A MOTHER'S GREATEST GIFT
Matthew 15:21-28 New
International Version (NIV)
The Faith of a Canaanite
Woman
21 Leaving
that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A
Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of
David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering
terribly.”
23 Jesus
did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her
away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He
answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The
woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He
replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the
dogs.”
27 “Yes
it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their
master’s table.”
28 Then
Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And
her daughter was healed at that moment.
On this Mother’s day I want
to share something with you that I got over the Internet called “You know
You’re a Mother when...”
You count the sprinkles on
each kid’s cupcake to make sure they are equal.
You have the time to shave
only one leg.
Your kid throws up and you
catch it.
You consider finger paints to
be a controlled substance.
You’ve mastered the art of
placing large quantities of pancakes and eggs on a plate without them touching
each other.
Your child insists that you
read “Once upon a Potty” out loud in the lobby of Grand Central Station and you
do it.
You hope ketchup is a
vegetable, since it’s the only way your child will eat anything.
You find yourself cutting
your husband’s sandwiches into cute shapes.
You stop criticizing the way
your mother raised you.
You hire a sitter because you
haven’t been out with your husband in ages, then you spend half the night
checking on the kids.
You use your own saliva to
clean your child’s face.
You say at least once a day,
I’m not cut out for this job,” but you know you wouldn’t trade it for
anything.
In the midst of all the humor
that surrounds these statements there lies a great truth--the image that
children are forming of their world and their church and their God is being
significantly influenced by what their mothers say and do.
I want you to look with me
this Mother's Day at the story of one of the mothers in the New Testament. It is this Canaanite woman or the
Syro-Phoenician woman as she is called in Mark's Gospel. Here we read one of the few accounts of
Jesus venturing outside of Jewish territory in his ministry. It was for Jesus a time of deliberate
withdrawal. The end was coming
near and he wanted to have a time of quiet to prepare for the events of the
end. It was not so much that he
wanted to prepare HIMSELF, although that purpose was probably also in his mind,
but rather he wished some time in which he could prepare his disciples for that
difficult time. There were things
that he had to tell them--things that they had to understand.
There was no place in
Palestine where he could be sure of privacy; wherever he went the crowds were
sure to find him. So he went
north, right through Galilee, until he came to the land of Tyre and Sidon,
where the Phoenicians dwelt.
There, at least for a time, he would be safe from the hostility of the
Scribes and Pharisees, and from the dangerous popularity of the people, for no
Jew would be likely to follow him into Gentile territory.
But even in these foreign
parts Jesus was not free from the loud cries of human need. There was a mother
who had a daughter with a dreadful affliction. Her daughter was suffering terribly from demons.
Now many people in our modern
American culture don't believe in the devil and demons. They just speak of evil influences and
inclinations and yet when Jesus spoke of evil he always spoke of personal
evil. It was always done by
someone either human or demonic.
Jesus believed very much in the devil and in the servants of the
devil--demons, as does most of the Christian church world wide today. Most of
the Christian church worldwide today is not so naive as to label the stories of
demons in the New Testament as ONLY mental illness or epilepsy or something
like that. And perhaps one of the
reasons why the church in America today seems to regard sin and evil so lightly
is because so many do not regard the devil and demons in the same way that
Jesus did.
This woman knew the terror of
demons. She could see her daughter
writhing on the ground, or being thrown suddenly into the fire, or uttering all
sorts of curses and profanity apart from the control of her own will. There was no problem convincing that
mother of what was wrong with her daughter. And evidently no one in the Canaanite cities could do
anything to help her.
Somehow she must have heard
about Jesus and the wonderful things that he could do. When she heard that he was coming to
her area she followed him and his disciples, and cried out desperately for
help. Jesus was her last hope. If Jesus couldn't help her then no one
could.
At first Jesus seemed to pay
no attention to her. The disciples were embarrassed and they wanted to get rid
of her. They told him--”Tell her to get lost. She's bugging us. She's a pest. You have to rest.
The last thing you need now is another woman pesting you.” To them
the woman was a nuisance and all they wanted to do was to be rid of her as
quickly as possible.
If this had been a Jewish
mother, no doubt Jesus would not have hesitated to meet her need, but she was
not. This was a Gentile woman, and
not only was she a Gentile, she was a Canaanite. She was from a long line of people who were enemies of the
Jews. These were the people who
occupied the land when the Hebrews first arrived with Abraham. They were always
a thorn in the flesh to the Hebrew people attacking here and attacking there,
rushing out in raiding parties from their fortified and impenetrable cities
along the coast of the Mediterranean.
They were also deeply pagan,
idol worshiping people, people so filthy and corrupt that even in this day of
permissiveness and sexual promiscuity scholars refuse to translate many of
their religious texts from their cuneiform and Ugaritic languages, they are
that bad. This was a CANAANITE
woman hollering for Jesus. What in
the world could she want? What
insult did she want to hurl at him?
And you need to understand,
there were rules about Jewish rabbis not going into Gentile territory, and
about Jewish rabbis not talking to Gentiles, and about Jewish rabbis not
talking to women in public. These
rules are not in the bible, but they were the rules of the good church
folks—the Scribes and Pharisees.
Of course, church folks today
can also make up some rules of their own.
There are some strange laws regarding church on the books in communities
all over our country. Young girls
are never allowed to walk a tightrope in Wheeler, MS, unless it’s in a
church. In Blackwater, KY,
tickling a woman under her chin with a feather while she’s in church carries a
penalty of $10 and one day in jail.
No one can eat unshelled, roasted peanuts while attending church in
Idanha, OR. In Honey Creek, Iowa,
no one is permitted to carry a slingshot to church except a policeman. No citizen in Leecreek, AR is allowed
to attend church in any red-colored garment. Swinging a yo-yo in church or anywhere in public on the
Sabbath is prohibited in Studley, VA.
And turtle races are not permitted within 100 yds of a local church at
any time in Slaughter, LA. Don’t
some of those laws make you wonder what in the world ever led to their
enactment?
It’s true that there are
rules in the Bible. There’s the 10
commandments, there’s the great commandments that Jesus quotes from the Old
Testament. But the Pharisees made
the mistake of confusing the rules with the faith. The rules are boundaries set up by God to keep us safe. Outside of those boundaries we can get
hurt. The rules are there for our
benefit.
We must focus on what is
inside the fence of the rules and not on the fence itself. It is the core and not the outer edge
that is most important. The core
of our faith is our personal loving relationship with God and the core of the
church’s task is ministry. At one
point Jesus called the Pharisees Whitewashed tombs filled with dead men’s
bones. He was saying they looked
fine and respectable on the outside because of their rule obeying, but they had
no life within them for the life of faith is not found in just obeying rules,
but in a living, loving relationship with God. They had missed that important point and were teaching
others to do the same.
So, Jesus ignored the rules
of the Pharisees regarding rabbis.
This woman was not hurling insults and curses. She was crying out for help! So Jesus told her that he was sent first to the house of
Israel. He was the Jewish Messiah
first. He had been sent to God's
chosen people. But she said that
even the pet dogs get the bread thrown from the master's table.
She was speaking of a
practice of the day in rich homes.
In those days the people did not use knives or forks or napkins at the
table. The people ate with their
hands and wiped their soiled hands on chunks of bread and the pet dogs ate that
bread when it was thrown to them.
So the woman was saying, "I
know that the children are fed first, but can't I even get the scraps that the
children throw away? The children
of Israel have been fed for some three years now and they have thrown much
away, may I not have some of the mercy that they have discarded?
It was then that Jesus saw in
this Canaanite woman something very deep.
In that Canaanite woman Jesus saw a faith greater than that of many of
the children of Israel. And he
healed this mother's daughter of her demonization. He cast the demons out and the daughter was set free.
Do you realize that this
faith was the greatest gift that this mother could ever give her daughter? I imagine that many times as the
daughter was growing up, she asked her mother, “Tell me again, Mom, how Jesus healed me." And the mother would tell the story
again. Do you think that daughter
would want to know more about this Jesus in whom her mother believed so
strongly, this Jesus who healed her without ever even seeing her? Of course she would.
You see, this mother had a
faith that gave her a new perspective on her world. She saw the world through different eyes than those around
her. She could see things clearly
that were unclear before.
When we go to 3D movies as
you enter the theater they give you a pair of those special glasses to wear
while you watch the film. When the
film comes on it is amazing to see the movie come alive with people and animals
seeming to come right out of the screen into your lap. During the film I sometimes have taken
off the glasses to see what it looks like without them. When I have done that, I have found
that the film was all out of focus.
There are double images on the screen and you just could not see the
film clearly without those glasses.
Faith is kind of like those
glasses, for faith enables you to see things as they really are--from God's
point of view. And yet millions of
people without faith-eyes, without those special glasses that God gives us,
millions are walking around in a foggy out of focus world claiming that they
see clearly. They don’t know any better. They don't know what it is to see clearly through the
eyes of faith. And there are such
people in the church as well.
No doubt the people of that
Canaanite woman's village were that way.
None of them came with her.
They must have said “Forget
it! We've seen this before. Your daughter is hopeless. We have never seen anyone like her
delivered from demons before so don't get your hopes up. If our doctors can't help you, then no
one can. Why in the world do you
want to go and see Jesus, you are just setting yourself up for a big
disappointment. Be realistic. Nothing will ever change.”
And you know, if she had
listened to them they would have been right! Nothing would have changed. She would have gone on believing that it is not practical to
believe that God would intervene in our world. It is not practical to believe that God will respond to our
needs and our requests. It is not
realistic to believe that God will do miracles for us. And if she believed that, nothing would
have changed. Her daughter would
still be demonized.
But this woman, this mother,
had the special glasses of faith that enabled her to see beyond what had
happened in the past, and beyond what was happening around her in the present
and to see into the world of possibilities. A world where God is actively involved in providing the
needs of his people. A world where
God not only saves his people from hell but sustains them while they are living
in a fallen world, by intervening on their behalf. She was as Robert Schuller says, A possibility thinker.
Now which way of life is
really the practical way? Which way is more realistic? To say that we believe in a miracle
working God, who intervenes in our world on our behalf with unlimited resources
at his disposal and then NOT expect God to act like that? Is that realistic? Is that really practical? And yet, that is the way that we live
much of our lives!
The life of faith is really
practical. God DOES exist. God DOES want to act on our
behalf. He DOES want to perform
miracles in our lives. We CAN
depend on him. We CAN trust
him. The life of faith DOES work
in daily, everyday, ordinary life.
Just as a car runs best when; it works according to the instructions of
its designer and manufacturer, so our lives run best when they are lived
according to God's instructions.
God says “Trust me. I will take care of you. Believe me in spite of what you may see
or NOT see around you. I WILL
supply your needs.”
This is the kind of faith
that this Canaanite mother had.
And what greater gift could she give to her husband and daughter than
that same faith? By her trust in
God, by her speaking of God and his faithfulness to her she could instill that
same faith in her family.
Do you have the faith, the
trust of this Canaanite woman? You
can. You may not think you can,
but you can, for God says you can.
It involves an act of the will.
You need to say to yourself, “Yes,
I believe that God can be trusted, that he has by best interests in mind and
that he WILL act on my behalf.”
It means taking God at his word, believing that what he says in the
Bible is true and that he will act like he says he will act.
Will you begin today to look
at the world in a different way?
Will you look at your life situation in a different way--through the
eyes of faith? And will you share
that faith with others? That will be the greatest gift that you can give to
anyone.
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