospel. To understand

why, we need to understand first of all why the Gospels were written and for

whom.

Matthew’s Gospel was written for a community of Jewish Christians who

were struggling with their new faith and identity. They were a small community

within a larger Jewish community, so any messages relating to the status of non-

Jews was of special importance to them.

The Jewish people had been waiting for the promised Messiah, and

Matthew’s Gospel shouts that Jesus is the Messiah. That is one of the reasons

why Matthew’s Gospel begins with the long and quite frankly tedious lineage of

Jesus. Matthew wants everyone to understand that the Messiah is here.

I must say that when I saw the Gospel passage for today, I think I

groaned. For this is one of those passages which has us wondering exactly what

is going on. Could Jesus really have ignored this desperate woman, and worse

still, insulted her by calling her a dog?

And why was Jesus always arguing with the Pharisees. This is not the

gentle Jesus, meek and mild, which we all remember from our Sunday school

days.

But these stories, the arguing and the healing tell us about the identity of

Jesus and his mission.

The Pharisees are complaining that Jesus and his disciples are neglecting

religious ritual, which they thought was the most important part of worship.

But Jesus isn’t denying the important of ritual – rather he is trying to get

them to understand that love and compassion are far more important. It serves

no purpose obeying the ritual washing and the dietary laws if people hate each

other and treat each other badly.

It is love and mercy that God requires. Time and again we read of Jesus

telling the people that he has not come to abolish the Laws, rather he has come

to fulfill the laws.

After the encounter with the Pharisees, Jesus has traveled near the

predominantly Gentile area of Tyre and Sidon, not for the purpose of evangelism,

but rather as a “retreat”, a time away from the pressures and the controversy

which he has attracted wherever he has gone.

Only three times in the Gospels does Jesus minister to people outside the

Jewish community, so this meeting with the Gentile woman was very significant.

We know very little of this woman.

We know that she is a Canaanite; we know that she is the mother of a sick

child. She’s not just waiting passively for something to happen; this nameless

woman “comes out to meet him. She is actively searching for Jesus. And when

she meets Jesus, she acknowledges him immediately. “Have mercy on me,

Lord, Son of David”. A profession of faith from an outsider, a Gentile woman, at

a time when many of the Jews failed to recognize Jesus and accept his ministry.

She is taking an enormous risk here, a gentile woman approaching a

Jewish rabbi. I have an image of Jesus and his group walking along the road,

being pursued and harangued by a very determined woman, who would not shut

up and leave them alone.

This Canaanite woman must be desperate, but she is not only rebuffed,

she is insulted as well. To be called a dog by the man you have begged for help

must be crushing.

Dog was a term the Jews commonly applied to gentiles because the Jews

considered that these outsiders were no more likely to receive God’s blessings

than were wild dogs. Jesus was telling this woman that his mission was first and

foremost to the Jews, because God wanted them to present the message of

salvation to the rest of the world.

She is prepared to be insulted, rebuffed and humbled to have her prayers

answered, so certain is she that Jesus can help her. And in the end, Jesus

relents, and her daughter is healed.

My own experience in ministry has taught me that it is when people are at

their most vulnerable, their most desperate that they are most free to call on

Jesus.

When they have tried all the other options, when their own resources are

exhausted, and nothing else has worked, that is when they can recognize that

they need something more than their own self.

But what I really want us to think about this morning is this: what would

have happened if Jesus had not relented and healed the woman’s sick daughter.

Would we still been reading about the woman two thousand years later, or would

it have been left out of Jesus life story?

Would she have gone home, telling everyone that Jesus was a fraud and

not the promised Messiah. That Jesus was just another con man who performed

magic tricks.

There are times when we might feel just like that, especially if our prayers

are not answered in the way we had hoped. We might think that God, is not who

we believed God to be. There are times when we might be disappointed with

God.

We might wonder, what is the point in prayer? How can we know that God

hears our prayers and we are not fooling ourselves? The author Philip Yancy

calls prayer “keeping company with God”. I love that description, not for its

theological depth, but for its simplicity. When we pray, we enter into God’s

presence.

We pray because Jesus gave us the example of prayer. As we read

through the Gospels, we frequently find Jesus seeking solitude for prayer, and he

seems especially intentional about prayer before the major events in his life.

He prays at his baptism, at his transfiguration and in the garden at

Gethsemane. as he contemplates what is to come. He prays for his disciples. He

prays for those who are yet to become his disciples. Prayer is so important to

Jesus that he teaches his disciples to pray, what is known to us as the Lord’s

Prayer. That is the example which Jesus has left us.

Prayer is a two-way conversation. There is no way we can grow in our

Christian life if we ignore the practice of prayer. But we need to understand that

the purpose of prayer is not for God to please us or give in to our demands, but

rather to change us and deepen our faith. Prayer offered in true faith

acknowledges that it is God’s will be done, not our will. Accepting God’s will,

means that we relinquish control of the situation. I suspect that, like me, you may

have found this a difficult thing to do at times, because we like to be in control.

But I have learned that no prayer is ever wasted, because time keeping

company with God is never wasted. We are changed by prayer, whatever the

outcome.

The Canaanite woman had only a brief encounter with Jesus the rabbi.

She came looking for Jesus, and had a life-changing experience. Each time we

leave our comfort zones and go searching for Jesus, we empty ourselves, and

that is when God almighty rushes in.

AMEN