Faith holds on to the truth of who Jesus is revealed to be, despite our sometimes incongruent experience with God.
Everyone in the world knows that Jesus is kind, compassionate, caring and full of love for all people. Long has church art depicted him cradling a lamb in his arms, or healing the man with leprosy. But sometimes, in our given life experience, that is not the Jesus we meet. It’s also not always the Jesus we see in the Gospels. Sometimes, Jesus seems…well, mean.
A disturbing passage where Jesus doesn’t meet our expectations is Matthew 15:21-28. Seeking out the lost sheep of Israel, Jesus passes into Gentile territory where a Gentile woman from Cannan approaches him in tears and distress. Her daughter is severely oppressed by a demon. “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David!” she cries. We can picture her, dirty from the long journey, a mother in crisis, a seeker who has long gone through other attempted remedies only to see her daughter get worse. Surely God, the compassionate and merciful Lord who loves everyone will be moved with compassion and help her.
But we are told in verse 24, Jesus, “did not answer her a word.” Silence. No coming to the door to answer. No reply. Not even a ‘no.’ Jesus just ignores her as if she wasn’t there. A lot of us can take a ‘no’ even if we don’t like it, but to be ignored is to be made unworthy of even this truth. It’s to be told you are not worth a reply. What a harsh response to her crisis.
The next verse records that the disciples “begged” Jesus to send her away because “she is crying out after us.” In other words, she is an embarrassment and a bother. She has resorted to begging. Is that what God wants from us? To grovel and beg and plead and embarrass ourselves in order to get what we need? The text frustrates us because Jesus and his disciples do not meet our expectations: they are impatient, rude, and uncompassionate. Not only that—the actions of Jesus and his disciples seem….wrong and petty. As the story continues, things only get worse.
In response to the disciples’ pleading, Jesus makes a broad statement—not to the woman directly, but to all present: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” This reply acknowledges the woman’s presence and need and she takes advantage of this opening. In her desperation she cries a simple but deeply profound prayer—the prayer of a mom who is running out of hope and options and frightened for her daughter. The prayer of a mom who has come a long way, faced dangers, withstood the sun, has no money, and carries with her only the goodwill and hope that Jesus is as wonderful as she has heard. Her prayer is simple but from the heart: “Lord, help me.”
What loving God could refuse such humble and simple pleading? Apparently, Jesus can. He responds, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Some commentators try to soften this reply. They point out that in Greek, the word for “dog” is a diminutive—an affectionate form of the word that means more like “pet” than an insult. All fine and well, but Jesus didn’t speak Greek—he spoke Aramaic, and there is no distinction in that language. Whatever the level of insult intended, calling her a dog is at the very least meant to disenfranchise her and set her on the lowest levels of Jesus’ hierarchy. Jesus’ reply is a door slam, he answers the door only to slam it shut in her face. She has come a long way but the response to her is clear: “No!”
So many of them are confused about his identity, but she is assured.
What the woman does next is actually rather incredible: she replies by stating her entitlements: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” Her response is—if you will excuse the term—a form of holy entrapment. She has entrapped Jesus by exposing the truth of who he is. So many times in the Gospels, Jesus outwits his opponents, but here, this desperate woman entraps Jesus in the truth of who he is. There were already clues leading to this previously.
Earlier she had called him “Lord” and “Son of David.” She has some deeper sense of the truth of who Jesus is than the Jews Jesus came into this geographic region to find. So many of them are confused about his identity, but she is assured. Essentially, she is saying to him that she expects him to be true to who she knows him to be just as a dog rightly expects food from the master’s table. It is a question of identity and entitlements. Her faith expects him to act like who he really is. Her faith is grounded in a proper sense of who Jesus is, not in a sense of what she deserves because of her merits.
A bad reading of this passage often proclaims the faith she displayed, and that Jesus marvels at—the faith that grants her healing request—is a faith of persistence. Essentially, this misinterpretation argues Jesus rewards her because she doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. Yet in 2 Corinthians 12:7, St. Paul also doesn’t give up praying for the removal of a “thorn in his flesh,” but God continues to say ‘no’ so that God’s strength may be made perfect in weakness. The point of our passage is not to persist in prayer until you get what you want. Faith is not endurance, even if faith endures.
But there is something valuable being said about Jesus as well as about this woman’s faith. Her faith knows who he is, despite his apparently steely personality. This is an important point for us as we ride the waves of misunderstanding, confusion, and hurt from a God whose will we sometimes don’t understand or find hard to accept. Faith holds on to the truth of who Jesus is revealed to be, despite our sometimes incongruent experience with God.
Take the passage as a whole, one more time, in sequence:
- Sometimes we pray and pray and pray to God and all we get back is silence. He answers us not a word. We feel abandoned, ignored and forgotten.
- Sometimes God breaks the silence by telling us “no.” He told the woman “no” and God’s “no” can hurt and make us doubt our faith.
- Sometimes God’s ‘no” becomes a “yes.” God is never wrong, but he can, so to speak, change his mind. Sometimes he does so like in the case of this woman; sometimes he doesn’t as in the case of St. Paul. Living a life of faith means accepting God’s “no” eventually, when it becomes clear to us he will not change his mind.
When we find our spiritual lives meet a God who doesn’t fit our expectations, who seems contradictory to what we know about him, we do well to rest on what is true and revealed. This is really what is meant by the old phrase, “Wait on the Lord.” It is a summons to be patient through our conflicting emotions so that God can be shown to be faithful and true. Only then can we discern God’s “yes” and “no” for our present circumstances, and only then can we work through our pain while embracing God’s loving healing for us. If God is silent, he will not always be. If God says ‘no’ perhaps he will change his mind in time. Sometimes, God’s ‘no’ is final, but God will help you to accept that and bring good from it. Other times, God’s ‘no’ serves some purpose that prepares us for his ‘yes.’
Suffering is an experience that requires time to get through.
None of these truths, of course, relieve the pain of spiritual suffering. Knowing them does not make that suffering easier. But it does give us a way to move through it, waiting on the God who is revealed in the WORD and true, so that we do not make a false God out of our experience. God is actually not mean, but he can seem that way to us sometimes. All the more reason to have a firm and assured sense of who he is apart from our feelings about him by hearing and reading the Word.
The woman in the passage today experienced the whole gamut of spiritual suffering in microcosm. She serves as an example to us as to how God can sometimes seem other than we expect, but also, that faith clings to who he is. Suffering is an experience that requires time to get through. All the better if the faith we bring to that journey stands solid and firm on the God who, through silence, or ‘no’ leads us to a ‘yes.’ Even if we do not get the specific thing we ask for, in Christ, God’s final answer to us is always ‘yes.’
