Not too long ago, the website Business Insider, published an
article entitled, “7 Brutally Honest Rejection Letters.” Included in this
article were rejection letters to a woman seeking employment in Disney’s
creative department in 1938, one to author Gertrude Stein, and screenwriter Tim
Burton. Or how about this rejection from the New Delta Review, a literary
magazine based in Baton Rouge: “Thank you for submitting. Unfortunately, the
work you sent is quite terrible. Please forgive the form rejection, but it
would take too much of my time to tell you exactly how terrible it was. So
again, sorry for the form letter.” We
cringe just hearing these letters, don’t we? We can all identify with the pain
of rejection, I think. It’s happened in our lives in one way or another, though
hopefully not as brutally as the poor folks on the receiving end of these
letters! We can’t know what happened to the people who received these
rejections. They may have looked at this bad news as just another bump in the
road to what they were sure would be a promising career. Or these letters may
have stopped their careers before they even really started. In my senior year
of college, I decided I wanted to go to grad school to pursue a master’s degree
in Shakespeare so I could work for England’s BBC. I applied to Oxford and
Trinity College in Dublin. I applied for a summer internship at the Alabama
Shakespeare Festival and I was rejected by all three. That was it for me, and
it sure did make me sad. I did go on to school to get a graduate degree in but
it was in English education. I decided if I could not work for the BBC I would
teach high school British English. The
road I wanted was not mine…it belonged to someone else. I took the road God opened for me….Rejection
isn’t the end of the road, is it? And as we all know, Tim Burton and Gertrude
Stein went on to excel in their chosen fields; the early rejection they both
received perhaps a motivation to try even harder to attain their greatest
wishes. Rejection doesn’t have to stop us, either. Certainly, rejection wasn’t
a deterrent to the Canaanite woman in this morning’s scripture reading. She
wanted her ailing daughter to be made well, and she wasn’t going to give up
until that very thing happened.
Read Matthew 15:21-28
So let’s take a look at the woman at the center of today’s
passage from Matthew. This woman’s story is recorded twice in the gospels; here
in Matthew, but also in Mark’s gospel, where she is described as the
Syro-Phoenecian woman. In both cases, the intent is to make very clear that
this woman is an outsider. She is not a Jew. Mark’s description of the woman as
Syro-Phoenician is geographical, placing here in a region beyond the bounds of
Jewish territory; an area that we would refer to as Gentile territory. Matthew
takes the distinction a bit further by describing her as a Canaanite. In doing
this, Matthew is not just placing her outside Jewish territory, but actually
setting her against the Jews, as the Canaanites were the people the Jews
displaced in order to move into the Promised Land centuries before. Clearly,
this woman is not a person Jews would associate with under normal circumstances.
The next thing we learn about this woman is that she has a
daughter who is suffering from demon possession. I believe it is safe to assume
that like the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years, this woman was also
desperate for healing. Many of you know the pain of watching your child suffer,
even when it’s just from a little stomach virus. You’d do anything to make the aches and pains stop. Parents of
children suffering from cancer often say they wish they had gotten cancer
instead of their children. We do anything and everything we can when our
children are sick to make them comfortable and to help them get better as
quickly as possible. And that’s exactly what this Canaanite woman is doing. She
has heard about a Jewish healer named Jesus, and she wants to see if maybe he
can heal her daughter of this agonizing affliction.
And it just so happens that Jesus is in the region. As Jesus
makes his way through Tyre and Sidon, the Canaanite woman sees the perfect
opportunity, and she knows she must seize it. She sees Jesus walking by, and so
she does what any of us would do when we have a sick child and a renowned healer
is in the neighborhood, she cries out to him. What follows is a four-fold
rejection. First, Jesus ignores the woman. Undeterred it seems, the woman
continued to cry out, for the next rejection was dealt by the disciples.
Obviously annoyed by the woman’s noisy nagging, they appeal to Jesus to at
least send her away, which prompts the third rejection. This time, Jesus
responds neither to the persistent cries of the Canaanite woman, nor to the
pleas of the disciples. Instead, he makes a rather general statement indicating
that he has no intention of getting involved with this outsider woman and her
daughter. “I have been sent only to the lost sheep, the children of Israel.”
But Jesus, it seems, has underestimated this woman. She
stops crying out now and instead employs a new tactic; she throws herself at
Jesus’ feet. “Lord,” she says, “help me.” She wants her daughter to be healed,
and she knows that this man can do it. She has tried every other possibility,
and with nothing but failure to show for it, she needs Jesus to help her. But
again, she is rejected. This time, I imagine, Jesus must have looked at her
with some measure of compassion and understanding as he said to her, “It is not
good to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
Now, before we go on here, I think we need to take a moment
to understand why Jesus was rejecting this woman just as persistently as she
was pleading with him. Though his words are harsh and seem to indicate that
Jesus came only to save the Jewish people, that was not the case. Already in
Matthew’s gospel, Jesus has raised the daughter of a Roman centurion.
Nevertheless, Jesus understood very clearly from his Father that his mission
began with the lost of Israel; his task wasn’t simply to be a traveling doctor,
healing every sick person he met. So Jesus was going along with his disciples,
traveling from one region to another, trying very intently to reach the lost
people of Israel and restore them to right relationship with God.
Think of it like this: If you are taking your child to
school, the goal is to get your child to school, and that’s what you do first.
Unless you have planned in plenty of extra time, you typically don’t go grocery
shopping, stop for a walk in the park, or bowl a few frames at the bowling
alley. You and your child get in the car, and you drive your child to school
where you drop them off before, perhaps, dealing with some of the other tasks
for the day like a trip to the store. That doesn’t mean that you aren’t going
to do what needs to be done, but that you have one mission to accomplish before
you can tackle the next.
It just so happens that as Jesus is traveling through Tyre
and Sidon, he is singularly focused on the people of Israel and helping them
become a light to the nations as was always the intention. And so Jesus does
not want to take time now to deal with this non-Jewish woman who has thrown
herself into his path. It would seem that he has even gotten annoyed with her
as he, in his final rejection, refers to her as a dog, which was one way Jews
commonly referred to Canaanites. But this woman is desperate, and she is crafty
in her desperateness, as she takes Jesus’ words and turns them right around on
him. “Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall off
their master’s tables.”
I’m not sure I can adequately describe to you what this
woman has done in this one simple sentence. It is truly masterful, and not only
because she has boldly used Jesus’ own words against him in support of her
cause. The woman accepts her identity as a lowly “dog,” an “outsider” in Jewish
thought. And yet, at the same time, she has placed herself within the reign of
God’s kingdom. She recognizes Jesus as the Master, and she places herself as
the dog scrounging crumbs under that Master’s table; lowly, and yet still
within the Master’s presence. Even more than that, without being taught, she
takes the approach of a mustard seed-sized faith as she says to Jesus, in
essence, “I don’t require much, only enough that my daughter be well, and from
you, even the leftovers, the crumbs can take care of that.”
Is it really any wonder that Jesus finally relents? Here
Jesus has been going around preaching, teaching, and healing among the
Israelites, and still God’s people don’t understand. Even his own disciples have
had difficulty wrapping their heads around what it means that the Messiah is in
their midst. They continue to question, they continue to doubt, they continue
to falter in faith; but not this woman. She has probably never heard from Jesus
himself, and yet she has heard enough about him to understand. Here is the
great physician, the savior of all peoples, the Messiah. She is in his
presence, and she knows that he has the power to heal her daughter. So she says
what any parent would say, “Help me.”
How many times have we prayed that prayer, and how many
times have we felt rejected in the response or lack thereof? Here’s what we
need to learn from this Canaanite woman with the very sick daughter. Again and
again this woman violates boundaries; boundaries set up because of ethnicity,
heritage, religion, gender, and demon possession. This woman refuses to allow
even Jesus to let “tradition” become a barrier, blocking her access to the
grace of God that she knows is there. The Canaanite woman comes to Jesus with a
crystal-clear, unshakable conviction that God’s mercy is enough for her
daughter and for herself. That’s what drives her. And, in the face of
uncertainty, doubt, and even rejection, it is such “great faith” that should
drive us as well. How is your faith? Are
you down?....Hopefully if you are….you are not counted as out.
About the Book: A getaway on a charming island may be just what Alyssa needs---if only she can let go of her past. When Alyssa Denham, a single career woman, wins a fun getaway for two on Mackinac Island where her grandmother lives, she gives her carefree best friend a call. Together, they tour the old shops and hidden treasures of the quaint island while helping Alyssa's grandmother piece together an heirloom quilt. Their quest gains them entrance into the homes of many longtime residents of the island, parts of the city that are otherwise off limits to tourists. As the quilt's story takes shape, Alyssa gains amazing insight into her grandmother's life . . . and attracts the attention of the handsome Scott Whitman, an island resident in charge of hotel transportation. Will memories of her past keep Alyssa from letting go? Or will the quest to piece together the heirloom quilt restore Alyssa's fractured heart---and bring healing to her entire family?
