Seeing Things As They
really Are
Isaiah 56:1-7
Psalm 67
Romans 11:13-15, 29-32
Matthew 15:21-28
Tim
Christoffersen
St. Anselm’s
August 18,
2002
"The
story of the Canaanite woman’s encounter with Jesus we just heard is
a story with great depth of meaning. How many of you thought the Canaanite
woman was ‘seeing things as they really were’? If we ask the question
of ourselves, how many of you believe you ‘see things as they really
are’?
Let me give you two examples that make the question slightly more challenging.
How many of you kind of know in your bones that today you are 1.5 million
miles from where you were yesterday? That is the distance the earth has moved
through space in the last twenty four hours. Computer chips start out on something
called a wafer and it looks a lot like a CD and is just a little bit larger
in size. The chips are made up of transistors, which are basically like a
light switch that can be turned on or off. A transistor is quite a bit smaller
than a light switch. Intel’s next generation of computer chips will have
120 billion ‘switches’ or transistors on one wafer. I think that
makes it pretty hard to ‘visualize things as they really are.’
Now if you are not feeling too much discomfort about ‘seeing things as
they really are,’ let’s go back to the Canaanite woman. She approaches
Jesus and cries out to him, "Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me!
My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession." Jesus does
not answer her and the disciples, in fact, urge him to send her away. Jesus
then speaks to her and says, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of
Israel." Not an auspicious start for her.
At this point it is important to remember the historical setting. The Hebrew
people were God’s chosen people. God delivered them from bondage in Egypt
and led them through the Sinai desert into the Promised Land. They reached
their military and political high point as a unified kingdom under King David,
about 900 years before Jesus. Later they removed from the land to captivity
under the Babylonians and by the time of Jesus they were living under Roman
occupation. The Hebrew people by the time of Jesus were expecting a Messiah
who would be descended from King David. They still had a keen sense of being
a chosen people.
Remembering this, it is striking that Jesus says he was sent to the "lost"
sheep of Israel. This calls to mind Jesus’ words to the Pharisees outside
the dinner with the tax collectors and prostitutes at Matthew’s house
when Jesus called Matthew to follow him. Jesus says, "It is not the
healthy who need a doctor but the sick…. For I have not come to call
the righteous, but sinners."
The Canaanite woman does not give up. She kneels before Jesus and says,
"Lord, help me." Jesus replies, "It is not right to
take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs." Now I
am pretty sure how I would react if it were me and I felt Jesus was inferring
that I was a dog. I think this statement is one of the toughest in all of
the gospels with which to wrestle. Fortunately, I do have good company. Martin
Luther, commenting on this same sentence in a sermon, said Jesus "presents
her in a bad light, she is a condemned and an outcast person, who is not to
be reckoned among God’s chosen ones. That [Luther says] is an eternally
unanswerable reply, to which no one can give a satisfactory answer."
And how does this Canaanite woman reply to what Jesus says to her? "Yes,
Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’
table." In effect, she concedes the comparison to a dog and asks
for nothing more than a dog would be entitled to.
There is humility in her response and a tenacious faith. She clearly "sees
things as they really are" both in the worldly sense and spiritually.
Let’s look for a minute at the root meaning in Greek of the word ‘humility’.
The root word has two senses about it. One is ‘mature thinking, the faculty
of perceiving and judging’. Paul uses this word in I Corinthians 14:20,
"Brother, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants,
but in your thinking be adults." The word also has the sense of the
parts of the heart. I think of Jesus’ words in Luke 6:45: "The
good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the
evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart."
The heart is our spiritual center.
The Canaanite woman is using both her heart and her head to see things as
they really are. She recognizes that she may be a dog in the sense she may
not be entirely deserving. Paul frames this question of ‘deserving’
clearly in today’s reading from Romans. "…God has bound
all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all."
In an earlier passage in Romans, Paul says, "this righteousness from
God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference
[between Greek and Jew], for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of
God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came
by Christ Jesus."
The Canaanite woman somehow knew all this. She accepted her place in the pecking
order of the world of her day but she held fast to her faith that Jesus could
heal her daughter. In the end, Jesus acknowledges her faith has mercy on her.
"Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted."
Perhaps the largest or biggest stumbling block to a faith that allows each
of us to ‘see things as they really are’ is that each of us sins
and falls short of the glory of God and we choose not to notice or pay attention
to this fact. Speaking personally, Jesus’ words in Matthew 7 nail me:
"Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not
notice the log in your own eye? …first take the log out of your own eye,
and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s
eye."
The faith and humility of the Canaanite woman allowed her to see things as
they really are and hold fast to her faith that Jesus was, in fact, "Lord,
Son of David" and would heal her daughter.
So tomorrow when you get up, it does not matter whether or not you have noticed
that you ‘moved’ 1.5 million miles in the prior 24 hours or that
you have trouble visualizing 120 billion light switches on a CD platter. But
it does matter that you remember that God loves you, Christ died for you and
that, in faith, you will have a good shot at removing the log and ‘seeing
things as they really are.’
AMEN.
