Amen. Please be seated. And if you have a Bible, let me invite you to turn with me to Matthew chapter 15 verses 21 through 28. Let me say it's great to be back with you this morning.
I was on retreat with other ministers this last week. It was very refreshing and encouraging, but there's no place like worshiping here at Redeemer. Many thanks to the session for sending me in for Scott and Dan for preaching morning and evening last Sunday. This morning we returned to our study in Matthew.
So it's been a couple of weeks. And here we discovered that Jesus has taken his disciples on a kind of retreat that is away from the crowds that pressed them and even to anyway, far distant land and people. They're no longer in Israel as we encountered them here at verse 21. And we discovered that Jesus has taken them away to the land of the Gentiles north of Israel, but where again the pressing needs of ministry press in on them.
And here we have an appeal to the compassion of Jesus as a woman comes crying. And Jesus shows himself to be the Messiah not only for the Jew, but for the Gentile. And so let me invite you to give your attention to the reading of God's holy and inspired word. Matthew chapter 15 beginning at verse 21.
And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. But he did not answer her word.
And his disciples came and begged him saying, send her away for she is crying out after us. And he answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. But she came and knelt before him saying, Lord help me. And he answered, it is not right.
And take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. She said, yes, Lord, yet even the dogs, the crumbs that fall from their master's table. Then Jesus answered her, oh, woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.
And her daughter was healed instantly. Amen. This is God's word. Let's look in the prayer.
Father, bless to our hearts, not only this reading, but the hearing of the preaching of your word in Jesus name. Amen. Jesus cut right to the chase. First point, God's grace is for the unlikliest people in the most unlikely of places.
You see that verse 21. Jesus goes away from their withdraws to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Now for some time, Jesus had been attempting to get away from the crowds with his disciples, away from the multitudes for a time of refreshment and teaching and to prepare them for the ministry that is to come. But every time he withdrew, the crowds would follow him or find him.
You remember he had gotten a boat to go across the Sea of Galilee. The people figured out where he was going and the crowds beat him there. And so the crowds were always pressing on him. Then they came back across the sea.
And there was another crowd of people. And then people sent for people. And so here to get away, he goes north out of Galilee, north out of Israel to two cities or a district of two cities on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. Tyre is about 25 miles or so north of Galilee.
And Sidon is about 25 miles or so north of that. So they're located in what's modern-day Lebanon north of Israel. So what has he done? What's he done?
Now think about this. He's just, and if you remember from a couple weeks, the last few weeks, in chapter 15, 1 through 20, he's just had lengthy conversations about what's clean and unclean with the Pharisees and scribes who came to him from Jerusalem. They've criticized him in verse 1 for his disciples wash or don't wash. That is, they, before they eat, they have ceremonially unclean hands and yet they eat.
And then Jesus said to them in verse 11, it's not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person. So it doesn't matter what your hand touched. But what comes out of the mouth, this defiles a person. That is what comes out of the mouth was in the heart.
And the problem with people is the heart. We have dirty hearts, defiled hearts, marred, misshapen hearts. We need Jesus to wash us clean internally. And then what does he do after that discussion?
He immediately takes his disciples out of Israel to a place full of Gentiles whom Jews thought it was unlawful to associate with or visit. And oh, if you touch them, you were unclean. Touching Israelite is fine. I mean, unless they're unclean.
But touch of Gentile, you are unclean. That's how the Pharisees and scribes thought. That's how the Jews thought. That's how his disciples had been taught to think.
And Jesus brings them there to give them a lot of lesson in God's grace, where they find a heart made clean by God through faith in the Messiah. And it's in a woman who comes calling verse 22. The whole of the king and the night woman from that region came out and was crying, have mercy on me. Oh Lord, son of David, my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.
Now Mark in his gospel in chapter seven says some added things about her that she's a Gentile. He makes that clear. She's not a Jew. She's a siro-foenician woman.
That is, she's from Phoenicia in the Roman province of Syria. And as Matthew points out, her family lineage goes all the way back to the Canaanites, that ancient enemy of God's people. You may remember them. The Canaanites, historically worshipped false deities like Baal.
They engaged in all kinds of forbidden sexual practices. And they even sacrificed their children to the Canaanite gods, putting them to death on behalf of the deity. Now before we just dismiss them as backward knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, we should know that they actually had a sophisticated culture. They were the first to create an alphabet.
So you can be a nation on the cutting edge of knowledge, accumulation, and cultural transformation and also be very wicked and hard-hearted and unloving. Well Israel met the Canaanites as they went into the promised land. I mean, certainly they met them in battle because God had determined to wipe out the Canaanites because of their wickedness. In fact, he explicitly told Israel, do you know what I mean?
Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart. Are you going into possess their land? But because of the wickedness of these nations, the Lord your God is driving them out for before you. And he'd given them actually 400 years to repent of this before he finally did it.
So this woman, you understand her family ancestry and her geography and her ethnicity makes her an outsider to Israel and the people of God. But like Rahab, before her, that prostitute in Jericho, a Gentile Canaanite, this woman likewise has faith in the God of Israel. And I want you to know as well, the woman comes with an attitude which is noticeably different than those who followed Jesus in Matthew 14 and 15. I mean, even in the feeding of the 5,000, nobody in the crowd is reported to have acknowledged that Jesus was in fact the Messiah of Israel, though they were glad to get their bellies full.
And yet this woman calls Jesus in verse 20 to saying, have mercy on me, oh Lord, Son of David. She confesses him to be great David's greater son, the Messiah promised to come in the lineage of David. It's a messianic title. And she understands him to be that.
And she calls him Lord, that word that was used so frequently, Old Testament, to speak of Yahweh, the God of Israel, the Lord God. She applies that to him too. And she worships. She kneels.
She adores him. And she seeks his help. And so we see this a massive contrast between the Jewish multitudes and the religious leaders who will not acknowledge the Messiah to be the Messiah. And this Gentile Canaanite woman who openly professes Jesus is Lord and the Son of God, the Messiah.
And so J.C. Riles says, it is grace, not place, which makes people believers. And you'll find them in the most unlikely places. And so don't write anybody off.
That's the first lesson, second lesson. A fliction sometimes proves to be a blessing to a person's soul. Notice her cry, have mercy on me. She's in a tough spot.
Her daughter's oppressed by a demon. That's horrible. Not just oppressed, but severely oppressed, it says. And we don't know the details, but we don't know how manifested, we don't know what symptoms there were.
But we don't need to know that. What we need to know is that it was terrible. It was severe. The daughter's in misery.
And the mother is in misery too. For his others have said, of course, the mother is only as happy as her least happy child. Some of you know exactly what that means. You could be full of joy in Christ.
You could get circumstantially, only as happy as your least happy child. The good mother feels for her children. She aches for their health and well-being and wholeness, longs for them to be relieved of their miseries, even the miseries of spiritual forces of darkness, the demonic, the devil, as well as death and judgment. And so she's a mom and she cares and she comes crying to Jesus.
And as, again, J.T. Ryle said, and without the trial, who knows? He's hypothetical, of course, but she might have lived and died in careless ignorance. But as he was put in his book, The Problem of Pain, we can ignore God or we can ignore even pleasure, but pain insists upon being attended to God whispers in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains.
It's his megaphone, the rouse of death world. And she's an agony and agony on behalf of her daughter and moves for soul to seek mercy and help from the Messiah. And so J.C. Ryle says to Christians, there's nothing which shows our ignorance so much is impatience under trouble.
We forget that every cross is a message from God and intended to do us good in the end. Trials, he says, are intended to make us think, to ween us from the world, to send us to the Bible, to drive us to our knees. Health, he says, is a good thing. But sickness is far better if it leads us to God.
Prosperity is a great mercy. But adversity is a greater one if it brings us to Christ. Anything, anything is better than living in carelessness and dying in sin. Better a thousand times be afflicted like the Canaanite mother.
And like her to flee to Christ and live at ease like the rich fool and die at last without Christ and without hope. The affliction of her daughter was this woman's hour of grace. God used it for the good of her soul. That's the second thing.
The third is this Christ people are often less gracious and compassionate than Christ himself. Notice that in verse 23, well, in what it transpires, verse 23, she cries out and but he does not answer her a word. How curious. I mean, why the silence?
I mean, remember Jesus has looked upon the crowds and he has had compassion on them because he has seen that they are like sheep without a shepherd. They were hungry and he fed them. They were sick and he healed them. She cries out and he's silent.
Why? Perhaps so they and we can benefit from the interaction, interaction before the healing. Notice the disciples reaction and to verse 23, disciples came and begged him saying, send her away. She's crying out after us.
So she not only cried out to Jesus, but she's been crying out to the disciples who are following Jesus. It's a persistent thing. She keeps on crying out. And they are thinking not of her daughter but of themselves when they beg Jesus to send her away.
So basically they don't have to put up with her anymore. I mean, they're annoyed. They're tired. Maybe they're embarrassed.
Apparently they're a bit hard-hearted here. Send her away, they say. Now that doesn't necessarily mean they want her daughter to continue to be oppressed. They may mean and it certainly can read this way and I think this is likely.
They may mean, come on Jesus, please just do what she asked and send her home. Get rid of her already. I mean either way though, it's not very flattering, is it? As Alexander McLaren said, what they really want is not the granting of the prayer but the getting rid of the positioner.
They were doing as most of us would have done, he says, and as many of us do. When we give help without one touch of compassion in order to stop some imploring mouth. And so what you see that is the compassion of Jesus highlighted by the lack of compassion of his disciples. And we could just pause there and say, I mean, that her experience may have been our experience.
It may be that you have been hurt by Christians, by their impatience, by their lack of care or concern or kindness. Maybe you've been disappointed in Christians and maybe in your disappointment you become cynical about Christianity itself, even cynical about Christ himself. And this passage is here to remind us that even the apostles stumbled in these ways. And it does not make what Jesus says untrue and it did not make Jesus untrue.
Jesus followers will fall short of his calling. It'll happen more often than not. He's the only perfect one. But to those who are followers of Christ, this is a call to us, a call to repentance for a lack of care and concern, compassion, and treating people different from us with indifference.
And then Jesus does speak to her. Oh, he does speak, but apparently again, not quite yet to her but apparently to the disciples. They're the last ones to speak and he answered verse 24, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Jesus here is very aware of the Father's commission.
He has been sent by the Father, right? And he volunteered to go and in his earthly pilgrimage, he wasn't sent to Athens or Alexandria or to Gusagolpo or Timbuktu, right? His own commission was like the one he gave his disciples in Matthew chapter 10 when he told them, go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans, but rather go to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, go to the house of Israel. And she isn't that, not the way the disciples would think of her.
To them she's a gentle Gentile, a cyro-finesian, a Canaanite, not one to be saved, but one to be, well, frankly, ruled and subdued, even destroyed under the glory of the coming Messiah, who will set all things right for Israel and we will dominate the world. Jesus here though is aware, it seems, of the limitation placed on him by the will of the Father, that is the confines of his ministry, certainly limited by his finiteness. When he added humanity to himself, he'd only be one place at one time. That place was to be in Israel, but it was also limited by the will of his Father.
He was sent to the people of Israel and it was a temporary limitation. We have to acknowledge that, not meant to stifle, ultimately, the mission to the Gentiles, but actually it was the way to enable the success of the mission to the Gentiles. As another put, as an illustration, wood has to be stacked in a fire before the warmth of it can reach the opposite side of the room. So the gospel had to first be brought to the Jews before it could run to the whole world.
This was the economy of God's plan of redemption. The plan of the Father and the submission of the Son is not because God is not gracious to the world. They've always been on his heart and mind, but because God's way of reaching the world was to first send his son to the people of Israel. The gospel was for the Jew first and the Gentile, the scripture says, and we see it here.
And yet we see in her case, it turns out she's not so lost as the lost sheep of Israel. And she's figured out who this Jesus is. She's confident of what he can do for her and she won't take over an answer. The disciples add, is, add, is to send her away, get rid of her.
And that's not the attitude of Jesus at all. He gives her what he asks for, what she asks for. So his mercy has helped her for Jews and Gentiles. And so we see finally the fruit of God's grace, the fruit of God's grace.
In her prayer, her humility, and in her persevering faith. Notice this tenacity, verse 25. She came and knelt before him saying, Lord, help me. I asked for mercy and I got silence.
The disciples said something and you responded and it just doesn't sound super encouraging here. But Lord, help. She falls at his feet in beautiful shamelessness as John Chrysostom calls it, repeats her prayer, but this time with pathetic brevity, honoring but one cry, Lord help me. And so this is Alexander McLaren, the intenser, the feeling, the fewer the words, heart prayers, our short prayers.
Or help. What contrast she is to the scribes of the Pharisees. We met in one to twenty. They came all the way from Jerusalem to Jesus, not to ask for mercy and not to ask for help.
But this woman pleads for mercy. It says, help me. The Pharisees came to Jesus pointing fingers. She falls at his feet in adoration.
They rebel against his authority. She bows to it. They were offended by his teaching. She humbly agrees with his teaching.
We'll see in a moment. They were not, as Jesus indicated, some are not. They were not planted by the Heavenly Father, but she is a planting of the Heavenly Father. They, Pharisees and scribes are blind guides, but she sees the truth that has great faith and notice then his response to her prayer verse 26, he answered, it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
Now, first blush, maybe you find that to be shocking in Ruth. Not every commentator who writes on this says that. Right? I mean, what does he mean?
Is he belittling her? Is he picking on her? What's the deal? Well, first imagine the scene.
He envisions a household with parents and children gathered together to eat a meal. And there are dogs present in the home. Not those nasty, mangy, dangerous scavenger dogs that roam the trash pits people are afraid of and you read about in the New Testament. But the word he uses here is very specific.
This is the house pet. Man's best friend. It's a domesticated dog. And you know how dogs like these are?
Right? They get tired of kibbles and bits. They're hoping for scraps of the good stuff. And this is likely a proverbial expression that he's employed that everybody would agree with.
You don't take the bread that's meant for the children and throw it to the dogs. I mean, that wouldn't be right or good or fair. The bread is for the children. The adults are to see that the children get fed.
Of course, pets need their food too, but not at the expense of the children. It's very straightforward. But what's he saying? He's saying he has a household.
And in this house, the bread should go to the ones who belong in that house. And she agrees, verse 27. She says, yes, Lord, she knows the proverbial saying is true. She's respectful of him.
She doesn't take offense of him. But she won't take note of her answer. Yes, Lord, get even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table. You know it.
And I know it, Jesus. The children get fed, but there are crumbs to be gobbled off the floor. And so what's he saying? Jesus, can I have a crumb from your table?
The master's table? My, my master's table. I'll be a dog in your house, Lord Jesus. If you're my master.
I think her longing and logic is like that of the sons of Cora in Psalm 84 when they say how lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts. My soul longs, yes, feints for the courts of the Lord, my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God. Even the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young at your altars, O Lord of hosts, my king and my God. Blessed are though all those who dwell in your house ever singing your praise.
For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. And I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked. Make me like the sparrow, Lord. Make me like the doorkeeper.
I'll be the family pet, so to speak. Just let me in your house and let me sit by your table and let me eat the falling crumbs. And verse 28, Jesus says, oh woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.
And the daughter was healed instantly. What a lesson. What lessons here? And let's just close with a few.
What a lesson in humility she was for the disciples. They were specially invited to eat at the table again and again with Jesus. And they had just been privileged to eat the fill of their belly. From the tiny little loaves he broke when he fed the five thousands.
But she says, I'll be satisfied even with just crumbs. And in that she reminds us that nobody deserves the grace of God. Nobody has a claim on God. That is nobody can say, God, you must give me this.
No, she stands here as a beggar knowing she only deserves judgment and condemnation for her sin. But hopeful that God will be gracious and merciful to her. Just give me the crumbs, Lord. And what she's actually teaching us is that we're all in a way standing in precisely the same position.
This isn't so much about where Gentiles stand as opposed to those in Israel and Jesus' day. Ultimately, it's about where everybody stands before God. We don't stand before God in ourselves in such a way that we can demand from Him grace. We deserve, and if we get what we deserve, it's judgment.
But we can beg for grace. And He loves to give it. Just don't look at grace as an entitlement. You're not entitled.
We might say to anything but hell. That's what you and I have purchased the title to in our rebellion. Anything other, heaven, is a gift we don't deserve. It's grace.
We have less than in humility. We have in her humility. But also, it went a lesson in faith. They wanted to send the hungry crowds away.
Remember that. They never considered that Jesus could satisfy the many thousands with just a few loaves. And then they wanted to send her away and get her off their minds. But she understood that Jesus could satisfy her desire.
He could heal her daughter. He could take from His abundance, and the crumbs would be enough. And so she wouldn't take no for an answer. They, Jesus called them, were men of little faiths.
Remember that, chapter 14, when He comes walking through them on the water and they're spooked and scream and shriek? When Peter says, let me walk on the water with you, Jesus. And He does. But then He takes his eyes off.
Jesus, He sees the winds and the waves. He begins to sink and he shrieks or screams or cries out. Same word as her. Jesus saved me.
And just this fast. It all turns around. And here's a woman crying. What Peter cried, would help me.
And she won't stop until he does. And he says, oh, woman, great is your faith. What a story for us to remember as we intercede for others. J.C.
Ryle says, have we children? Who's conversion we desire? Have we relations in France about who salvation we are anxious? Let's follow the example of this Canaanite-ish woman.
In the late of the state of their souls before Christ. Let us name their names before him night and day and never rest until we have an answer. We may have to wait many a long year. We may seem to pray and in vain and intercede without profit.
But let us never give up while life lasts. Let us believe that Jesus is not changed and that He who heard the Canaanite-ish mother and granted her request will also hear us. And one day give us an answer of peace. What a lesson in humility.
What a lesson in faith and what a lesson in the mission of Jesus. His grace abounds to the desperately needy. He helped Jews from the House of Israel. He helped a gentile of the House of the Canaanites because his compassion is for lost sheep and all who cry out to him, Lord, Messiah, help me, have mercy on me.
Get an answer. This is the only way any of us ever comes to Christ. Have you ever spoken to him like her? Let's pray.