The Sound of Silence

 

Jesu Juva

St. Matt. 15:21-28                                                 

March 20, 2024

Lent Midweek 5                

 Dear saints of our Savior~

        This is the final sermon in a Lenten series on suffering.  Tonight we consider the suffering of a Canaanite woman—a mother whose daughter was demonized.  Was she a single mom?  We don’t know.  But no husband or father is mentioned.  What’s certain here is yet another instance of a suffering parent.  There are a lot of suffering parents in the gospels—multiple mothers and fathers who come to Jesus on behalf of troubled children—children who are afflicted and assaulted by the devil—children who are sick and suffering—children who are disabled or even dying.  And all of these suffering parents brought their troubles to Jesus.  As parents, it’s what we do. 

        The mother in tonight’s text was a Canaanite.  That fact is important.  She wasn’t Jewish.  She wasn’t a child of Abraham.  In religious terms she was an outsider.  But she was also desperate.  Her daughter was oppressed by a demon.  Parents, imagine this mother’s anguish.  There was no pediatrician—no medicine—no psychiatrist—no therapy of any kind to stop this demon from doing diabolical things to her daughter.

        And so this mother did the very thing that all of us would do.  She went to Jesus for help.  And she expresses her need to Jesus perfectly, with just the right words:  Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David.  She calls Him “Lord,” which is how Jesus’ disciples address Him.  And she also calls Jesus the “Son of David.”  With that title she’s saying that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah of Israel.  Not even Shakespeare could have crafted a better opening line for this desperate mother to gain the Savior’s helpful attention. 

But Jesus—He didn’t answer her a word—didn’t even acknowledge her presence or tell her to take a number and wait her turn.  The only response this woman got was the sound of silence.  Jesus ignores her.  But she just won’t let up.  She keeps on pleading.  The disciples beg Jesus at least to send her away.  Jesus reminds them that He was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  At that, the woman falls on her knees, and lays her heart wide open, “Lord, help me.”

        Finally, Jesus turns and gives her a direct answer (and it’s not very nice):  It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.  Ouch!  She’s literally down on the ground and Jesus gives her a verbal kick.  Jesus appears to be cruel, heartless, and unfeeling.  He calls her a “dog.”  In the ears of a First-Century Canaanite that would be heard and understood as an ethnic slur.

        What would you have done if you were this woman?  Leave in a huff?  Find a different Savior?  Tell Him off?  But seriously, what do you do when Jesus appears to give you the cold shoulder?  When He seems distant and unconcerned?  What do you do when Jesus treats you like a dog?  What’s so striking about this Canaanite woman is that she has absolutely no sense of entitlement.  Her fur doesn’t get ruffled just because Jesus calls her a dog and treats her like an unclean sinner.  She knows she’s entitled to absolutely nothing; yet she freely asks for everything.

We, on the other hand, we are the insiders.  We have an oversized sense of entitlement.  We feel entitled to almost everything.  We think God owes us just for showing up and trying hard.  We think God owes us just for choosing church instead of an evening of screen time. We’re pretty good about saying that we are poor, miserable sinners.  And yet, the minute someone points out our sin to us, or rebukes us for our sin, we get all defensive:  “How dare you call me a sinner!”  The same thing happens when God seems to treat us like the sinners we claim to be:  “How dare He ignore my prayers!  What did I do to deserve this?!  Why is He withholding the blessings I’m entitled to?  Why are my calls on the hotline to heaven going to voice mail?”

But this suffering mother didn’t do anything of the sort.  Instead, she listened.  She listened to what Jesus said; and she heard something that faith could latch onto.  Jesus said something to her and she saw an opportunity to hold Him to it.  It was in that deeply insulting word, “dog.”  That which sounds so humiliating and disgraceful to our ears, didn’t sound that way at all to this woman of great faith.  For in the word “dog” she found a hidden blessing:  “Yes, Lord.  I am a dog indeed.  And what do dogs do?  They eat up the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  She holds Jesus to His own words and will not let Him go.  She latches onto that word “dog,” like a lab latches on to a soup bone.  Even when His words seem to scream out a “no,” she found a “yes” hidden inside the “no.”  (She sniffed out that “yes” like a bloodhound.)

As for His part, Jesus can’t contain His pleasure.  He honors the woman He just dissed as a dog.  One minute He gives her the silent treatment; and the next minute He says, “O woman, great is your faith!  Be it done for you as you desire.”  And her daughter was healed instantly.  That’s the picture of faith, my friends, dogged faith that can only be worked by the Holy Spirit.  And take notice, please, that it is the outsider, the Canaanite “dog” who has such great faith.  Not the Israelite.  Not the disciple.  The despised Canaanite.  It is all by grace—it’s all undeserved kindness.

Let’s not forget that this woman was also a mother—a mother with a demon-possessed daughter.  And from that very hour, her daughter was healed.  Her prayer was answered.  The demons are no match for Jesus.  Just a word from the Savior’s mouth is all it takes.  Jesus had come to do battle with the devil and the power of demonic darkness.  He came to deal a decisive blow at the cross.  There on His crucifixion cross, Jesus would take your place.  Jesus would experience what it means to be forsaken, abandoned, and ignored by God.  Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? 

Jesus Himself suffered the sound of silence—the deafening silence of God.  That’s the hell we deserve.  That separation from God is the only thing we are truly “entitled to” as sinners.  But Jesus stepped in to receive the horror to which you are entitled; and (in exchange) He gives you all that He’s entitled to as the holy Son of God.  You can trust this Jesus—even when He seems silent or unconcerned about your troubles.  By faith, you know otherwise.

The healing of this woman’s daughter is as much for us as for her.  Jesus is training us and teaching us about what great faith looks like.  It looks like a desperate mother who doggedly pursues the hidden promises of Jesus.  Jesus is teaching us to hang onto His words and to trust those words and to look for the promise in those words—and not to trust our feelings or even to gage things by how God seems to be treating us.  Cling to Jesus’ words and run with them.  Cling to those words like a collie catches a Frisbee.  If Jesus says you’re a dog, then embrace your inner terrier and wag your tail and run straight to His table, for the richest of crumbs fall from this table.

Here the Master calls you by name to come to His Table.  Here even the crumbs prove to be the richest of fare—the Savior’s body and blood, for the forgiveness of sins—nourishment for eternal life—strength for each day in a dog-eat-dog world.  These pews are, in fact, occupied by poor, miserable pooches.  And Jesus, our Master, well, He’s the Lord of the Dogs—the Messiah of mangy mutts like us.  We know His voice.  And when He calls us in our suffering, we come running. 

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.