The Harshness Of God: The Magnificent Defeat

Pastor Ian Graham looks at the perplexing encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman in Matthew 15 as we begin our Lenten teaching series.

Transcript

Gratitude For A Sacred Week

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Thank you, Lydia. I I do want to acknowledge uh sometimes as a church we're always too forward looking and we just kind of keep going to the next thing, a little bit attention deficit. But we had a really amazing week this week, and I I do just want to rest in that for a minute. Uh if you were here on Ash Wednesday, just raise your hand. Uh if you're here for our guess, yeah. Uh that was special. Uh and I mean obviously the the sort of objective quality of the music being beautiful was something, but uh the way that God meets us in those spaces, and so uh just want to acknowledge Alfredo and his team, those that that helped out to facilitate that. Thank you so much. And then last night we had our first kind of community dinner on a Saturday night that we're we're hoping to instill was a more regular rhythm within the life of our church, and it was just really beautiful. Uh we talked some wider angle things about things that we're trying to put our hands to and trying to uh push forward with, but also just had a great meal, and that as so many things in the life of our church was Alisa and her uh great, great work. So I'm just so grateful for her. And so just wanted to take stock of that because again, I think it's I I am wary of my own kind of constantly, what's next? And sometimes we fail to just rest in what has been. Uh it's been a very good week. Well, have you ever had the experience of you're reading the Bible and you have a general perception of Jesus and you come to a story and you're like, what? Is this just me? Or have you kind of come across, you're like, what did he say? Or what did he do? Or why did he do that? Now I have a prior conclusion that I tend to read all of the Bible through. And I hope it doesn't come as a surprise to you who have been here for a while. If you're new here, we're so glad you're here. Welcome. My prior conclusion that I tend to arrive at constantly in reading the scriptures is that Jesus is unrelenting, boundless, endless joy, mercy, goodness, kindness, love. And he likes you. I have a lot of things to say, but inevitably that's kind of what I'm saying to you. He won't give up on you. And so when I start with that preliminary conclusion and I come to passages like the one we're gonna read today, sometimes it's like, ooh, is that is that introducing a level of tension into that conclusion? That the only way to actually account for it is either to dismiss the story itself or to try to pigeonhole it into some easy answer to a hard question kind of dynamic. I just read it, finished reading C. S. Lewis's Paralandra, uh, which is the second in what they call the space trilogy. But I'm always struck by Lewis's ability to both bring us into the warmth and the safety and the goodness of the divine figure in his stories, but also there's this severity that's present there. There's this awareness that there are things within the people, the very flawed and frail people, that need to be discarded, that are not good. And Lewis does this beautifully. If you're familiar with the Chronicles of Narnia, you have this moment where Susan is about to meet Aslan the lion, and even conceptualizing the sort of divine figure as a lion, Lewis is doing a lot with. And the beaver is describing Aslan the Lion, and he says, Aslan is a lion, the lion, the great lion. Oh, Susan said. I thought he was a man. Is he quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion. Safe, said Mr. Beaver. Who said anything about safe? Of course he isn't safe, but he's good. He's the king, I tell you. And I think what Lewis does, he dramatically captures what holiness is and what holiness does. Holiness is both confrontational and comforting. It is the fiery furnace that purges that which is not free in us so that we can be really freed. It often has all the appearance of diminishment, but really enlarges us. Throughout the scriptures, holiness is severe. It's a terrible beauty. And this call to holiness is the call that we turn our attention towards during the season of Lent. This marks the first Sunday of Lent. Lent, if you are not from a highly liturgical church tradition that pays attention to the church calendar, is simply a season of 40 days leading up to Easter, where collectively and individually we focus our hearts on God. And often that focusing entails putting some things away. For us in a highly distractable world, maybe some of us are putting away things like social media. For me, it's the dumb sports podcast that I listen to, that I love, that I mark my days by. So just let those go. More quiet in my life. We also turn our attention towards God by taking some things on. Traditionally in the church, it was a call to receive almsgiving and to respond in that way, to give to the poor. And so we're taking on these practices, not so that God can love us more. He's not interested in our spiritual performance. He's not saying, oh, you fasted really well for Lent this year. I'm so proud of you. God also knows that Lint just so happens to fall in the dead of winter this year, and it's going to snow like two feet, apparently, and that if you maybe miss out on your fast the next couple days, he will forgive you. He likes you. But I think this season for us is a good one to stare down some of the passages that maybe we find a bit uncomfortable. Especially when it comes to Jesus. That we would easily rather try to explain away. C.S. Lewis says, the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and his compulsion is our liberation. And with that in mind, I want to invite you to turn over to Matthew chapter 15. We'll find one of the more striking scenes in all of the scriptures together. Matthew 15, beginning in verse 21. The words will be behind us on the screen. And if you picked up that outline you scan, you can also find them there. Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David, my daughter is tormented by a demon. Now, a few things are going on here we need to account for. This is the only time in the New Testament the word Canaanite is used. The word Canaanite features prominently in the Old Testament. These are some of the oldest standing enemies of the people of Israel. But in the New Testament, we only have this one woman. She comes to Jesus identifying him properly. She uses the Greek word addressing him Kyrios, which we translate as Lord. And our translation here capitalizes Lord to say that they think that she is identifying him as a divine figure, not just master or king. She is saying, this person in the form of this man is God in the flesh. And she says, Lord, son of David, have mercy on me. She is an outsider to the promises and story of Israel, but she's acknowledging the significance and centrality of that story. These regal promises in the lineage of Jesus and what it means for the story that has long transpired. She's acknowledging all of that. This is one of the most orthodox identifications of Jesus in the whole New Testament during his earthly life. She sees Jesus for who he is. And notice what she's asking for. My daughter is suffering. Now, if you did not know where this story was going, but you knew the things that you know about Jesus, what would you think happens here? She pleads for help, she identifies Jesus. You would think instantly, he's like, Cool, done. What happens? Verse 23. But he did not answer her at all. Really? Nothing? Not even a courtesy nod? He's just ignoring her. His disciples are watching all this transpire. And we're not really sure what they're feeling. Perhaps it's annoyance. The text tells us this woman has been shouting at Jesus. Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me. Just shouting at them. And the Greek verb would tell us that she's doing this kind of habitually. It's possible that the disciples are just annoyed and they want her to be quiet. And they're kind of like, Jesus, just you know, give her what she wants, she'll go away. It's also possible they're feeling a little bit awkward. They know that Jesus can do this kind of thing. They've seen him do it. We're 15 chapters into Matthew. Jesus has been up to some things. They're like, Lord, this is her daughter. Just send her away. We've seen you do this kind of thing before. But for whatever reason, they intercede on her behalf, however, half-heartedly. They are trying to say, Jesus, just do what she wants. Jesus then responds to the his disciples. He doesn't even turn to the woman, but he talks with an earshot of her. Have you ever had somebody do this to you? Kind of talk about you, around you? Good gosh. It's so annoying. It's so like belittling, right? And he answers the disciples. He says, I was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Now here we see insight into Jesus' self-understanding. It may seem harsh or narrow to us, but this gives us insight into both the way that Jesus embraces human limits and the way that he goes about fulfilling the promises of God, the covenant given to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Jesus, as God incarnate, doesn't go to every corner of the earth. He doesn't inhabit every culture, every time and space. He comes as the incarnate son to one specific time and place. He's born as a first century Jewish man under Roman occupation, at a particularly explosive moment in the history of Israel, where within 30 something years of his death, the temple will be destroyed, and the face of Jewish practice and religion will be forever altered. Jesus is alive at this nexus point in history, but he's not alive at every culture and every place during his earthly life. In Hindu spirituality, there is the avatar, the incarnation of God in so many different forms and places. But the particularity of the Jesus story is saying that he only came to this one specific people and place. And he came to that one specific people and place on behalf of the entire world. This was in fulfillment of the promise that was given to Abraham. That through your descendants, all the nations on the earth will be blessed. So we see here that God keeps his promises, he doesn't discard them. Jesus is not a plan B to Israel. He is Israel's Messiah. As Carl Barth says, we are all guests in the house of Israel. Because of what God has elected to do for the whole world through a specific people. And Jesus has this understanding of what he's here to do and what he's up to. The image that we're given in the story, as Jesus is having these interactions, that he and his disciples are walking along. And the woman is shouting at Jesus, Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me. And as we arrive at verse 25, we find that their progress is halted. Something impedes them. As this woman falls down in front of the traveling party, notice what she says. She's moved from shouting along behind them to falling at Jesus' feet. The word that Matthew uses here for kneeling is the same word he uses for worship throughout the gospel, Proscano. This woman has fallen down at Jesus' feet, kneeling before him. But you can even just imagine the significance. She's been shouting, she's been at a distance. Now she's moved close. And you can see the tears in her eyes, and Jesus can see them. You can hear her shaking voice. Lord, help me. Now, surely, with what we know of Jesus, this is the moment that will mark a change in his disposition. This is the time where he will give in to her requests. Verse 26. It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs. Don't mistake Eklesia. That calling her and her child a dog is exactly what you think it is. Now it's not a racial slur, as some scholars have suggested, but neither is it a term of endearment. And it is most definitely a term that is divided along racial lines. He's saying to her, You're not a part of ethnic Israel. So now not only is Jesus being stern and dismissing her, not only is he ignoring her, he's now making it clear that Jesus doesn't help these kinds of people. What is going on here? Right? The record should be scratching for us. Does that settle it? Is Jesus really going to ignore this woman and her dear daughter because she's not ethnically an Israelite? What does that say about Jesus? Well, we've got one more card to play. And we're not told whether this woman is just particularly clever. She might be. We're not told, you know how you like try try to say something smart as you walk away? Like maybe she's so offended and she just utters, like, even the even the dogs get to eat from their master's table and walks away. We're not told. You always think of those things later, right? But she says one more thing to Jesus. And it's that that marks a shift in the story. Jesus answered, Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish. And her daughter was healed from that moment. It's a fascinating story. Okay, so all's well that ends well, right? But as we're staring at the scene, we're all kind of scratching our heads still, right? Like, what happened here? What does this say about Jesus? Why does he respond to her the way that he does? Now, there have been many suggestions as to what's going on here. And what I am endeavoring to do this morning is not say, here is the one interpretive key that will solve all of this. I think this is a very complex passage. Martin Luther just said, nobody knows what's going on here. And then proceeded to preach an hour-long sermon about it. So we're in good company here. Some scholars insist that Jesus here is truly being racially narrow, perhaps even bigoted, because he was both God but also man, and that he needed this supposed outsider to expand his horizons, thus making Jesus truly a man of his time. Now I have to tell you, that has explanatory power, but I am completely uncomfortable with this for a lot of reasons. But primarily because it would accuse Jesus of some form of race racism, which racism is a sin, full stop. He who knew no sin became sin for us. Jesus was the sinless one. And so any suggestion that would implicate Jesus in sinful behavior, I'm gonna step away from. So we need another interpretive key to get our bearings within this story. I want to offer just two here. First, let's take ourselves into the woman's perspective. I think we see here the necessity of persistence in prayer and petitioning God. Jesus is a genius of formation. He is the greatest teacher who ever lived. And not just the most eloquent, not just the best talker, he is the best at forming that which he envisions for us, in us, because he has the power to do it. Now, have you ever felt like God is ignoring you? Have you ever offered prayers up to the heavens that felt like they were just getting stopped right at the ceiling and reaching no further? Have you ever felt like God was more concerned with other people than he was with you? As you took assessment of other people's blessings and the goodness in their life and how things seemed to come easy to them, then you look at your own life. And the distance between those two things feels so vast. This woman's persistence would pay off in a perspective that would have been unavailable to her had she stopped. She would have walked away, perhaps saying Jesus is a bigoted racist, and her daughter would still be suffering. It's only her persistence, what Jesus calls inevitably faith, that enables her to see beyond and to encounter the actual face of Jesus. For us in here today, for some of us, Jesus is trying to urge us on, keep going. And it's stories like this one that, however, subtly are trying to say there's more, don't stop. Keep asking. For many of us, we have received that initial, what felt like silence to a desperate plea. We've even maybe been in conversation with Jesus or around Jesus and felt like that he's still not getting to the heart of the matter. And Jesus is saying to us today, keep going, don't stop. When Jesus teaches about prayer, one of the most consistent themes that he goes back to is just don't stop doing it. Keep asking, keep acknowledging that I am the source of all the goodness in your life. I am your provider. I have numbered every hair on your head, I know what you need. Don't stop. For some of us, in a similar vein, but a little bit different, we find that our lives with Christ have taken on a new texture. One that we're not always sure what to do with. If you've been walking with Jesus for a while, things that used to bring you an awareness of God's presence, to inspire you to press in and to pray, things that maybe sometimes you could literally feel in your bodies, the goosebumps, or just that awareness that God is present, maybe those things have become less common. Now we tend to interpret this change as either distance on our part or on God's. But sometimes that perceived distance is exactly the location of what God is doing in drawing us deeper unto life with Him. The church tradition, especially the medieval saints, identified this as the dark night of the senses. You can find John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila. I think the psalmist captures this in Psalm 42. We start with this beautiful imagery in verses 1 and 2. As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God? It's beautiful. But then notice the situation that the psalmist finds himself in. My tears have been my food day and night. While people say to me continually, Where is your God? Sometimes our faith is seemingly met with silence or dismissal. John of the Cross describes this as the dark night of the senses, which often is prelude to the dark night of the soul. In that outline, there's some parameters of what the dark night of the senses looks like. I listed those for you. You can look them up on your own time. But there are things that can only be revealed to the eyes of faith. And faith is only built in assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen. And so often, when we encounter Jesus, we want the vending machine God. We want him to do exactly what we ask him to do when we want him to do it. But so often Jesus is much interested in something quite different. I think it's very safe to say that Jesus saw this woman from the very beginning. And his silence was not him dismissing her, not him devaluing her, not him saying, Oh, you're a Canaanite. I got a place for you, or in Mark chapter 7, a Syrophenician. I think he's drawing her into real and vibrant life with him. And I think he wants to do the same for us. And that brings us to our second thing. Throughout the scriptures, we see the eternal value that God places on face-to-face relationship. And he minimizes and really abhors, he hates transaction. This woman rightly identifies Jesus. She could have gotten what she wanted by her rightful orthodox testimony. But Jesus has more for her. And I think we see a little bit of insight into what this looks like all the way back in Genesis 32. I'm going to invite you to turn over there. Jacob, here, is about to meet his brother Esau for the first time in a very long time. Time. Now, the last time that Jacob and Esau were together, Esau decided he wanted to kill Jacob because Jacob stole his blessing. And in some strange twist of events, even though everybody figures out that Jacob stole the blessing, Isaac can't take it back. Somebody should write a book about that. We'll do that. So Jacob is staring down a night filled with anxious waiting, certain that when day breaks, he will meet certain doom in the face of his brother Esau. He is terrified, he is alone, he has sent all his family away, and he is afraid. Have you ever had a night like this one? Where what the day holds feels like it weighs far too much. In the genius of our God, how does he respond to Jacob's hour of need? Verse 24. Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak.

unknown 23:01

Okay.

Beyond Transaction To Face To Face

Jacob Wrestles And Is Renamed

The Parent Who “Loses” To Form Us

SPEAKER_00 23:03

When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket, and Jacob's hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. So when you need God, he will come and injure you. Then he said, Let me go, for the day is breaking. But Jacob said, I will not let you go unless you bless me. So he said to him, What is your name? And he said, Jacob. Then the man said, You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans and have prevailed. Then Jacob asked him, Please tell me your name. But he said, Why is it that you ask my name? And there he blessed him. The name that marks the descendants of Jacob, of which Jesus is a part, is literally given on their account of their wrestling with God. Something about the kind of people that we are to be face to face in relationship to Jesus is marked by struggle. Something entails resilience, the refusal to let go. This woman, Canaanite, supposedly a minor character in the mainstream story of salvation, is invited into this language of relationship. And as she holds on to Jesus, she won't let him go. She sees the face of God. Jesus will not settle for simple transactions. He wants something so much more, something beyond. At the end of each wrestling season for our boys, our coaches host a parents versus kids wrestling night. And it's amazing. There are kids on one side, a bunch of them, and there are parents, and each kid is matched up with their mom and their dad, Courtney, and I got to wrestle our respective boys this Thursday. And you know what we as parents do? I mean, I outweigh my son by like four times. Do you know what we do in a wrestling match? I freaking crush him. Life is hard. Lessons learned. Now, of course, we don't crush them. Right? You know what we do? We put on a good show, we put up a good fight, we try not to hurt them as we roll around, and then we let them win. And they go nuts. As I had been meditating on this passage all week, really just asking the question, Jesus, what are you doing here? I felt like I felt the Lord speak to me at a parents versus kids wrestling match. Said, Ian, that's what I'm up to. Our children can't beat us in wrestling, not yet. But they certainly will be shaped by our surrender to their joy, to their needs, and they certainly see more of our heart for them in the seeming defeat than if we were to just use our strength to crush them. Do you see what's happening here? Was Jesus being narrow or even worse, bigoted with this woman? Was he playing games with dear lives to make an object lesson? No. He was inviting her to the wrestle, to the struggle that marks an actual encounter with the living God. And as God, he was willing to be bested by this woman, by this supposed outsider, because in this magnificent defeat he could manifest the face of God. Martin Luther says this. I'm going to invite our worship team forward. Paul writes, when Jesus is allowed himself to be taken captive, he takes captivity of self captive. Jesus could have come to this world and crushed it with the weight of his glory. He could have revealed the face of God in terror from the heavens at a distance that would demand our supplicating response. Dear Lord, you see this when people see Jesus throughout their personal interactions with them. Peter says, get away from me, Lord, I'm a sinful man. Woe is me, I'm a man of unclean lips. That would have been our awareness, but Jesus doesn't do that. He draws near. And sometimes the cloud of that drawing near requires waiting through, as we see in the story of this woman. The cross is Jesus' ultimate allowance to be bested by humans. He lets himself be taken captive. He lets himself be given over to death, even death on a cross. But there it's not human cleverness, ingenuity, even desperation. It's human weakness, our curse. It's the desperation of God Himself that leads him who knew no sin to become sin for us. And he would embrace that seeming defeat to embrace the entire world. We pray, come, Holy Spirit. God, would you comfort those who feel like their prayers are answered with nothing but silence? And it's been that way for a long time. God, I know we as leaders would love to rationalize that, would love to explain it away, but sometimes the pain of that just feels too much, and we just stop. Would we take the witness and testimony of this dear woman? God is invitation to grapple, to clutch, to not let go as you don't let go of us. And would you encourage those who have long put away the asking, Lord, the turning towards you to turn again, to lift up their eyes and to see where their help comes from, God. God, would you be with those of us who are undergoing seasons of transformation that often feel like a furnace burning things? Lord, as our life with you changes and shifts, it doesn't mark a diminishment of the relationship, it actually marks a deepening. As in so many of the relationships that we know in our life with our spouse, with our kids, these relationships change and they transform over time. And they require constant cultivation and attention. But if we will give ourselves to the work, if we will allow ourselves to be yielded to you, God, you will form in us something that is forged so much stronger than that which is based upon feelings or ideas, God. God, would your Holy Spirit bring comfort here in this place that you see us, God, that you love us, Lord. And in the magnificent defeat of the cross, Lord, you have defeated sin and death and the curse that stands up against us, Lord. We pray these things in your name, in the beautiful name of the Father and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we pray. Amen. Ecosia, let's respond in worship to the presence of our Lord. Continue to allow the Holy Spirit to minister to you as the worship team leads us. I'm going to invite you to stand with me.