During our 6 AM, Saturday morning Bible study, one young man, Logan, was bemoaning the literature course that he is taking at college. He said that it is a study of screenplays by Shakespeare. The professor is always digging down into the minutia of the underlying thoughts and nuances that the film writer crafted into his films. “Take notice of the way there is a light streaming in through that distant window. See how you can barely make out the outlines of a hand reaching up into that light beam as if to arrest its progress across the room; to grasp desperately at that shaft of light? Think about how the film writer makes this an image to demonstrate the ethereal nature of truth! Blah, blah, blah…” Logan, of course, being a young man with a rather less romantic mind was having none of this and wrote it off as foolishness. He was finding no enduring significance in delving into the nuances of Shakespearean thought.
But on farther consideration, I was able to piece together Logan’s groanings about British literature and contrast them with the wonderful significance that we had found during our study while digging deeply into the Matthew 15 scripture. We had found things of far greater significance than some “shadowy hand in the background.” And that is the true wonder, the true evidence of the divine inspiration of this sacred text. That is why there are literally libraries full of writing that have attempted to plumb its depth. Whole classes of people who tear it apart letter by letter, trying to squeeze out every detail of the story that our creator is trying to reveal to us. That is why we will be able to sit at the feet of our creator for 10,000 years and still find that it is as if the story telling has just begun. By contrast, when someone sits under my teaching for only 20 minutes, they are looking at their watch and getting ready to bolt out the door of the church to grab their Happy Meal at the local McDonald's. God’s discussion of the story of life and redemption is so much deeper and more compelling than ours that 10,000 years will only get Him through the preamble!
The first story was Matthew 15:22-28. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So, his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.”
27 “Yes, it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
What grabbed my attention in that first story, and made me start digging down into its nuances, was how uncharacteristic the action in this story was of Jesus. He was downright rude to this little Canaanite lady. He looked like a flaming racist calling this lady as a dog and refusing even to talk to her directly. It was only after the lady had thrust away his indelicate insinuations about her unworthiness and refused to go away that Jesus suddenly, almost explosively, relents, and pays her a compliment that elevates her above even his disciples and all the others around Him. “Oh woman! Great is your faith. Let it be to thee as you as you wish,” and her daughter was healed from that hour. Here this non-Jewish “dog” woman had shown such a high level of faith in Christ that she had pierced this wall of separation between the Jews and the Canaanites that Jesus appeared to be hiding behind.
But what is going on here? Why was Jesus shown as being so uncharacteristically rude to this poor woman? Why is he shown as a flaming racist in this story, but in the very next story, he is sitting indiscriminately with the whole motley crowd, healing everybody’s illnesses? This seemed to make no sense. How could I fit this story into the greater narrative of this chapter’s message about who Jesus is?
Looking more closely at the women, we see that she addresses Jesus with the Hebrew title of Lord, Son of David. Furthermore, she knows the Jewish scripture as can be noted in her quoting from it in verse 27. But she is not Jewish. She is Canaanite. And Jesus makes it clear that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. Therefore, she is not a candidate for his grace. The disciples, of course are encouraging him to act like this when they tell Him to send her away. Clearly, Jesus is allowing himself to be pent up inside this Jewish shell. But it appears that he is doing it for a reason. Like the gunpowder inside the shell of a firework getting ready to burst open its casing and display its blazing glory to the world, Jesus allows his glory to be ignited inside this shell so that he too can be seen bursting from its grip. Healing and God’s favors are no longer going to be a consequence of Jewish lineage. As Jesus bursts these bonds, he graciously proclaims that it is no longer lineage, but faith that has allowed her to find favor with God and have her daughter’s healing granted. You can just imagine the disciples standing there, shell-shocked at the bursting out of the grace of Jesus from the confines of traditional Jewish mindset. Healing comes by faith, not by lineage!
Now that Jesus has displayed his grace bursting out of the Jewish shell, he sets up a gathering on the hills above Galilee to show the magnificence of this grace. The next story in Mt 20: 29-31 shows Jesus mixing and mingling with the people; a great crowd of people. And everyone appears to be having access to the healing graces of Jesus. The disciples are not mentioned in this story. But everyone is praising the God of Israel and no one is trying to send anyone away or judge the worthiness of any individuals. These couple verses tell a delightful story that ranks right up there near the top of all joyous gatherings ever to have occurred on earth.
But then we move into the third story, and once again we see the disciples pulled back into the picture. Jesus seems to have a problem. He has compassion on these people but seems unable to meet their needs; needs that He had been meeting quite handily during three days of unstopped healing previously. But now He seems to need the disciple’s aid to feed these people. He asks them, “How many loaves do you have?”
After taking a quick inventory, they sheepishly tell Him that they have only about enough to scrap together three Happy Meals. But even though their resources are small, Jesus seems to need their pittance of an offering to be the substance that is going to be multiplied into enough for all the people to eat. And in contrast to the previous story, where it appears that it was just Jesus sitting there alone amid the thronging crowd, in this story it is the disciples who are doing the touching and giving. It is now they that are experiencing the joy of blessing the multitudes like Jesus had experienced in the previous story. And not only do they see that they are able to meet the needs of everyone, but there is even food left over to be gathered up into seven more baskets of leftovers.
But now stepping back from these three individual stories and looking at the combined flow of the narrative, a more beautiful picture emerges that draws all these stories together into a sweeping panorama of God’s intended plan of redemption. Jesus may have come to the Jews, but he is going to burst out from that narrow, nationalistic calling to fulfill God’s promise to Abraham in Genesis 12:3 where God says that “all the peoples of the earth will be blessed through you.” And then we see the glory of that ministry of Jesus as he ministers to all the people scattered upon the hillside. But his time of personally meeting their needs was limited, though his compassion was not. So, in the third story, we see him passing on the ministry to his disciples and ultimately to the church. They will now become the hands and the feet of Jesus. They will be his agents moving among the crowds. Now we can answer the question that stumped us when we looked at the first story: “Why was Jesus made to look like such a racist?” It is now easy to answer. He is not a race-ist; he is a grace-ist!
So here we see yet another illustration of the deep layers of meaning that can be pulled from the scripture that make it of infinitely greater impact and interest than can be gained by digging down into any Shakespearean screenplay. His plays may have been inspired by the genius of one of the greatest literary minds ever to grace the planet. But the writings of the Bible were inspired by God; the creator of the planet and all the inhabitants on it! The Word of God begs us to just dig down deeper! We can never out dig God!
No comments:
Post a Comment