"When Jesus said NO" given August 20, 2017

 Jesus said NO. He refused to heal. He was on retreat, and had been working very nohard. He had been preaching and healing and teaching at breakneck speed. He had done a couple of miracles, fed a crowd or two, He had even walked on water.

Yet it's clear from the Gospel that Jesus was still waging an uphill battle to proclaim the good news in the face of the criticism and opposition of the Pharisees and the just plain orneriness of so many everyday people of Israel. And that must have pained Him a great deal. It was, after all, for the lost sheep of Israel that He'd come.

There is there a very real sense on Jesus' part that he had indeed come to minister to Israel. Clearly Jesus' primary earthly mission was first to his own people. As a human being, Jesus came onto this earth a Jew, an Israelite, one of the Chosen people of God. And He focused his teachings on that particular people, in that particular place, at that particular time in history.

But so many of them had been saying NO to Jesus and his teachings. And so Jesus seeking a bit of respite, Jesus had ducked away from the Jewish areas to the coastal region of Tyre and Sidon. It wasn't very likely that he'd be recognized there. Jesus must have been feeling the need just to get away. Just to take a break, to regroup, to be somewhere else where everybody wasn't either continually putting the arm on him for miracles or else trying to nit-pick the message he was trying to bring.

But even here, in this historic region where the pagans lived, it turned out that He couldn't get away for a little mini-vacation. Matthew tells us how Jesus was walking down the road with the disciples when some

strange woman saw him.

"Hail! Son of David!" She cried. "Have mercy." Most commentators make point out of her form of address. "Son of David" was a royal, Messianic title that the disciples weren't even extending to Jesus at this point.

Despite that, Jesus just kept walking. But the woman kept on shouting, begging, nagging Jesus to come and heal her mentally disturbed child. She was persistent, so annoyingly persistent that the disciples finally asked Jesus to tell her to shut up and clear out. But Jesus continued to ignore her.

Matthew calls her a Canaanite. He uses that rather archaic phrase, to underline her different-ness. She was a pagan. She was a woman. She had borne a child that was abnormal. This woman had three strikes against her as far the disciples were concerned. For her, a gentile and a pagan to appeal to Jesus as Son of David--whichever way she meant it--was for her to appeal to a God that was not her own--a God strange and alien to her and her people.

And Jesus used her mistake. "Yes, you are quite right. I am the Son of David. I have come for the Jews. I did not come for you. I came for the lost sheep of Israel."

But the woman was persistent. "Help me." she cried.

The Jesus got rude. "I came for Israel's lost children. It's not fair to take food intended for children, and feed it to the dogs."

She retorted. "I know you came for those children. But what about my child? Are there no left-overs at the table of the children of the rich? Are there no table scraps for the stray dogs outside the door? Help me, give me the crumbs you would throw away."

At this point, you kind of have to like this Lebanese woman. She has guts. She may not be a Jew, but she has chutzpah. She may be an outsider and a pagan, but she's also a mother and she's gutsy enough to take on this foreign holy man in a verbal duel if it might possibly help her child.

Our reaction to Jesus in this story, on the other hand, is one of surprise. Jesus was downright snotty to her. Worse, Jesus said NO. That just doesn't fit with everything we've ever learned about him in church and Sunday School. It doesn't square with the Savior we know in our hearts. It doesn't fit with the Lord whose very life and ministry teaches us that God's grace is accessible to all peoples. It just doesn't seem right or proper that some poor woman would have to engage in a battle of wits in order to coerce Jesus into healing a child.

It's a scandalous text. Jesus said NO. Could Matthew have made up the story, put that NO into Jesus' mouth in order to grind some particular theological ax? The problem with that cop-out is that this story is also found in Mark. So it's likely that Jesus really did tell the Canaanite woman NO.

Why would he do a thing like that? Why would Jesus say "NO" to this poor woman? And why is it that Jesus sometimes seems to say "NO" to us in our lives and trials? There are some possible explanations. Whichever explanations we seize upon, will say something about who we are, and who Jesus is in our lives.

Maybe Jesus was testing the woman's faith--lots of believers think that all the illnesses and sorrows and challenges that come to them are personal tests from Jesus. Maybe Jesus intended to heal her daughter all along, and he was using the conversation to make a point about the inclusiveness of the Gospel. But both of those possibilities show a mean- spirited-ness that I for one am not very comfortable with.

Maybe Jesus was not at that point, trying to heal the whole world. Maybe was still trying at that point, still working and praying and hoping to minister to in depth and transform that community with which he had a primary relationship. Maybe Jesus knew what some of us forget--that it's folly to try to be so concerned with people in far away places, if in the process we ignore the pressing needs of those under our own noses.

"Bloom where you are planted", says the old saying. You and I are called by our circumstances and our life situation to focus our ministry and attention here--on our own particular corner of God's world first.

But still, we can't totally cut off our concern for those beyond our family, our community, our congregation. Time and again Jesus taught us that we need to heal our own broken-ness before we can bring wholeness to others. Our Lord knew that we must set our own houses in order, tend our own gardens, transform our own communities, remove the log from our own eye, before we set out to change the whole world.

And maybe Jesus was just "miracled out" that day--too exhausted from the hectic demands and pace of his ministry. He was there looking for some peace and quiet, after all. As his anger in the Temple courtyard and his grief at the grave of Lazarus show, the earthly Jesus was fully human--and fully subject to the limitations of this frail human frame.

And perhaps, just perhaps the Creator was using the woman to tell the earthly Jesus in that it was time to escalate his ministry beyond the boundaries of Israel and out into the world. There are times in this life when the needs of others, the cries of the outsiders, simply will not be denied. It's certain that God is capable of using the cries, the call of outsiders in need to confront us and deepen our ministries as believers and broaden our understandings of who exactly is inside, and who exactly is outside.

The Blessings of our God will always eventually break forth and reach beyond the immediate circle. The Love and Power of our Redeemer is the only power that can break the bounds of race and color and creed and ancient enmity and move into the hearts of all. Sooner or later we will hear that call to extend our ministry and mission to the world at large.

Along with affirming that Jesus came as Israel's Messiah, we also affirm that He came as Savior of the world. Jesus had been struck by the Canaanite woman's words--and struck by her faith. Yet he stuck to his NO. He wouldn't totally give up on Israel. He didn't change his route. He didn't go to her child. He didn't touch the child's mother. He didn't touch the child. No prayers, no laying on of hands, no smearing of his saliva on the child's demented forehead. Rather, he simply told the woman,

"You have great faith. You believe in my mission to the Jews. You believe in my power among the gentiles. It is YOUR faith that will help you. What YOU want will be done."

And Matthew tells us that the woman's daughter, who had been possessed by the spirit of madness for years and years was healed by her mother's faith.

It was not to torment this woman that Jesus said NO. It was not to discriminate against her. He must have known that she believed in Him--or at least in the possibility of Him and His mission. Otherwise why would she have spoken?

So I suspect that Jesus said NO, in order to call forth that hope, that faith he saw in her heart and couple it with the determination and love for her child he saw in her actions. And perhaps that's one of the reasons that Jesus sometimes says NO to our prayers--to challenge and call forth our faith, our power, our YES.

Salvation, the love of God is a gift freely offered to all. But each one must respond. Paul says in this morning's Second Reading that God's desire to save all people is irrevocable, But, the Apostle adds, the gift must be accepted--freely ratified in love by each person so blessed.

Like the Canaanite woman, we must respond in love and believe. Like Jesus, we must be willing to broaden the circle of our concern. If there's a moral to her story it's a moral about the power of faith. The faith of this Canaanite woman overcame the barrier between male and female, the barrier between Jew and Gentile, the barrier between broken- ness and wholeness. The faith of this pagan woman healed her child.

Brothers and Sisters, we preachers talk a lot about the faith that heals. But what is that faith? We say if you haven't got faith you have nothing. What is faith in God? Is it no more than an intellectual belief in a created universe? What does it mean to say Christ is Lord? Is it simply a matter of choosing to accept the Historicity of the human being known as Jesus Bar-Joseph of Nazareth? Or is there something more to this faith business?

Do you recall the time that Jesus chastised the people in his own hometown for their lack of faith in him? What do they say in response?

"Where does he get these ideas? Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't this Mary's boy? Isn't this James and Joseph's brother? Don't we know him and all his sisters?"

They didn't believe in him. Much less in his Divine roots and his cosmic possibilities. They though he was just like them. And not believing in him or in his roots in God, they couldn't believe in themselves, or in their roots in God. Much less in their own possibilities. So they said NO to Jesus.

They reasoned, "he's just like us, ignorant, useless, helpless and hopeless."

And of course, that reasoning made them ignorant, useless, helpless, and hopeless. That reasoning killed possibility, murdered hope in their lives. That's why they could not heal, or even be healed. Had they been able to believe in him, they would have believed in themselves.

But the Canaanite woman, a woman, a gentile, mother of a deranged child, did believe in him. She could say "YES" to Jesus. And she believed in herself. She believed that she could bridge the gap between herself and Jesus. And she believed that she could get this foreign holy man to heal her child. She prevailed. She knew that he could heal and that he would not refuse if she called upon him in the name of his mission. Yet it ended up being her faith that healed her child.

If we believed in Jesus like that, we would also believe in ourselves. If we believed in his power like that, we would also belive in our power. And we would believe in our Freedom too. And we would believe in our responsibility, and in our love, and in our hope, and in our forgiveness.

And above all we would believe in the God within. We would say YES to the One who is the Source of all these gifts. We would say YES to the imageo dei, the spark of the Divine that dwells in all of our hearts and lives.

And our lives would change. And once we'd said YES, we would be in this broken world, healing and touching, transforming and redeeming it, day and night. Amen.