Matthew 15:21-28 | "Life-Giving Crumbs"

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning and welcome.

You can breathe a sigh of relief.

I am dressed normally this morning.

Thank you for returning to our worship services after my sermon last Sunday.

If you missed it, all I'm gonna say is watch the video.

The object lesson of how I was dressed last Sunday and the illustrations I used were designed to stir you up, even if necessary, to provoke you, so that you might consider the place of religious traditions in your own heart.

But don't worry, I will only do that about once every four or five years.

They didn't teach us in seminary whether or not to do that, so you don't know how the reaction's going to be.

You don't know what to expect.

So I trust that it worked for you.

But some of you may have taken offense.

And I did not intend to offend, but sometimes offense will be taken whether we intend it or not.

And that actually can be spiritually beneficial.

The Jewish religious leaders were offended by Jesus' actions and his teaching.

And Matthew states that directly to us in Matthew chapter 15, verse 12.

Matthew 15:12

The disciples came to Jesus and said, Hey, Jesus, did you realize that the Pharisees and the scribes were offended at what you said?

That reality that we can take offense at truth is bolstered when we are entrenched in traditions.

Now, if you took offense or were stirred up or provoked by last Sunday's sermon, I need to inform you that it won't be much better today.

If you were convicted by the Holy Spirit by last Sunday's sermon, it might not be much softer today.

For in Matthew's gospel, Jesus moves from making a difficult point about the place of traditions to effectively giving a slap in the face to the scribes and the Pharisees.

I say that because our passage for this morning in Matthew chapter 15 was the same lesson of the prophet Jonah.

Matthew 15 · chapter mention

And it was given to the religious elites of Jesus' time.

Jesus trashes the Jewish traditions by showing grace and mercy and even providing salvation to those who were considered less than human by Israel's traditions.

Look with me, if you will, at Matthew chapter 15, beginning this morning in verse 21.

Matthew 15 · chapter mention

Matthew 15, verse 21, the word of God says that Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.

Matthew 15:21

And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, son of David, my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.

But he did not answer her even a word.

And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, because she's crying out after us.

But Jesus answered to the disciples, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

But she came and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.

And he answered, It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.

She said, Yes, Lord.

Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table.

Then Jesus answered her, O woman, great is your faith.

Be it done for you as you desire.

And her daughter was healed instantly.

Amen.

According to the Jewish feast calendar, we sometimes refer to the advent of the church as Pentecost.

The birth of the church has a biblical foundation in the historical traditions, the patterns of celebrating God's grace to the people of Israel.

While not as significant and not holding a biblical status, the rebirth of the church also has a prominent place in the history of God's program.

Now the church's rebirth was a process occurring over several decades.

But we often point to a single date as the church's rebirth, and we often point to October 31st, 1517, as the moment of rebirth.

We point to that date because on that day an Augustinian friar posted a list of grievances against the Roman Catholic Church on the public bulletin board.

Those grievances, we know them today as the 95 Theses of Martin Luther, were the culmination of a long and deep spiritual struggle that took place within the soul of Martin Luther.

Let me give you an example from Luther's own words.

These are not from the theses, but from some of his other writings and personal letters.

He said, though I lived as a monk without reproach, I felt that I was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience.

You ever feel like that as a Christian?

You think I come to church, I participate in everything about the church, but I have just a disturbed conscience.

He says, I could not believe that anything that I thought or did, or even prayed, satisfied God.

You get a sense of the internal struggle, the fight that was going on within Luther in those words.

He also said, I hoped that I might find the peace of my conscience through fasting, by praying, through the vigils of a monk which I miserably afflicted my body.

But the more I sweated it out like this, the less peace and tranquility I knew.

He worked and he worked and he worked to follow all of the traditions, all of the patterns, to somehow satisfy God and thereby to satisfy his own conscience.

But it just got worse.

Luther said, I was a good monk, and I kept the rules of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.

I love that statement.

Just sounds great.

If ever there was a monk that got to heaven by his monkery, it was I.

All of my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear it out.

If I had kept on any longer, though, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work.

He said, I almost fasted myself to death.

For again and again I went for three days without taking a drop of water or a morsel of food.

I was very serious about it.

After trying desperately to attain God's favor through the strict rules of his order, Luther wrote to a friend, I bowed down because of my sorrow, and I tortured myself in the multitude of my thoughts.

Look, exclaimed I, you are still envious, impatient, and passionate.

It does you no good, O wretched man, to have entered this sacred order.

Imagine spending your life dedicated to your order of monkery, torturing yourself to somehow please God, in the end realize it didn't change anything.

A year and a half before posting his theses, Luther wrote to a fellow monk and friend.

He said, For in our age the temptation to presumption besets many, especially those who try with all their might to be just and good without knowing the righteousness of God, which is most bountifully and freely given to us in Christ.

They try to do good of themselves in order that they might stand before God, clothed in their own virtues and merits.

But this is impossible.

How can he say that it is impossible?

It's because he lived it.

He knew it cannot be done.

He says to his friend, while you were here, you were one who held this opinion, or rather, error.

And so was I.

In that same letter, Martin Luther communicated the gospel to his friend.

He said, Therefore, my dear friar, learn Jesus Christ and him crucified.

Learn to praise him and, despairing of yourself, say, Lord Jesus, you are my righteousness, just as I am your sin.

You have taken upon yourself what is mine and have given to me what is yours.

You have taken upon yourself what you were not, and have given to me what I was not.

You see, Luther finally came to the recognition and to trust in Christ that gave him saving faith.

Here again are his own words.

Therefore I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through the open doors into paradise.

And such is the rebirth of the church.

Luther's early experience was like that of the Pharisees in the beginning of Matthew chapter 15.

Matthew 15 · chapter mention

Pharisees were all about following their traditions, following their patterns of outwardly conforming to some religious pattern.

They sought to desperately satisfy God's expectations and to be approved by him, even if they had to beat their bodies to do it.

Now listen, we beat up the Pharisees endlessly, right?

But they were not much different than you and me.

They were earnest people.

They were genuine people seeking to satisfy God's law.

They were sincere in their religiosity, just like Luther and many religious people today, but their seeking God was outwardly focused.

Rather than seeking an internal heart change by faith, they established sets of rules and regulations and traditions in an attempt to conform to their ideas of what pleased God.

And in the end, in the end, that only magnified how much they broke God's law.

That was Martin Luther until he realized the truth of what came to be known as sola fidae, faith alone.

And Luther's rebirth and the rebirth of the church hinged on the comprehension of faith alone.

And that's what Jesus challenged the Pharisees with.

Pharisees came to Jesus and challenged him about not following the traditions of their faith.

But in doing so, they thwarted God's word by their strenuous and strict fences around Scripture.

And by following the fence lines, they missed the heart.

That's why when Matthew composed his biography of Jesus, he placed the next account right after that challenge of the Pharisees.

Right after the challenge of traditions, Matthew brings along a woman who had no chance in the Pharisee world to please God.

It was impossible.

Because the Pharisaic traditions kept people from coming to genuine faith.

Scribes and the Pharisees sought to please God by following the 613 commandments that they added to Scripture.

Imagine being a monk and having your monkery consist of 613 commandments.

Oh, on top of all of your Bible.

They would rather that Jesus' disciples starve than to eat with impure hands.

Jesus said that what was spoken of Isaiah was true of them.

When Isaiah wrote, This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.

In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.

That's from verse 8 and 9 of chapter 15.

And in this first section of chapter 15, Matthew emphasizes the evil inclinations of the heart, showing how the inside of a person is what brings impurity, not what is on the outside that goes in.

And by doing what he did, Jesus stripped away the outward traditions of the Pharisees.

He said, Take away all the traditions that you've added to God's word, and suddenly what happens is the heart is revealed.

You take away the fences and you begin to realize how wild the animal really is.

Now in verses 21 to 28, that picture is flipped around.

It's completely flipped over.

And we're shown how faith in Jesus brings cleansing and wholeness, not by putting up standards of traditions and forcing conformity to a law, but by changing a person from the inside out.

Now, Matthew wrote his biography of Jesus anywhere from 10 to 40 years after the ascension of Jesus to heaven.

We don't have an exact date.

But his first readers were most likely very much like us.

People gathering together as the early church.

Maybe it was written while the Christians were still gathering with other Jews in the synagogue.

In that case, Matthew's pattern of contrasting the commonly understood religious patterns of the Pharisees with the teaching of Jesus would have been very stark.

Most of those early Christians were Jews, and they often struggled to leave behind the trappings of Judaism that were contrary to the gospel.

That makes sense to us.

But if this is inspired Scripture and it is, then what does Matthew and the Holy Spirit ultimately want today's church to take away from this?

When we think about that in a kind of a big picture kind of way, and in an authorial, intense sort of way, that is, that God intended us to hear something from this.

What should be our takeaway about this ancient experience with a woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon?

Well, I think that we can see two significant implications.

Number one, we must learn the utter uselessness of appearances in the spiritual life.

Number two, we must obtain the powerful cleansing mercy found only in Jesus.

Now let's test these implications against the details of this encounter and see if they hold.

First, we're going to test the implication that we must learn the utter uselessness of appearances in the spiritual life.

This implication would fit well with the challenges of the Pharisees, would it not?

They were all about the outward elements of their religion, including the washing of hands and the dedicating of things to God.

I tried to illustrate that last Sunday with the way I was dressed.

The outward appearance illustrates something and demonstrates something, but it ignores the heart.

That's why Jesus said to his disciples, what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart.

And that's what defiles a person.

Verse 19, for out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander, these are what defile a person.

But what's on the outside with unwashed hands, that doesn't defile anybody.

Why did Jesus say that?

Well, he needed to say it.

Because the Pharisees taught the people that things on the outside were corrupt.

If you have impure hands and you eat with impure hands, your whole being will become corrupt.

Because what's dirty on the outside will make its way on the inside and corrupt the whole thing.

But Jesus comes along and says, No, you've got it backward.

All the effort that they put into being pure, into appearing righteous and accepted by God, ignored what was going on on the inside.

Hopefully, by God's grace, we've learned that truth.

We know, at least conceptually, that it does us no good to get ready on a Sunday morning to go through all of the hassle of getting up early and getting to a 9 a.m.

worship service, putting on nice clothes and being ready with a smile to be with God's people in God's presence.

It does us no good if we do all of that, all while harboring hate or jealousy or bitterness or lust in our hearts.

That's all about appearances.

To look at it differently, the modern church often places more emphasis on the entertainment element of the gathering of the church instead of focusing on the word of God directed to the heart.

And that truth hit the Pharisees right at the core of their ministry.

You see, they sincerely believed that they were on the right track to God.

They were sincere.

But it is possible to be sincerely wrong.

And that's what Jesus is telling them.

Saying, listen, you've got it wrong.

They believed that they were right in emphasizing the outward compliance to a set of rules because they believed, like Martin Luther, that it would lead to holiness.

And Jesus smashed that conviction to pieces.

And now Matthew shows us that truth through this unnamed woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon.

What's the big picture truth?

We must learn the utter uselessness of outward appearances in the spiritual life.

Now, if that is an implication of this passage, we ought to be able to see something here about outward appearances.

We ought to be able to see something of the spiritual life.

And we ought to be able to see a demonstration of how it is useless.

So let's think first about the last part.

Let's think first about how Matthew details the outward appearance.

Interestingly, according to Mark's account of this same event, Jesus goes to a home in the region north of Israel in Tyre and Sidon.

And he does it to seemingly escape the crowds.

It seems he needs some.

Downtime, or perhaps maybe just some independent time with just the disciples.

And Tyre and Sidon would be would be a natural place to escape to in our sensibilities.

It might be like going to the lake.

Get away from everything.

It wasn't considered normal Jewish territory.

It was Gentile territory.

And Gentiles dominated that region.

So as a result, Jesus would be far less known.

On the other hand, Tyre and Sidon wasn't exactly the most positive place to take a vacation.

They didn't have the best reputation among Jewish people.

Do you remember Nineveh?

That city that Jonah didn't want to go to?

Perhaps containing at least a hundred thousand people within the walls of the city?

The home of people so evil that Jonah preferred for them, the prophet of God preferred for them to simply be destroyed than to receive God's pardoning grace.

The Jews were not friendly with those cities and their surrounding regions.

Why?

Well, they have a history with them.

If you remember your Old Testament, you might remember King Ahab from the Old Testament, among the top two or three worst rulers in Israel's history.

Ahab married a woman named Jezebel.

You got it.

Ahab married Jezebel.

Here's what the history of the king says about Jezebel from 1 Kings 16.

It says, and as if it had been a light or a small thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam, the son of Nabat, he took for his wife Jezebel, the daughter of Eth Baal of the Sidonians.

Actually, king of the Sidonians.

He married the daughter of the king of the Sidonians, and he went and served Baal and worshipped him.

Jesus has already spoken of Tyre and Sidon back in chapter 11, indicating that they had not repented of their sins and would be one day judged along with Sodom and Gomorrah.

Tyre and Sidon did not in any way live up to Israel's expectations of appearances.

They were evil, sinful people whose history was rebellion and worship of false gods.

And Matthew's emphasis on this perception of people continues in verse 22 with an emphatic, behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came to see Jesus.

But that's not really the problem here.

The problem is that she is a Canaanite.

This is interesting because Mark calls her a Syro-Phoenician woman.

What's that, you ask?

Mark refers to her as a resident of that region by using an ancient term for that region of land, part of Syria and Phoenician, where they come together.

It was an old term, not necessarily a modern term, but it was more like us saying, ah, they're from the cities.

And when we mean that, we mean the twin cities, right?

Minneapolis and St.

Paul.

That's kind of what Matthew does here, except he uses an older term.

He uses an old term that says, she's from this region, but Matthew doesn't do that.

Matthew uses a different term, still an appropriate term, but it's a derogatory term.

She's a Canaanite.

Here is a woman that by all appearances should not even exist.

See, God told Israel in the book of Joshua to wipe out the Canaanites.

He said, destroy them.

Their sin has gotten so bad, so terrible, that my judgment needs to be poured out on them, and my judgment is this: destroy them.

Israel didn't obey.

And so throughout Israel's history, the inhabitants of the land, the Canaanites, caused Israel trouble again and again and again.

And if you're keeping track, that's three strikes against this woman.

She's from a Gentile region.

Her ethnic background is one that God wanted destroyed in ancient times.

And her people drew Israel into sin throughout the centuries.

The disciples eating with unwashed hands was nothing compared to this situation.

If the disciples were impure from eating with unwashed hands, then there is no chance of purity for this woman.

At least there was something redeeming about the disciples, as they were Jewish, but this woman, no.

See, Matthew is directly attacking the prevalent Jewish view of tradition, of their traditional opinions and beliefs that came alongside following God.

And there's so much here that Matthew packs into a few words that speak about appearances.

On the outside, this woman is pagan to the core, utterly unclean and wretched from the perspective of the Pharisees.

What does it say about her spiritual life?

Do we see anything in this account about that?

Well, yes, we do.

One element that we see is that her daughter is demon-possessed.

And not only possessed by the demon, but severely so.

That doesn't necessarily tell us anything about the woman who came to Jesus.

But it does tell us something about her household's nature.

Because if the demon severely impacted her daughter, then it's quite probable and very likely, in fact, that the woman's household bore the burden of that impact.

And that only serves to highlight the impurity, the appearance of impurity, because the Pharisees would come along and say, Well, of course.

The pagans are doomed for destruction by the hand of God.

Where else would we expect demons?

But that's not all we see of the spiritual life of this woman, is it?

Spiritual or otherwise, she is persistent.

She hounds Jesus for help until the disciples get so annoyed by her that they ask Jesus to do something about it.

But what did the disciples miss at that moment?

What did they miss?

They missed that this pagan Canaanite woman recognized and believed Jesus to be the Lord.

Not just to be the Lord, but to be the expected son of David, the Messiah.

She believed Jesus to be the promised Messiah.

Somehow, you don't know how, but somehow in this Gentile region, she had come to hear of Jesus, like Naaman in the Old Testament, that Syrian whose captive Jewish girl told him of the prophet of God in Israel who could heal him.

This Gentile person, this Gentile woman, somehow hears of Jesus and believes what she heard.

Reminds us of the New Testament statement that faith comes by hearing.

That would have been difficult for the Pharisees to swallow.

She's an unclean pagan.

Jesus shouldn't even be speaking to her.

But remember, what is Jesus telling us?

Jesus said that it's not what's on the outside, it's not what appears to be true that makes someone impure.

So I think we have validated our implication.

Matthew writes to tell us that we must learn the utter uselessness of outward appearances in the spiritual life, because here is a woman who is totally impure in outward appearances and yet comes to Jesus with faith.

She had genuine faith in Jesus despite appearances.

Nevertheless, Jesus uses the standard view of Jewish view of Gentiles to draw out this woman's faith.

It doesn't really fit our modern sensibilities.

But Jews of that time were what we might term today as racist.

They considered Gentiles as dogs, less than human.

Dogs were scavengers, they were unclean animals that carried disease and damaged goods and even hurt people.

But here, Jesus doesn't use the typical term for dogs.

He uses a term that specifically refers to a household pet.

An animal that is close to the family, that is around the normal functioning of the family.

Nevertheless, still a pet.

But first, Jesus corrects the disciples about his ministry.

Did you catch that when we read through it?

The woman hounds the group of men for help.

And Jesus seemingly ignores her.

Until the disciples just get fed up with her hounding, and they beg Jesus to do something about it.

No longer is the woman begging, the disciples are begging.

Jesus responds to his disciples that he came to Israel, not the Gentiles.

The outreach to the nations would come after his death, resurrection, and ascension.

Jesus is focused here on his own people and going to the cross.

You might hear echoing in your mind the Gospel of John in chapter 1, Jesus came to his own people.

They didn't receive him.

Who is receiving him?

He wasn't in the region of Tyre and Sidon to minister to the Gentiles, but to escape popularity, and seemingly the woman hears the comment from Jesus to the disciples and comes and approaches him, kneels down on the ground, and asks him for help.

Lord, please help me.

And Jesus responds almost coldly, implying that the woman, to the woman, that her relationship to the Jewish people and the hope of God's promises are like the relationship of a family pet to the family's children.

See, Jesus is playing off of the typical Jewish sentiment of the time.

No, you have no reason to be recipients of the grace of God because you are a Gentile.

Sound like Jonah?

What God intended to give Israel was not for the Gentiles.

What God promised for Israel should not be given to a pagan Canaanite.

So what's happening here?

How do we make sense of that what feels to be harshness from Jesus?

Well, we gain some clarity when we put it into the context of God's ultimate intention.

Remember when God chose Abraham in the book of Genesis, he chose him out of all the nations of the world, all the people groups of the world.

He chose Abraham.

And God promised to make a nation out of Abraham.

He pledged temporal and eternal blessings to Abraham, but not to other people, not to other nations.

God promised to send a redeemer to Israel, a son of David, a Jewish king.

God chose Israel and He gave Israel his law.

He didn't choose other nations.

Israel is his chosen people, and Jesus reminds the woman and the disciples in this moment of that history.

He says, You all know this.

That's why I've come to my own people.

In that sense, what belongs to Israel should not go to pagan people.

Because that would invalidate God's faithfulness to his chosen people.

And that is the moment.

That is the moment that we see the depth of this woman's faith.

Yes, Lord.

You are correct.

To Israel belong all the promises, all the care, and the provision of her God.

But even dogs get to eat the crumbs that fall from the children's plate.

And at my house, that can be quite a bit.

And isn't that exactly the point?

When God gives so much grace and provision, even the crumbs are of eternal value.

Perhaps without knowing it.

Even, even those who traditionally were thought to be less than human.

And there, my friends, is the mercy of God to his world.

He chose Israel.

But through choosing Israel, he intended to bring blessing.

Even to the Canaanite, to the Gentiles, to all impure sinners in the world whose faith rests only in him, even to those who were utterly without hope.

Even to a monk named Martin Luther.

Leads us, my friends, to the second implication.

We must obtain at all costs the powerful cleansing mercy found in Jesus.

The danger for those who put tradition above the Word of God, the danger is that they miss the mercy.

Because mercy is hard to accept for someone who's all focused about the law, about justice and judgment and retribution, and making sure that everybody toes the line.

It's hard for them to miss, to see the mercy.

And the mercy of Jesus is powerful, for it removes the demonic presence from the woman's daughter and her home instantly.

She's not even there.

And it happens instantly.

No power of Satan can stand in the presence of Christ's mercy.

It is powerful.

It is cleansing.

For it drove out the power of Satan and it redeemed a child of the devil and adopted her as a child of God instantly.

Do you see now why Matthew puts this right after that encounter with the Pharisees?

They're standing there all smug in their monkery.

And Jesus says, Let me show you what true faith is all about.

She wasn't Jewish.

What have we learned?

She wasn't Jewish.

In fact, she was she was of the people of Jezebel.

She wasn't Jewish.

She was of the people who worshipped Baal.

She wasn't Jewish, she was a Canaanite.

She didn't follow Israel's law.

But she kneeled in worshipful faith before Jesus, the son of David, the Messiah.

And Jesus' response was, How great is your faith.

Like all who come to Christ today, she was adopted into the Father's family through her tremendous faith in Jesus, the Redeemer.

Centuries earlier, Jezebel stained the land of Israel with the impurity of her paganness.

So much had she stained the land that God said that he was going to stain the land with her blood when the dogs tore her apart.

But when the promised blessing of Abraham appeared in the flesh, he brought redemption and cleansing to a daughter of Tyre and Sidon.

And yet those who are blinded by their traditions miss out on the faithfulness of God through the mercy of Christ.

We shouldn't really be surprised if we've really read Matthew's book.

Because in the very beginning, in that chapter that you probably just skimmed through, Matthew already told us that there are one or two Canaanite women in the lineage of Jesus the Messiah.

Ruth, for sure.

Sorry, not Ruth.

Rahab.

Ruth is in there, but she's not Canaanite.

Rahab.

Rahab, the woman who lived in Jericho, where all the inhabitants were destroyed except for Rahab and her family who exercised faith.

Rahab and then Tamar.

Women who were destined for destruction by Israel, but in God's grace were redeemed and included in the Messiah's lineage.

Friends, Jesus destroyed the value of outward appearances.

He laid waste to it.

They're worthless.

Don't look at your traditions with such strength that they blind you to God's mercy.

In the scope of history, you can't be worse off than this Canaanite woman.

You can come to Jesus and find that powerful cleansing through faith in him.

Don't elevate the things that you put in line with God's word to the above God's word and say, this is most important, because you will miss the mercy of Jesus.

Don't look at others on the outside or how they might be framed by culture or by the times in which you live.

Look at them as needing cleansing on the inside by the mercy of Christ, because only the powerful mercy of Jesus can redeem from the true source of impurity.

Become like Martin Luther and enter into a rebirth like Nicodemus.

You must be born again.

Not by anything that you do, but by the mercy of Christ through faith in the Lord Jesus, who gave himself for you.

Let's pray together.

Lord Jesus, we come to you confessing to you that we we don't always do things well.

We are sinful people and in our in our sin and our own sinful perceptions, we we elevate wrong things to wrong places.

Strip those away from us and enable us to walk humbly with you, setting you and your word above all other things.

Bring grace and mercy to us and the forgiveness of our sins.

Even today, this moment, bring the gift of faith by hearing the word of God to someone.

We give praise to you, Lord Jesus, that you, the King of glory, would enter into our world.

We who are mere creatures, that you would come into our world so that we might receive mercy.

We give you praise and honor and glory that is due only to you.

In your name.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.