This miracle is not simply the story of a mother and her demon-possessed child; it is really an international incident which was to affect the future shape of Christendom. What happened to the Canaanite woman that day affects us today in a most direct and vital way.
Like most international incidents it happened at the border between two adversaries. Jesus had traveled to the extreme north end of the Jordan Valley. He was standing at the border line between Syria and Galilee. The inhabitants of Syria were called Phoenicians.
The story of our miracle is told by Mark (7:24-30) as well as by Matthew (15:21-23). Scholars fail to agree as to whether Jesus actually set foot into Gentile territory. Some interpreters like Richard Trench1 are convinced that at no time in his earthly ministry did our Lord pass beyond the borders of the Holy Land. Others like R. C. H. Lenski and William Hendriksen2 are certain that he did. The accounts are not clear at this point. In Matthew, Jesus went only in the direction of the foreign country. In Mark, it might be assumed that Jesus entered into Gentile territory when he writes, "He went into a house, and did not want anyone to know that he was there." Some writers see the lack of this detail in Matthew as his hesitancy to have Jesus enter a Gentile house because it was well understood that a pious Jew would never enter an unclean place. In Mark, the woman comes to Jesus, enters into the house and falls at his feet. In Matthew, she comes out from Phoenicia and meets Jesus while he is still in Galilee. The issue of
whether or not Jesus actually set foot on the foreign soil of a Gentile land is difficult to resolve. But this is not really essential for an understanding of the full meaning of this story. The important fact is that Jesus is standing at a more decisive border - a border not geographical but racial. He stood at the borderline between two distinctively different races of people - the Jews and the Gentiles. The woman who confronted Jesus was a heathen - a pagan - a Gentile. Mark calls her a Syrophoenician. Matthew refers to her as a Canaanite. Harvey comments that this "is a piece of antiquarianism on the part of Matthew."3 It is really an Old Testament word used to designate those people who were occupying the promised land when the Jews arrived. This, however, might be suggestive of the seriousness in which Matthew held this encounter between Jesus and a Canaanite woman. The whole history of the Jews since they had arrived in the promised land was now to be altered by the radical action of Christ as he healed the daughter of a hated foreigner. "Here," writes H. Benedict Green, "the future attitude of the church to the Gentiles is prefigured."4
The relationship between Jew and Gentile doesn’t mean very much to us today, but in the days of our Lord it was an explosive issue. In the minds of the disciples, the fact that this woman was a mother with a sick child was secondary to the fact that she was a Gentile. For them, the issue was not their Lord’s ability to heal a sick child, but would he step over the forbidden threshold that protected the purity of the Jews as the children of God?
To understand the serious implications of what Jesus did that day, we need to view it against the background of Old Testament history. Here there were two views in tension. One view held Israel to be a closed nation of the chosen children of God. The other saw Israel as the priest-nation servant to the world created by God. Abraham was called by God to be the father of a particular people. But it was a calling with a covenant, and that was an agreement with a task. They were to be the means by which all the nations of the earth would be blessed. The prophets never lost this perspective, but the Jewish leaders and the ordinary Jews viewed their election as a separation out from an unclean world to be a holy and pure people. Therefore, they erected about themselves strong barriers of exclusiveness.
It was left to Second Isaiah to solve the puzzle of this impossible tension (Isaiah 49:5-6). Second Isaiah revealed that there were two stages in God’s redemptive work - first, the restoration of Israel to its true purpose and destiny as the chosen people of God; second, the restoration of Israel as the servant people of God who would go forth to bring God’s kingdom to the world.
This was undoubtedly the strategy of Christ. He lived close to the neighborhood of the Gentiles all his life, but he rarely made contact with them. He never undertook a mission to Gentiles. This is not to imply that Jesus had less universal a vision of God’s ultimate Kingdom than did Genesis, or Jeremiah or Second Isaiah; rather, he viewed his calling to be the first step of Second Isaiah’s plan of redemption, namely the restoration of the Jews to their chosen role as servants and children of God.
It is interesting to note that Matthew not only records the words of Jesus, "I have been sent only unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel," but he also records, "Go, then, to all peoples everywhere and make them my disciples." The only answer to this apparent contradiction seems to be that whereas Jesus saw his own mission especially directed to the Jews, for his disciples he saw the mission expanded to include all the world.
So Jesus stands at the borderline between Jew and Gentile, a borderline he himself acknowledged and respected. Before him stands a Gentile woman in need. The whole historic tension between Jew and Gentile hangs in the balance. Calmly but deliberately, Jesus fires the shot that will be heard around the world. And the shot he fired into the barrier between Jew and Gentile was the simple little word "faith"! From that moment on, a revolution in religion occurred, and the banner that led its followers out to conquer the world bore that one little word - "faith." It was to take time. It took a man called Paul to recognize the full revolutionary implications of this word. There is little doubt that Paul, more than any other man, drew the attention of God’s people to this word, "faith." The issue of who shall enter into the Kingdom of God was no longer a matter of racial heritage but of faith. And the mark of membership in the Kingdom was no longer the priestly ritual of the temple nor the Mosaic Law of the synagogue, but the personal relationship between a people and their God.
Jesus said to the woman, "You are a woman of great faith. What you want will be done for you." The radical impact of that statement upon history has yet to be fully realized. But of one thing we can be certain - the way to the Kingdom of God for you and for me has now been opened up.
One Who Stands Clean Before the Lord
When the miracle story is viewed in the light of its placement within the Gospels, an interesting lesson emerges. Both Matthew and Mark place our miracle story in a situation of controversy - the controversy between the disciples of Jesus and the Pharisees over the issue of religious cleanliness.
The Pharisees were concerned about the fact that the disciples did not wash their hands before eating. Now that sounds natural enough to most of us, for how many times have we told our children to wash their hands before coming to the table? But the issue here was not hygienic but religious. It was the issue of what constitutes religious purity.
The belief of the Pharisees was that man’s contact with the world made him dirty. Jesus disagreed and held that nothing outside a person can enter into him and defile him. Rather, it is that which comes out of a person that defiles him. It is the condition of the heart and not the cleanliness of the hands that determines the state of a person’s purity before God.
The Greek word used here is kardia, which means more than the physical organ we commonly think of when we hear the word "heart." Kardia means the core and center of a person. It is the place of origin for all our feelings, thinking and acting. So that what Jesus is saying here is that it is not the hands - the outward state - that should first concern us, but our hearts - the inner state of our being. The Pharisees were demanding the correct practice and observance of a ritualistic rite. Jesus, on the other hand, went directly to the core of cleanliness and pointed to the heart - the inner condition and commitment of the heart.
When the miracle of the Canaanite woman is seen in the light of this controversy, some interesting interpretations are possible. The event of the miracle becomes a living parable of a principle which Christ had just presented. It is an example in a real-life situation of what it means to be clean before God.
The example which Jesus chooses is a strange and even shocking one. The woman is a Gentile, a foreigner. In the eyes of the Jewish disciples, she was an outcast. She was not a member of God’s chosen race. She did not know the law or obey it. She was a representative of the unclean Gentile world and yet Jesus used her as an example of religious cleanliness. He had by-passed his own people and publicly declared her to be clean.
Now, why? Why was this woman an example of cleanliness before God? The answer which the setting of this story gives is that it was the condition of her heart. And where was the concern of her heart? Not on herself but on her daughter. She came to Jesus, and she cried out, "Son of David, sir! Have mercy on me! My daughter has a demon and is in a terrible condition." The whole life of this mother was focused on the need of her child. She was willing to be ignored, insulted and rebuffed if only her daughter could be healed.
Dr. Reinartz, for many years secretary of the United Lutheran Church in America, tells of his mother who struggled to hold their family together through the Great Depression. When times were rough and food was short in the parsonage, she would place a meal on the table and then wait until her husband and her children had enough to eat. Only then would she partake of what was left. As the days went by, Dr. Reinartz tells, he noticed his mother’s hands as she sat at the table; each day they became more and more wrinkled and drawn from laboring long hours for her family. Then it came to him - those hands were dying for him.
This Canannite woman died to herself as she stood before our Lord. Her inner concern was truly and totally for another. Therefore, Jesus follows precept with parable, idea with example, and points out in a dramatic way that this Gentile woman, outwardly condemned by the law as unclean, was in reality clean before God. She was clean because her heart was humble, empty of self, and totally concerned for another - her daughter.
This is what Jesus again and again attempted to teach his disciples. He wanted to prepare them to understand that his life and death were meant to fulfill the Gospel of willing obedience to God and concern for others. On the cross he was ignored, rebuked and insulted. And all this, not for himself but for others. Therefore, the greatness of this woman’s faith was not just the fact that she trusted in the ability of Christ to heal her daughter, or even that her trust was persistent and unperturbed by insult and rebuke; rather, the greatness of her faith sprang from the inner condition of her heart - a heart humble and helpless, dependent on Christ, and totally concerned for another - her daughter.
The Woman Who Got More From the Kingdom of God Than She Bargained For
When the miracle story is viewed apart from its setting in Matthew and Mark, other interpretations are suggested. It becomes, for example, an account of a woman who got more from the Kingdom of God than she bargained for. The woman came to Jesus asking for one miracle and she got two. This is really a double miracle, for the daughter was exorcised of her demonic possession and received a new life, and the mother, through her experience with Christ, found a new life as well.
This interpretation of the miracle places the mother as the main character of the account. The daughter is simply the occasion that brought about the encounter between this woman and Christ. Many commentators point out that this is an amazing story of how a woman’s superstitious belief in Christ as a healer was transformed into a faith that Christ was her savior.
Unlikely Soil
Now, this growth of faith took place in the most unlikely soil. This woman grew in a situation of adversity and insults. Most people use adversity as an excuse for not having faith, or at least for failing and weak faith. Faced with troubles, they become discouraged and are ready to give up. God has failed them. God has brought this tragedy into their lives. They are not to blame. God is. They are caught in circumstances that cut them down and count them out and at the same time cut them off from God. Everyone is against them - even God.
Not so with this woman. She seems to thrive under the treatment of tragedy. The fascinating thing is that Christ was sensitive to the needs of this woman. He knew that she was different. And that difference and his response to it explains to some extent the strange actions of our Lord in this story.
Treatment - Rude not Redemptive
The average reader is shocked by the treatment this woman received from Jesus. The gentle Jesus of our Sunday school art - one who is always kind and responsive to people in their needs, suddenly is presented as a man of indifference - harsh and even rude. The idea that Jesus could and would act like a narrow-minded nationalistic Jew is understandably repulsive to us. Yet that is the apparent picture that is first presented to us in this story - at least so far as the surface facts are concerned.
What we need to see is that this roughness was a treatment. Christ recognized not only what this woman needed but how those needs would best be met. Lincoln once saw a man attempting to split a log. "The wood is too hard," the man remarked to Abe. "No," Lincoln came back, "your ax is too dull." Jesus was willing to sharpen his ax when the situation called for it. He knew that what she needed was not kindness at this point, but a shock treatment. And she got it. Christ was willing to go against his own nature if that was what the situation demanded, and apparently that is exactly what this situation did demand! Christ was concerned first for the woman and what she needed, rather than that his character and reputation be consistently maintained. He was willing to go contrary to his own nature if it would help this woman.
Many times kindness is not the answer. Kindness can be cruel, and actually kill. If a small boy breaks his arm and his father takes him to the doctor, the boy may cling to his father and beg him not to let the doctor hurt him. But if the arm is to be straightened the father must let his son undergo the painful process of setting the bone. Otherwise the son would face life with a crippled arm. Sometimes there is no kind answer, no kind and gentle way of dealing adequately with the need.
So Jesus met this woman at the level of her needs and was willing to apply the treatment necessary. From our point of view it may seem unnecessarily rough, but the final results prove the wisdom of our Lord’s actions. Jesus diagnosed this woman. He knew from the very beginning of the encounter that he would heal her daughter. There was never a doubt in his mind about that, but he was concerned not just for the daughter but for the mother as well, and he decided to heal them both.
A Trial of Faith
Some interpreters attempt to excuse or at least justify Jesus’ treatment of this woman as a trial of faith. He was simply testing her in order to discover the quality or strength of her faith. If she was worthy of being helped, then he would do something for her. William Taylor, for example, writes, "As regards the woman, the course adopted by the Lord was well fitted to test her faith. He would prove whether she were really as earnest as she seemed to be."5
Others strongly disagree. Lenskie says, "Jesus did not keep this woman on ‘tenterhooks’ for the purpose of making her faith stretch itself to the utmost, like holding a morsel higher and higher to make a dog jump to the limit of his ability before rewarding him."6 Jesus was not sending her through a series of obstacles to be overcome, each one being made progressively more difficult. As James Smart says, "But it is not like Jesus to play with a person’s faith in an hour of need merely to test the strength of faith."7
Others, like Luther,8 see the event as a trial of faith, not in the sense that Jesus was testing her faith to see how strong it was, but rather a testing that would in the process make of it a stronger faith. This is the principle that resistance is necessary for the development of strength, as every good athlete knows.
These interpretations are seldom satisfactory, for in the end they create more problems than they answer. They tend to make of Jesus not a savior who comes to sinners - the unworthy - giving them unmerited gifts of grace, but rather such explanations make of Jesus a "master of ceremonies," rewarding faith-athletes who have developed strong muscles in their struggle for self-improvement. Or at the very best, they present Jesus as a teacher who instructs persons in the process of developing a strong faith. This is simply not consistent with the concept of faith as presented in the New Testament. Faith is the work of God in us - not the results of a training session endured and a series of tests passed. What we have here in our miracle story is not so much a test as a treatment - something that Christ does to and in this woman.
Operation Silence
The first step in this woman’s treatment was silence. "But Jesus did not say a word to her." In the Greek, "not" (ouk) precedes the verb, and so it is an emphatic statement.
Homileticians have generally focused in on this reaction of Jesus; for them it becomes a symbolic act of the silence of God, and suggests the problem of "unanswered prayer." They see in Christ’s silence to the woman’s plea a dramatization of the experience of a person who calls on God in prayer for help and God doesn’t answer.
Edmund Steimle, for example, deals with this miracle as a case history of unanswered prayer. He sees in the woman’s reaction the positive point of persistence which awakens a response in Jesus. Steimle goes on to say that, like this woman, we need to prove our sincerity in prayer by our persistence. Then he concludes his sermon with the assurance that "God never lets a man down who trusts him all the way."9
Ronald Wallace follows this same line and sees in this miracle a story of a woman who refused to accept the tragic circumstances of her life as inevitable. He feels this should be a lesson to us all, for we too often resign ourselves too quickly to failure. We should rather, when faced with problems, not relax and resign ourselves to them - but rebel.
Wallace goes on to point out that the silence of God is only an appearance; the Word of God expresses his true nature. "We must see in the silence of God nothing else but a challenge to ourselves to persist in our praying till we have some response to our knocking at the door of heaven." Wallace then concludes with the idea that, "Faith laying hold of the love of God will be able to draw from the heart of God a response that would not otherwise be given."10
The interpretations are most helpful and very preachable, but they fail to focus in on the problem of the text itself. Why was Jesus silent in this particular moment of our story? To answer this question, it is necessary to see three possible approaches. First, was this silence directed toward the woman, or second, was it directed toward the disciples, or third, was it a silence reflecting some inner struggle within Jesus himself?
Jesus’ Own Inner Struggle
Klostermann and Branscomb see this incident as marking a stage in Jesus’ understanding of his own mission. His silence represented an inner struggle. He was moving from a Jewish exclusiveness toward a more universal outlook.11
For Bruce, the silence of Jesus is an expression of his uncertainty. He writes that there was within Jesus "a disinclination to be thrown into a ministry among the heathen people which would mar the unity of his career as a prophet of God to Israel."12
Theodore P. Ferris presents this interpretation in even a stronger manner as he suggests in his sermon:
Throw away your picture of Jesus as the idealized man, the man who never spoke a harsh word; the man who was never tempted by any deep-seated hostilities that plague us; never torn by the dark passions that tear us to shreds; the picture of Jesus that shed all his Jewishness when he was a boy ... There is a better picture of Jesus, of a man growing up into the stature of a mature human being; wrapped as everyone is, in the swaddling clothes of his people’s past, both their prejudices and their principles, their greatness and their weakness. Gradually, you can see him wriggling out of those swaddling clothes, working himself finally free of them. By birth he was predisposed to treat Gentiles as outsiders. The Gentile woman was an outsider. He finally came to see the Gentile in need to be the same as any other human being in need. He grew in stature, and growth is a painful process. That to me is a much more realistic picture of Jesus.13
This interpretation of the miracle may have its problems for those who hold to the unsoiled divinity of Christ at the expense of his humanity, but it does present to us a Jesus who was truly a man of his day and in so doing presents to us a savior who understands. For as he has faced honestly the temptation of prejudice and fought it through and conquered it, then surely he can understand our struggles and listen to our pleas for help with real identification. He has gone this way himself, and he knows that it is not an easy task to throw off the effects of the social and family training that have created prejudice within us all. We are many times victims of our inheritance and our environment, and he is patient with us when we struggle and fail to change the ingrained and learned attitudes toward people who are different. He is with us when we, as Ferris puts it, "move through the narrows of inherited nationalism out into the great depths of human need."
Role Playing With the Disciples
Some scholars take the position that the silence of Jesus was not an inner struggle but directed at the disciples. They see the purpose for Jesus entering Gentile territory as an opportunity for Jesus to teach his disciples. For example, James Smart writes to this point: "The idea that Jesus hesitated because he was uncertain whether or not he should respond to the need of a Gentile is ridiculous, particularly in the light of his eventual praise of the woman’s faith. It was a strategic hesitation, utilizing the encounter with a Gentile to draw out and expose the discriminatory prejudice of the disciples."14
Jesus was literally acting out the response of the disciples to show them how their attitude toward the woman really appeared. Jesus was playing a role. He was holding a mirror up to the disciples to show them the reflection of their true selves.
Herschel Hobbs goes a step further and sees in Jesus’ silence a lesson directed against the whole Jewish traditional attitude toward the Gentiles. Hobbs says, "What better way could he show the vicious nature of the tradition of the elders than by assuming their role himself."15
Hobbs sees this part of the miracle story as an acted parable performed for the disciples to unmask their vicious attitude that would ignore a woman in great need simply because she was a Gentile. The point is stingingly clear. The outside world was crying out to the priest-nation of Israel for help, and they answered them not a word. William Taylor expresses this same idea very clearly when he says, "What the Pharisees were among the Jews, that the Jews were themselves at that time among the nations."16
This approach presents Jesus as role-playing the inner thoughts and attitudes of his followers. It is sort of an "Archie Bunker" approach where ugly bigotry's personified and held up before us that we might see our true selves in the actions of another. Many times this is the only way to expose us to what we really are, and then having been repelled and shocked by this experience, we
willingly accept an opportunity to change.
Now there is merit here. For any true encounter with Jesus should not only lift us up to the full potential of being a new person in him, but it should at the same time expose us as we really are in all our ugliness. We can never really fully appreciate what Christ has done for us, until we have realized how far we have fallen away from the destiny that our Father intended for us. Before the new life in Christ can be embraced and celebrated, the old person in us must be honestly faced, severely condemned and completely rejected. An encounter with the living Lord is always both a repelling and an attracting experience. The evil in us is repelled as we are drawn to the fresh new freedom promised in Christ. As the Canaanite woman was first rejected and then accepted, so the disciples and we must continually experience the struggle of rejection and acceptance, repulsion and attraction which is essential for growth out of our old ways and into the new way which Christ offers to them and to us.
Let It All Out
When we look at the miracle story from the point of view of the woman, we see our Lord’s penetrating insight into human personality. He is always concerned not just with the problem but with the person. Despite the fact that not a great deal of information is given to us about this woman, other than the fact that she was a Gentile, there are several things we can assume if we are sensitive to her actions in the account. It seems obvious that she was not a quiet demure type of lady. She was by nature strong willed, aggressive and very emotional. She was much like "Maude" of television fame. She was, our text tells us, so demonstrative that the disciples begged Jesus to send her away. "She is following us and making all this noise," they said.
Now this was not the day of women’s liberation, and the position of womanhood should have placed her firmly in the background - not being seen or heard. But she was not to let social proprieties or customs stand in her way. She went after Jesus and the disciples like a lioness when her cubs are threatened. And she would not let them alone.
We can also assume that she came to Jesus tense and filled with pent-up emotions and frustrations. She had been searching for a long time for a cure for her child. She was at her wit’s end. Frustrated by disappointing cures, she was now at a stage of sheer desperation. What she needed before all else was a release of her emotional tensions. She needed to let it all out. And that is exactly what Jesus did by reacting to her first plea with silence. He knew that there was no point in dealing with her problem until she had calmed down, and she could not calm down until she had fully expressed the intensity of her feelings.
Today we recognize the importance of such emotional release. In a grief situation, the tears and moans of self-pity, the total expression of grief, are a vital part of therapy. So the silence of Jesus permitted the woman to release weeks of anxiety.
Self-Evaluation
The second step in Jesus’ treatment of the woman was one intended for self-evaluation. He does not address the woman directly; rather, he speaks in the direction of the disciples, knowing that she will overhear his remarks. James Smart sees here a statement used as a two-edged sword cutting in two directions at once.17 It is part of his role-playing with the disciples. The words he speaks are their words, "I have been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." But he intends these words also for the woman. She gets the point. She stops her emotional tantrums, comes to Jesus, and falls meekly at his feet. She realizes that she is not of the house of Israel and therefore an outsider, but she is willing to do anything - become anything - if only this man will help her daughter.
It is important to note at this point that the woman interprets what Jesus said as you do not belong, but she does not interpret it, you cannot belong. Somehow, Christ communicated to this woman that the words he spoke were not a final rejection but a challenge to respond. It may have been that her desperate need blinded her to all else. Or it may have been that all she had heard about this Jesus convinced her that he would not completely deny her. So far as the story is concerned, the fact that Jesus did not do what the disciples asked - send her away - raised sufficient hope in her and gave her the courage to persist.
Scraps for the Puppy Dog
Then Jesus looks directly at her. "Is it right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs?" Ever since Origen, interpreters of this miracle story have pointed out that the word Jesus uses here is diminutive in form and therefore means "puppy" and denotes a household pet.
R. C. H. Lenski18 makes more of this than any other interpreter. He creates a domestic picture of children dining with their little pet beside them and any crumb that falls from the hands their little pet beside them and any crumb that falls from the hands of the children is quickly snatched up by their pet. Lenski paraphrases the statement of Jesus, "It is not a nice thing to take the bread of children and throw it on the floor for the pet dog." The implication, according to Lenski, is that the bread is taken from the children. It is not the crumbs that normally fell from the dining table; but the bread is actually taken away from the children and given to the dogs.
The woman quickly siezes on the word "taken" and comes back at Jesus, "Yes, Lord! But is it not possible that the little pet dog could eat some of the bread if it fell from the table?"
Being a Gentile, she did not presume to possess the rights of the chosen people. She did not want to take anything away from them - she only wanted left-overs, scraps, any little part of what the children failed to eat. For Lenski this is most significant. The very use of the term, "little pet dog," separated this woman out from the general classification of all other Gentiles. As a neighbor to the Jews she had lived among and close to them; therefore, she was different from the ordinary Gentile. Because of this closeness, she feels she has some claim to a few crumbs of grace that fall from the tables of the Jews. She wants to be let into the Kingdom not as a child of God, but as a dog who cleans the floors.
This interpretation has great appeal and would certainly make for an interesting sermon. However, knowing the Eastern mind and particularly the Hebrew mind, it is difficult to see how the term "dog," even in its diminutive form of "puppy," could have been taken as A. D. Bruce states, "playfully and humorous." Knowing the serious bigotry and prejudice of the Jews toward the Gentiles at the time of Jesus, it would be rather a sick form of humor to call a Gentile a "puppy dog," even in jest or play. As one of my students pointed out, "To call a policeman a ‘little piggy’ would not soften the sting of the insult. It might even increase it." William Taylor seems closer to the truth when he writes, "Surely this was a mode of speech well calculated to destroy all hope in the woman’s heart. It seemed nothing short of a refusal, given in somewhat of an offensive way."19 This woman was undergoing a baptism by fire, and the story loses its dramatic impact when we attempt to avoid the harsh treatment our Lord applies to this woman.
A Real Encounter
When one places the story of this miracle in the Oriental culture in which it happened, additional light is thrown upon it. In the East, transactions between people, even in the business world, are intensely personal encounters. You do not simply buy an object; you bargain for it. If a man in the street attempts to sell you a rug, you do not ask the price, reach in your pocket and pay the amount. No! You strike up a conversation with the seller. He makes a proposal of price and you react with a counter proposal. There is a live personal exchange even to the point of a hassle. To immediately pay the price asked would destroy the opportunity for a personal encounter and would, as one of my Eastern friends pointed out, "Take all the fun out of business." Our method of transacting business here in America is cold and computerized. We stop and look and then finally make up our own mind to buy. The less the clerk interferes, the better. That is the way we like it. We are disturbed with the salesman who is too aggressive, but not so in the East. There the seller wants to be a part of the transaction. He wants to become involved with you as a person, not just as a customer. There is the delight of encounter and conflict that occurs in any exchange between buyer and seller.
This is not to imply that what happened in our story was a business transaction where a woman paid so much in effort and presented such a strong faith as to buy a favor from Jesus. Just the opposite. But what is important and similar to our story is the fact that here we have a real encounter between a woman and Christ. The problem the woman possesses is not the important thing - not even the healing of the daughter in the end; rather, the important thing is that Jesus and this woman had a real encounter - an engagement of personalities, and this created a situation in which something marvelous could happen.
A Daughter of Jacob
It could be concluded that Jesus was departing from his clearly stated principle that he had been sent only to the house of Israel. Therefore, when he heals the daughter of this woman, he is making an exception. Certainly, so far as the disciples were concerned, Jesus was making an exception of this woman - a very dangerous exception. She is a Greek and a Gentile. There is no doubt about that and the two absolutely do not mix with the Jews.
In another sense, however, Jesus does not make an exception. For in her encounter and struggles with Jesus, she was being baptized into Israel and was becoming a child of God. Luther’s assertion is that this story teaches us "the method and trick of wrestling with God."
In the book of Genesis (32:26) there is the account of how Jacob wrestled with the angel of the Lord until he was blessed. And what happened to him? He was changed by this encounter. He was transformed. And his name was changed from "Jacob" to "Israel." To this woman Jesus was an angel from the Lord, and she wrestled with him, struggled with him, surrendered and submitted herself to him until she was finally blessed by him. This was her baptism by fire, and because of it she stood before God as a true "Israelite."
Baptism by Fire
In the light of the New Testament understanding of dying and rising with Christ, which is the meaning of being baptized, this woman was actually baptized by this experience with Christ into the new life and became part of the "new Israel." All the necessary elements seem to be present in this story - a great need, self-denial, humiliation, recognition of personal helplessness, struggle and surrender, and finally, being blessed. Truly this woman underwent a baptism by fire, and in it she was given a great faith.
Faith Is a Personal Minus
In our story this woman knelt down before Christ. In this woman’s world there was only her daughter, Christ, and herself - there was nothing else. She willingly sacrifices herself, does everything to cut herself out of the picture, to eliminate herself so that there are only Christ and her daughter. She literally casts all her desperate frustrations and heart-rending problems onto Christ. "Destroy me!" she is saying, "but save my daughter." This casting of all her burdens upon the Lord is the true mark of faith. It is not the woman’s self-assertion, self-determination, self-effort - just the opposite. This woman’s great faith results from the total surrender of herself - her self-respect, her self-esteem, her self-concern. What better picture could we have in the New Testament to summarize the meaning of faith.
When John G. Paton went as a missionary to the cannibals of the South Sea Islands, one of the first things he did was set about translating the New Testament into their language. When he came to the word "faith," he discovered there was no adequate equivalent in the native language. One day a runner came into Paton’s tent. He was totally exhausted and out of breath and fell down on a bamboo couch, letting the whole weight of his body relax into the soft support of the couch. One of the men standing near by used a word to describe what the runner had done. Paton leaped to his feet, "That’s it! That’s it!" he shouted. He asked his friend to repeat the word, which meant casting all one’s weight upon the couch. Paton said, "That’s what faith in Christ is; it means casting your total self upon Jesus Christ."
Great Faith
The faith of this woman was great because it was not hers. As she surrendered herself to Christ and cast herself totally upon him in trust, God gave her great faith. In this encounter with Christ, she was torn open and was filled with faith by God. As Hendricksen so graphically states this truth of the miracle story, "Divine love is so infinite and marvelous that it even praises a human being for exercising a gift - in this case faith - with which this very divine love has endowed her, and which apart from that divine activity could not have gone into action at all." Alan Richardson stresses this same thought when he says, "It is God himself who enables us to overcome in the struggle; it was Jesus himself who inspired the faith of the woman until it was triumphant."20
Now it is true that in the Greek the word used for "thy" (sou) is written out and therefore is emphatic. But the intent is not to emphasize her personal part in the accomplishment of this act of faith, but to contrast the faith which possessed her with the lack of faith exhibited by so many who were proud of the fact that they bore the name of Israel.
When Jesus praises her, "O woman, great is your faith," he is not saying, "You have mustered forth by your own efforts a faith that is so outstanding I cannot refuse anything you ask." Rather he is saying, "The gift of faith God has given you has been used well!"
Therefore, the lesson this miracle teaches is not to increase our own faith, but open ourselves up to God that he might give us great faith. God provides what he demands. And he blesses what has been given when it issues forth into action in our lives. This is not a story about one woman’s great faith as much as it is an account of God’s great gift of faith operating effectively in the life of this particular woman.
There was once a little old man with a long white beard. He had a great amount of faith in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. With everyone he met, he just had to share his story about Jesus. But he noticed that every time he witnessed to Christ, he lost a little bit of his own faith. But this did not stop him; he kept right on testifying to everyone he met until he had just enough faith left for himself.
The temptation to witness was so great that he thought the only thing he could do was live apart from people. So he did. He found an old log cabin isolated high in the mountains, and there he lived preserving his last little hit of faith. Then, one day, he saw a young man coming down the mountain trail right past his cabin. The little old man was terrified. He felt his little bit of faith welling up in him about ready to explode. So he closed his eyes and hid behind the shutters of his window until the young man had passed.
In the evening the young man returned from town and this time, instead of being empty-handed as he was in the morning, his arms were loaded down and on his back was a sack full of things. The next day the same thing happened. In the morning the young man passed the cabin empty-handed, and in the evening he returned loaded down with things. After several days of this same occurrence, the little old man came to the realization that the young man was a thief. He would go into the village in the morning and return in the evening with his ill-gotten gain.
"Oh, my!" the little old man thought to himself. "How tragic! Such a nice looking young man and he is throwing his life away in crime." The little old man felt impelled to go out and testify to the young man and point out to him what a dangerous path he was following. But he held back because the cherished faith he possessed was not enough to share with another person. Finally, however, the pressure was too great, and as the young man passed by, the little old man rushed out and told him about Jesus who had died for his sins so that he could live a good and happy life.
The young man listened attentively and as he did, his whole face lighted up. He was delighted - thrilled with the story that he had been died for - that he was important enough for God to care about him. The young man suddenly blurted out, "Thank you, my dear friend. I’ve never heard that story before. It’s wonderful and I promise you I’ll never do another wrong thing." And the young man went off singing merrily down the mountain. But the little old man with the long white beard fell to the ground sobbing his heart out, for he had given away his last bit of faith and had none left for himself.
Then suddenly the little old man felt a touch on his shoulder and he looked up and there stood his Lord - the Christ! "No, Jesus," the little old man cried out, "depart from me. I have no more faith left. I am not worthy to enter into your kingdom." But Jesus just looked at the little old man’s long white beard stained with tears and smiled, "Fret not, little friend," the Lord said. "True, you have given away all your faith, but it is not by your own faith that you enter the Kingdom, but by mine. And the more you give away your own faith, the more room you have to receive mine. You have now a great faith, so enter into my Kingdom."21
This is the main lesson of our miracle story. Great faith comes not as the result of our own effort to have faith, but in the willingness to give ourselves to others. In the act of giving ourselves away, we receive the gift of great faith from God.
1. Richard C. Trench, Notes on the Miracles of Our Lord (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1956), p. 213.
2. R. C. H. Lenski, The Gospel Selections of the Ancient Church (Columbus, Ohio: Lutheran Book Concern, 1936), p. 348.
William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Baker Book House, 1973).
3. A. E. Harvey, Companion to the New Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 65.
4. H. Benedict Green, The Gospel According to Matthew, New Clarendon Bible (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 146.
5. William M. Taylor, The Miracles of Our Savior (New York: A. C. Arnstrong, 1900), p. 299.
6. Lenski, op. cit. p. 351.
7. James D. Smart, The Quiet Revolution (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1959), p. 72.
8. Martin Luther.
9. Edmund A. Steimle, Are You Looking For God? (Philadephia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), p. 50.
10. Ronald S. Wallace, The Gospel Miracles (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1960, p. 111).
11. B. Harvie Branscomb, The Gospel of Mark, Moffatt New Testament Commentary (New York: Harper, 1937), p. 137.
12. F. F. Bruce, A New Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1969), p. 186.
13. Theodore Parker Ferris, Jew and Gentile (A sermon preached by Ferris in Trinity Church, Boston, on the Second Sunday in Lent, March 2, 1969).
14. Smart, op. cit. p. 72.
15. Herschel Hobbs, An Exposition of the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1965), p. 203.
16. Taylor, op. cit. p. 302.
17. Smart, op. cit. p. 72.
18. Lenski, op. cit. p. 349.
19. Taylor, op. cit. p. 297.
20. Hendriksen, op. cit. p. 621.
21. Clarence Jordan, The Substance of Faith and Other Cotton Patch Sermons (New York: Association Press, 1972), p. 43.
