"Yikes! Why?" a sermon on Matthew 15:10-28

Matthew 15:10-28
“Yikes! Why?”
Preached Sunday, August 20, 2023

“Yikes! Why?”

That was my exact and immediate reaction after I read today’s Gospel lesson while worship planning. One of the first things I do when worship planning is I go to the assigned lectionary texts. The Revised Common Lectionary is an ecumenical tool for pastors and churches where every Sunday of the year has four assigned texts: an Old Testament, a Psalm, a New Testament, and a Gospel. And I always read the Gospel first because most of my preaching, but not all, comes from the Gospel texts. And so I read this week’s and I went “Yikes! Why?” and I immediately went to read the other texts thinking, “No way am I gonna touch that story with a 10 foot pole! I’ll preach on the Epistle or Psalm” But then, I caught myself because I wasn’t following the advice I would give other preachers or even other Christians wanting to understand God better. And that advice, as uncomfortable as it may be, is to dive deeper, to move toward the discomfort. For it is only in working through discomfort that we grow. If we stay comfortable with our lives, if we live in the comfort zone, we become static. We don’t change. Church growth experts say there is no such thing as a static church. If people think you are plateauing, you are actually in decline. And while that is about church growth, I think it’s true for all kinds of growth. As Christians and, especially as United Methodists, we believe in sanctification, that is that we are called to do the daily work, that through the grace of The Holy Spirit, we are continuously being transformed to become more and more Christ-like. To become more loving. To every day, little by little, bit by bit, better love God, better love neighbor, and better love self. In other words, we are called by Christ to change. And in order to change, we have to disrupt our comfort. We need to move into discomfort so that, on the other side of it, we can embrace the change that God calls us.

So, let’s get uncomfortable this morning. And I really mean it. I am going to retell part of this morning’s Gospel lesson and really try to communicate exactly how uncomfortable everyone was in the interaction we heard today. How Jesus, the disciples, the Canaanite woman, and us as the readers all experience deep discomfort in this story - and then the change that came out of that discomfort once they worked through it and the tension was resolved.

But real quick, before we do that, I want to talk about the first part of this Scripture lesson today. This whole bit of “it’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles you but what comes out of it.” Cause Matthew carefully crafted the two stories to illuminate each other. So the Pharisees were very concerned about following the law, about doing things the right way, checking all the correct boxes. Jesus and the Pharisees butt heads a lot. Actually, one of my favorite theories is that Jesus himself came out of the Pharisee movement because you criticize most harshly those you are a part of - United Methodists are surely proof of that. But that’s another sermon for another time. So he said it’s not about whether or not your hands are clean when you eat. And it’s not about what you eat. Two things that the Pharisees had strict rules about. But it’s about what comes out of your mouth that defiles you or makes you pure. So if you do all the quote on quote, right things but you demean others, don’t act with mercy and love, you are defiled. And let’s say you don’t do “all the right things” but you do welcome the stranger, offer mercy, show love and compassion…you are pure or right with God. Theologian and Pastor, Gary Charles says it like this: “For Jesus, religious purity and faithful discipleship are not measured ultimately by how many perfect attendance badges one earns for Sunday school or worship, how often one has read the Bible from cover to cover, or how much money one contributes to the church treasury. Purity and faithfulness are shown ultimately by how the church speaks and lives out the radical hospitality and love of Christ.” Basically, Jesus was arguing against a tradition, an institution, that was stuck, that had plateaued. That was comfortable doing things the way they had always been done, washing hands and following dietary laws but not changing in ways that showed justice, compassion, and mercy.

Okay, so that’s the background Matthew lays for Jesus’s extremely uncomfortable encounter with a woman, begging for mercy.

“Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” Tyre and Sidon would have definitely been considered unwashed, dirty places. If a holy fence had been put up as to what and who and where was included in the religious tradition, Tyre and Sidon would have been on the other side of that fence. It was a place where an Israelite with any street sense wouldn’t walk alone.

And it is there that a Canaanite woman starts yelling at Jesus. Now, Matthew, right away, by singling out this woman as a Canaanite is communicating that she is not only an outsider but the enemy. In the time of Jesus, Canaanite was already an outdated term to describe someone. Theologians and preachers talking about this text often refer to her as the Syrophoenician woman - a term describing where she was from, her ethnicity. But probably of Canaanite descent. And the Canaanites were the historic and well-known enemy of the Hebrew people - but it wasn’t really used to describe people living in Jesus’s day…unless perhaps someone wanted to clearly mark someone as not only an outsider, but the worst of the outsiders. One of them. And the Syrophoenicians, the Canaanites, let’s just say that there were a lot of religious, ethnic, and racial stereotypes about them. Bigotry against them by the Israelites was well-known and often played a role in every interaction between an Israelite and a Canaanite. So this woman who was yelling at Jesus, she was not only an outsider, but her and her people were historic enemies. Now, as a woman and as a Syrophoenician, it was not a wise decision for her to start yelling at Jesus. It was not following decorum. It was not socially acceptable. And whatever backlash she encountered for yelling at Jesus, well, nowadays people might have said “she had it coming.”

Now, if someone was yelling at Jesus and his disciples as they walked through this region, well, they might expect some shouts of derision. “You don’t belong here!” “Leave!” or insults hurled their way. But the woman yelling at Jesus, she is not insulting them, she is pleading for Jesus’s help.

Because while it was not socially acceptable for her to yell at Jesus. And while it may have even been dangerous for her as a woman to yell at a group of men who would consider her an enemy, an easy target…there is one part of her identity that completely overrides the others. She is a Syrophoenician Canaanite, yes. She is a woman, yes. But she is also a mother. And her daughter, her daughter needs help. Her daughter needs healing. Her daughter is possessed by a demon. She is ill. And so this woman does what any loving mother would do, she sees an opportunity for her daughter to be healed and she takes it. She has obviously heard about Jesus, even in this unwashed, holy fenced off region of the Roman Empire. She has heard about Jesus and what he has done. He is a miracle worker. He has healed the sick. He has cast out demons. He is what she has been waiting for. The mother who is likely at the end of her rope, desperate for any solution, any treatment, any cure, any miracle for her daughter, she sees a glimmer of hope. She hears Jesus is passing by and she just goes for it, throwing caution to the wind.

She begins shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon." EXCUSE ME, SIR, ISRAELITE, JESUS, HAVE MERCY ON ME! HEAL MY DAUGHTER! HELP ME! HELP ME! PLEASE! SON OF DAVID, PLEASE!”

And, I need to give you a warning in case you weren’t paying close attention to the Gospel reading this morning. This is where Jesus starts to not look so good. He does not come off as the good guy Jesus we have all come to expect.

So she’s shouting, have mercy on me! Please! Help me! Heal my daughter! And Jesus…ignores her. He gives her the silent treatment. The text says, “But he did not answer her at all.”

“And then the disciples start ragging on her. Their hearts were not moved by her cries for help. We might have expected all these men that we call saints, the disciples, those closest to Jesus, we might have expected them to say, “Jesus, listen to her, don’t you think you could heal her daughter? Don’t you think you could drive the demons out? Don’t you think you could help? You’ve done it before. It’s for her daughter. Have mercy on her.” But, no. That’s not what they say. They say, “Geesh, Jesus, all her shouting is giving me a headache. She won’t leave us alone and is just yelling, can’t you make her go away? She’s annoying us.”

To which Jesus replies, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” His answer is clear, I wasn’t sent to help this woman. My mission and ministry is for the Israelites, the Judeans, those who are the same religion as us - not the double outsider, enemy woman shouting at us.

It is then that she is quieted. Maybe she wondered, am I really not going to get this help for my daughter? This man, this miracle worker, he can change everything for me and my daughter. He can heal her. He can. But he won’t.

So this is when she is quieted. She stopped shouting and came and knelt before Jesus, prostrating herself, humbling herself, “Lord, help me.” Now, some here have said that her calling Jesus Lord was a sign that she believed in his Divinity. But the word used, directly translated, could be just “sir.” She’s simply asking for help from Jesus, knowing what he can do for her, what he can do for her daughter. “Lord, help me.” A final plea, a simple ask for a man who had cast out demons before.

And Jesus, it gets even worse, even more uncomfortable. He looks down at this woman who is begging at his feet, this desperate woman who just wants her daughter healed, and he says to her, “It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”

Yikes! Did Jesus just…call this woman a dog? Yes, yes he did. And make no mistake about it, whether it was 2000 years ago or today, the implication of calling a woman a dog, and using any word remotely related to dog, like words I can’t and wouldn’t say in the pulpit…yeah. It’s just as insulting.

Jesus, what the heck!? Why are you being such a jerk? Or as my sermon is titled: “Yikes! Why?”

And here, the woman flips Jesus’s words back at him. She could have flipped him off and walked away. Honestly, I wouldn't have blamed her. But she KNOWS this man can heal her daughter. She knows it in every desperate bone in her body. And so she doesn’t give up. She says, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.” On one hand she is lowering herself, agreeing with Jesus’s description of her as a dog. On the other hand, she is staking her claim: I belong here. If not at the table then by it. And You. Can. Heal. My. Daughter.

To which…Jesus relents. He replies, “‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.”

At any time in that telling were you uncomfortable? I know I was. Because Jesus, who just argued with the Pharisees that they were stuck in their tradition. He said that it was what came out of a person’s mouth that made them unclean - not whether they washed their hands before eating. He said what mattered was how you treat people. How you show hospitality, love, mercy.

And then this woman comes along, this outsider enemy, and she is shouting, begging, pleading for mercy, for hospitality, for love. And Jesus…gives her the silent treatment and then insults her? Jesus, what!? Based on what you just said in your conversation to Peter about the Pharisees…you just made yourself unclean. You didn’t live up to your own standards. And everyone, everyone is deeply uncomfortable.

Jesus is uncomfortable as he is being pushed and shouted at.
The disciples are uncomfortable, not because of how Jesus acted, he acted like they’d expect a good rabbi to act toward a Canaanite woman. But they were uncomfortable because this woman wouldn’t stop yelling at them.
The woman was uncomfortable because she was putting herself out there to derision if not worse!

Now, we’ve covered the “yikes!” part of this interaction. But we haven’t quite covered the why.

Some say that Jesus was being a good Jewish rabbi, testing the seriousness and commitment of this outsider woman by making her prove herself.
Some say that Jesus was only pretending to be a jerk for the benefit of his disciples, to drive home his point he had just made in this argument with the Pharisees.
Some say that this interaction, and through working through his discomfort, actually changed Jesus’s understanding of the scope of his mission and ministry and who God sent him to save.

And for me, I am not 100 percent sure that we need to pick one of those three and be certain of it. Perhaps instead we need to work through the discomfort of the HOW it all happened and focus on the bigger why.

Because what we do know is that this marks a turning point in Jesus’s ministry where the circle is drawn wider. In today’s Gospel reading he goes from “I was sent only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel” to “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And then the Gospel of Matthew ends with “Go and make disciples OF ALL NATIONS.” That is a much bigger ministry and scope than the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And it includes Syrophoenician Canaanite women and their demon-possessed daughters. In fact, it includes all. Every nation.

Through working through discomfort, the understanding and scope of Jesus’s ministry was completely changed. Through pushing through discomfort, Jesus and this mother change everything. They draw the circle wider.

Thank you for diving deeper with me today. Thank you for working through discomfort with me. May this story embolden us to move toward our discomfort, knowing that on the other side of it, Jesus will do more for us and with us than we could ever imagine.

May it be so. Amen.