The Unveiling of the Messiah: Matthew 15:21-39

Introduction:

I am not much of an internet guy, but I do know enough to know about the “Expectation vs Reality” genre of meme. If you’re not aware of what I’m talking about, it’s essentially a meme where one has a picture of what they expected, and then a picture of the usually disappointing reality. I’m a bit too technophobic to try and use the big screen to show you some, but I do have examples from my own life. When I was younger, my friends and I used to be into BMX riding. We would cruise around Hilton, ramping so high it felt like we were flying, performing death defying tricks, and generally causing trouble. After a while, we thought we were pretty good, and we were confused about why there wasn’t a flock of women following us around town trying to get a hold of us. So, we decided to film ourselves. It was mortifying. Those ramps that felt so high would possibly launch us 10cm off the ground. Often less. Those tricks we thought were so impressive were, on film, unbelievably disappointing. It was truly a humbling experience.

I’d wager the majority of us have had experiences like this in some way or another. We are either anticipating something or imagining something, and then when it finally happens, the result is totally different to what we were expecting. This can be true in silly things like sport, but also in more serious things like relationships, business or parenting. Our imaginations just aren’t reliable indicators of what the future will be like.

I feel that this is sometimes what happens when we approach our Bibles. If you’ve been blessed to be a Christian for a while and go to a good church where the Bible is taught faithfully, we can start to get familiar with it. We can start to come to passages thinking we know what they are about to tell us. In other words, we come with our expectation. But if we’re sensitive readers, what we will find is that the Bible often surprises us. Passages we thought we had down pat throw up new challenges or ideas that we just weren’t expecting to see there, or context changes the interpretation of a passage we thought we knew so well. The Bible is, in other words, a book that surprises us, that challenges our expectations, and resists our efforts to be comfortable with it. Unlike my experience with my BMX filming, however, these surprises are not bad. They can be jarring at the start, but if we let them come and we trust the process, we often find our understandings of our Bible and our world are richer than they were when we started.

That’s certainly the case with this passage, Matthew 15:21-39. In our evening series on Matthew, we’ve been looking at passages that tell us a little about Jesus. In particular, about what it means that he is the Messiah. We’re going to carry on this theme this evening. In this passage, however, we’re going to consider Jesus in terms that are not too common, but, as I hope we’ll see, ultimately incredibly life-giving.

Jesus -- the Jewish Messiah:

The main thing our passage wants us to see this evening, and our first point, is that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. We see this in the story of the Canaanite woman. When Jesus arrives in Tyre and Sidon (Gentile country), a woman comes to ask him to help her because her daughter is demon possessed. She even addresses him as Son of David in v22. At this moment, we’re expecting Jesus to jump to action and help her, or give her some teaching, or do one of the things that we’re used to seeing Jesus do. Instead, if you look in v23, he is silent. He doesn’t say anything to her. Already this is surprising. We don’t usually see this aspect of Jesus.

She keeps crying out, and eventually the disciples ask Jesus to do something, so that she might stop bothering them. Note how Jesus responds. He tells them that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” (v24). In other words, he knows his mission. His mission is to go to the people of Israel, and since she is not an Israelite, it is not a part of his calling to help her.

The woman, however, is persistent. She comes to Jesus again and asks for his help. To this, Jesus says something surprising. He says “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (v26). Again, the language that Jesus is using here is surprising. We don’t usually expect our loving Messiah to go around calling people dogs. But when we understand the point he’s making, some of the discomfort should go away. You see, his point here is not to insult her, nor to call her a dog. He is instead explaining his unwillingness to help her using the a metaphor of a house. In a household situation, people always take care of their children first, and then focus on the animals that live with them. Any other order of care would be immoral. To explain the metaphor, when God sends the Messiah, he is sending blessings to his household. Now the Jews bear a special relationship to God, they are, in this image, his children. It is not right, therefore, for Jesus to take the work he has been sent to do among the children of Israel, and do it among the Gentiles. That would be like a homeowner prioritising feeding the dogs before he fed his children. So, Jesus is not calling her a dog in any sense except that which establishes the metaphor to explain his inaction.

The woman is not done yet, however. She challenges him. She doesn’t, however, challenge him at the point we might expect. She doesn’t tell him that his understanding of God’s purposes is wrong. No. She says, “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” In other words, she accepts that she is not a child, not a member of God’s covenant people. And yet, God’s blessings expressed through the Messiah are so rich that they overflow, and when they do, the Gentiles may receive them. Jesus hears her say this, and is impressed, and blesses her by granting her request. She returns home to find her daughter healed.

But I don’t want us to lose the main thrust of this section. The point here is that the Messiah, the plan of salvation, and everything that entails is Jewish. It belongs to the Jews. This is not an idea that we talk about very often, nor is it an idea that we’re particularly comfortable with. We tend to ignore it because most of us are not Jews, and it seems odd to focus God’s redemptive purposes on only one people. Odd as it may seem, it is also profoundly biblical. Obviously, the whole Old Testament is focused on the Jews. Even in the New Testament, we see this trend. For example, we see in this passage that Jesus thought of himself as Messiah to the Jews. This is a theme throughout Matthew, with Jesus explicitly not allowing his disciples to preach the gospel in Gentile places when he sent them out. Instead, he told them, go to the lost sheep of Israel (Matthew 10:6). Even after Jesus had ascended, and the church age had begun, the church started in Jerusalem. The first major church council was concerning the status of Gentiles in the new kingdom of God, and Paul, the great apostle to the Gentiles, patterned his ministry by going first to the Jews and only once he had been rejected there, going to the Gentiles. To state the point again, this passage highlights for us that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah, sent specially to the Jews, and, for this period anyway, focused on them almost exclusively.

I appreciate that this Jewish focus may make us uncomfortable. It is a discomfort the passage will resolve for us, but it is also something I don’t want us to ignore. I feel like often as Christians we read our Bibles backwards. We start with Jesus and the New Testament and we understand everything from there. This is not necessarily wrong. But what it means often is that we unconsciously understand Jesus and his mission in terms with which we are familiar. The Jesus we pull out of our New Testaments becomes Western, or African, and we start to apply categories from our own home contexts. But this passage, and the Bible as a whole, reminds us that if we want to understand Jesus and the whole New Testament, we need to let those fall away. We need to see Jesus as he is, a Jewish Messiah, and that to understand his person and work we must think in Jewish categories. We must also accept the fact that if we are not Jews, we are outsiders.

The fact that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah is important for another reason though. It is important because by this means we see that God is faithful to his promises. If God didn’t send his Messiah to the Jews initially, then all of God’s promises to his people would be null and void. But, by coming to his covenant people, Jesus is reminding them that God is faithful to remember the promises he made. This is all the more surprising in context. After all, just last week we saw the Jews arguing with Jesus and challenging him. Indeed, the whole story of Matthew is about Jesus facing increasing hostility from the Jews. And what do we see in our passage now? A Gentile woman who not only bows before Jesus calling him the Son of David, but understands the trajectory of salvation and Jesus’ place within that. In emotional terms, who would be easier to help? Surely it is the woman. And yet, Jesus emphasises that, despite their rejection of him, his focus is on the Jews, because through him God is showing that he is faithful to his promises he made to Israel.

So What I - The Opening of the Kingdom

In our second point now, I want to address why it matters for us that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah. After all, very few of us are Jewish, and it can be alienating to recognise the strong emphasis the Bible puts on Jewish identity and thinking. But if we follow this truth through, we see that it is actually a blessed truth. And in this passage we see this in two ways. The first is that it was the Jewish Messiah who would open the way for all peoples to enter God’s kingdom. At this the stage of Jesus’ ministry, it doesn’t happen straight away, but we have hints in our passage that it is coming soon.

We see this hinted at first in the fact that Jesus heals the woman. Once she shows that she understands how God has seen fit to work in the world, God heals her daughter.

We see it more clearly, however, in vv32-39. Here, we have a second account of Jesus feeding a large group of people. This large group of people has been with Jesus in the wilderness for three days, and Jesus is worried about them. He wants to feed them, so he gets his disciples to bring them the resources they have, that being seven loaves of bread and some little fishes. Jesus gets the crowd to sit down, he breaks the bread, and he gives it to the people. Everybody eats their fill, and then there are seven basketfuls of leftovers.

As I mentioned earlier, this miracle is a sister account of the miracle feeding of the five thousand, found in Matthew 14:13-21. They both have the same meaning. In neither case is the main point the meeting of a people’s physical needs. Instead, what we have here is a miracle looking forward and back. It looks backwards to remind people of how God fed them during the time of Moses, and show them that Jesus is the new Moses. But it was also a miracle performed to give people a hint of what the future will be like under the Messiah - it will be a rich future, where people will have their needs met, and God’s Shalom will reign. It was, in other words, a miracle that showed Jesus as the Messiah and explained what that meant. That was also a miracle performed in front of the Jews. Our miracle, the feeding of the 4000, was performed in front of Gentiles. The same kind of miracle, with the same Messianic implications, is now performed for Gentiles. Do you see what this is suggesting -- Jesus is hinting at the fact that soon, not right now, but soon, the way will be open for Gentiles to come into the people of God.

To an observant reader of Scripture, this wouldn’t be all that surprising. After all, Abraham was promised that through his seed would come blessing for all the nations. But the wonderful message of the New Testament is that Jesus Christ, the Jewish Messiah, has opened the way for all people to worship the one true God, the God of Israel, and to come into his kingdom. As I mentioned, this is not true at the time of our passage. It is only present in hints, but by the end of Matthew’s gospel Jesus is telling his disciples to baptise and make disciples from every people through the whole world. In Acts 10 we have Peter being given a vision in which God tells him that the cultural divisions that separated the Jews from the Gentiles no longer apply. The designation people of God no longer belongs to ethnic Israel exclusively. Instead it belongs to the people of the Messiah. Paul says this explicitly in Romans 11 when he describes the Gentiles as branches ingrafted into the olive tree of Israel. Yes, they are not a part of the original plant, but by God’s gracious and decisive work in the Messiah, they are joined into his kingdom. That is the wonderful truth towards which this passage points.

Why am I telling you all this? When we realise how surprising the inclusion of Gentiles like you and me is to the people of the New Testament, we realise what a remarkable and wonderful thing God did to fit us into his plan. Once we realise that we were excluded from God’s plans by both sin and birthright, we realise what a magnificent act of love and power it was on God’s behalf to bring us into his kingdom. It is only when we see how far away we were that we can really appreciate the work of God to draw us near.

But also, when we realise the lengths that God went to to include people who were very much on the outside of his covenant, like the Canaanite woman, we see we can’t then feel justified in excluding anybody. When we realise that ours is a God whose heart and plan was about bringing outsiders into the kingdom of God, how can we as his followers, as his image-bearers, not do the same? God himself did not hoard his goodness, but sought to share it as widely as possible. As his people we do not do well to hoard God’s blessings. Instead we should seek to share them as widely as we can, with any people who will have it.

So What II - The Reversal of the Curse:

So the first reason it is blessed news that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah is because it is through Jesus that God opened the way for all peoples to enter his kingdom. Now we’re going to see what kind of kingdom we have been welcomed into. In particular, we are going to see that Jesus’ kingdom, the Messiah’s kingdom, is one where the curse of sin is being reversed.

We see this in vv29-31 of our passage. In this section, Jesus goes to the top of a mountain and great crowds come to see him. And what do they do? They bring to him an assortment of people who are lame, blind, crippled and mute. They bring these people to Jesus and they lay them at his feet and he heals them. One by one these people come to Jesus and their maladies are treated.

Often, when we think of sin, we think of wrongdoing. Sin is when people have extramarital sex, or get drunk, or cheat, or lie about taxes. These are definitely sins, and the Bible condemns them. But they are not sin itself. When the Bible speaks about sin, it envisions sin as a curse. It is evil that has invaded God’s good world and destroys his creation. It twists and destroys his people, not only morally, but physically too. And so, when we see these people, the blind, the deaf, the mute and the lame, what we are being presented with is people who are feeling the effects of sin in their bodies. They are living under the curse, and being broken by it. When we see Jesus healing these people, what we see is God’s goodness breaking through the curse. We see God’s kingdom and its restorative power breaking through the curse of sin and returning people to the state in which they were created to be.

Nobody has expressed this idea better in my mind than CS Lewis in his Chronicles of Narnia. For those of you who don’t know the story, four English children discover a magical world in a wardrobe. But this world is ruled by an evil witch, and a symptom of that rule is that the world is covered over in snow. About midway through the book, however, the true king of Narnia, the lion Aslan, returns to his country, and something remarkable happens. The witch travels with her servant, a dwarf Ginnabrik, who spots it first: the queen’s sleigh isn’t moving as easily as it used to; it slows and get stuck frequently. All around, things don’t look how they did before. Eventually, he realises: “This is no thaw - this is Spring. What are we to do? The winter is being destroyed. This is Aslan’s doing.” In the story, by coming to his world, Narnia, Aslan had started to break the winter that held the land in curse. And the same is true here. When Jesus comes, and brings the true Kingdom of God with him, the curse of sin is cast out. People are set free from its clutches, and in some small but real way, God’s true Shalom starts to shine like the first sun of Spring.

Brothers and sisters, this is a wonderful truth. And the good news is that in the death and resurrection of Christ it has been fulfilled even more truly. One of the wonderful messages of the gospel is that sin, in all its dysfunction and destruction, is defeated. The grips of its curse that has held the world for so long is being peeled back. Don’t misunderstand me, it is not gone yet. Things aren’t yet as they should be, but they are going there, and they are going there inexorably. Sin is defeated. The curse is laid low.

But this should challenge us: God’s kingdom has truly invaded the world, and the church is God’s advanced base, the place where God has chosen to have his kingdom show on earth until such a time as he should choose to bring it in full over all the earth. Does our church look like it? I’m not suggesting that we should be seeing healings in church or anything like that. Rather, I’m asking if we can honestly say that in our church here today, we see a picture of God’s Shalom, his true and righteous rule. Again, I don’t want to cause us to expect the world - we’re still sinners, and a group of sinners is a sinful place, but it is equally true that the power of Christ is among us in the presence of the Holy Spirit. Do we get a sense of that looking at our church?

Conclusion:

In this passage, we have had the Messiah unveiled to us. We have seen that he is the Jewish Messiah, the faithful fulfilment of God’s promises to his people from all those years ago. We have seen that this is blessed news for us because he as the Messiah has opened the way so that Gentiles like you and me can enter into his kingdom. And we have seen how that kingdom is a place where, in real ways, the curse of sin in rolled back, and God’s true ways show through. Let us now, brothers and sisters, look to the Messiah who has been revealed to us. Let us trust in him for what he alone can give us, and let us seek to live so that people might look at us, Tokai Community Church, and say “This is the kingdom of God.”