Picture yourself in a situation of dire need. Say you’re in
a private clinic with a sick child, a child that has been ailing badly for
weeks and months. In this scenario, there is no Obamacare, no National Health,
no social insurance program, and you are without resources, which is why you’ve
waited so long to come to a doctor. You can’t pay, and you know it. Hospitals
are for the rich.
So you cared for your child yourself as best you could. You
tried home remedies. You bought what drugs you could afford. You called on any
of your neighbours who knew a little bit about medicine, but nothing could be
done. You have exhausted every possibility you could think of. Nothing worked.
So even though you know you can’t pay, you go to the clinic.
You sit in the waiting room and watch as other parents leave with healthy
children and smiles on their faces. You know that whatever this doctor is
doing, it works. You see him down the hallway, treating other patients, but no
matter how you beg the receptionist, she keeps looking past you and calling out
“Next!” to the rich people behind you in line.
Finally, you step out of line and right up to the
kind-looking doctor. Against all your natural instincts, with no dignity left
in the world, you begin to beg.
He looks at you with concern and compassion in his eyes and
says … nothing. Nothing at all. Not a syllable.
How would you feel? What do you do next?
My analogy lacks in many ways, but it’s transparent enough
that you can probably see where I’m going here. I’m trying to picture the
Lord’s behavior in Matthew 15 from the point of view of the Canaanite woman who
begged him for help:
“Jesus … withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 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 a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” (Matthew 15:21-24)
I can’t be the only one to find his behavior here hard to
explain, can I? A woman follows the Lord and his disciples, crying and begging
for help and yet we read “he did not answer her a word”. He’ll turn and speak
to his disciples, sure. But for her, nothing.
From her perspective, could he be any more insulting? Could
the situation appear any more hopeless?
And so she continues to beg and cry until even the disciples
get fed up with the distraction and the Lord’s uncharacteristic inaction and
say, in effect, “Please, Lord, get her off our case.”
But this is the Lord, and we know he’s going to heal the
daughter at the end of the story, right? That’s a given. So why does he wait so
long?
Or let me put it another way: If the Lord responds to the
woman immediately and grants her request, what’s the difference? What exactly
do we lose?
We lose a few things, I think.
The Importance of Doing
the Father’s Will
First, the delay reminds us that, in this world, God’s
purposes outrank any individual human need. In the Lord’s delay in responding
to a very legitimate need, we see an indicator of just how important the
Father’s mission was to the Son. He says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel”.
Evidently it mattered to the Lord a very great deal to do
the Father’s will. When he says, “My food is to do the will of him who
sent me and to accomplish his work”, he means that doing the Father’s will was more necessary than eating, that his
delight in pleasing his Father was not only sufficient to sustain him in the
desert for forty days but sufficient to carry him all the way to the cross.
Furthermore, it was not enough to the Lord that he perform
the will of his Father in some vague and general sense, as he might choose to
interpret it, for he said, “the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but
only what he sees the Father doing”, making it clear that he was bound and determined to perform the will of God in precisely
the way his Father desired.
No, the Lord was not asking the woman to accept a place in
the purposes of God that he did not first and foremost accept for himself, up to and including his own sacrificial death. When
Caiaphas prophesied “It is better for you that one man should die for the
people” we read that “He did not say this of his own accord”. The Lord fully accepted that his own human needs and desires were far outranked
by the privilege of doing the will of his Father.
This principle continues to be relevant for the Christian, for the Lord assures his followers that, even today, our genuine needs
will always be met when we put the Lord’s concerns first. The principle is right there in the “Lord’s Prayer”, isn’t
it: “Your kingdom come, your will be done” precedes “Give us this day …”
Doing the work of the Father, finishing it and complying
with his will in every respect was the Lord Jesus’ most important concern, and the
woman, the disciples and those who read it today needed to have that message
reinforced.
It was a message that without the Lord’s delay, we would
almost certainly miss.
To persuade the Lord to publicly step outside of the mandate
he had received from his Father to go “only” to Israel, the woman was going to
need to appeal to a principle even closer to the heart of God than the
principle of keeping his promises to his chosen people.
Next: What else do we miss?
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