A Brief History of the CrossPuzzle

The story of how the CrossPuzzle came into existence is a long and wonderful tale. I can’t begin to present it in total here. What I will briefly detail are some of the highlights of this project, a real “God Project”, that He seems to have recruited me on. It has truly been a pathway upon which all I can do is follow His marvelous logistical planning. He really does want to get the Good News of His plan of salvation for mankind out there to the whole world and somehow this little puzzle is part of His plan. All glory goes to Him!

I am a mechanical engineer who has designed anesthesia machines most of my life. My latest engineering job was working for Dave, a good friend who had started his own medical device company. He had been my boss twice before in life. Now, the third time he hired me, I came on board with his newly-founded company as the mechanical engineering resource for designing medical ventilation equipment for his company. We were acting as the engineering advisory team to a large Beijing medical company. As part of this team, I got to travel to China about three times a year for 2-week stints to work with their engineering department. The two weeks part was crucial, since it gave me the opportunity during the middle weekend to get acquainted with the people and churches in China.

It was during one of these trips to China in December of 2014 that I got asked a question that was to figure largely in the succeeding years of my life. It began on the 6^th floor conference room at the company headquarters in Fengtai. We were to visit the brand-new production sites in one of those new “build-it-and-they-will-come” villages just outside the Beijing city limits to the east of the city. I would need a translator so that I could communicate with the production personnel there. I had not picked up very little of the Chinese language. At the meeting, I was introduced to Lu. She was assigned to help me with the language problem and she did so splendidly. A bit quiet and reserved, she demonstrated an impressive mastery of the difficult translation of medical and engineering terms even though she had only been at the company for a very short time. And, although it was inconvenient for her to come out to the plant on the second day and continue helping me with the translation work, she willingly offered to do so. After work that day, when it was decided that I would take the train back to the hotel alone, she volunteered to accompany me back to the city and look out for my safety.

It was on this subway ride that I found out that she was part of a house church in the university area of the city. This connection made, our talk quickly turned to a discussion of our faith and values. The question – the one that changed so much of my following history – came unexpectedly and quite surprised me. Holding my gaze with her dark brown eyes she first noted, “You have been an engineer all your life. You probably made a lot of money.” And then she asked, “When are you going to stop worrying about making money and just do the Lord’s work?”

My eyebrows surely lifted as have those of so many others to whom I have related this story. But it was asked innocently enough, and I felt it deserved an answer. “Well,” I stammered. “We don’t often ask questions like that in America, but I think it is a good question and let’s sit down and talk about it.”

Which we did, at a little porridge shop on the south side of ChangAn Boulevard, just west of Tiananmen Square. With my spoon dipping into that warm pumpkin porridge, I told her about this little ministry tool that God had sort of dropped into my lap about a year before. I recounted how I had been sitting in church one Sunday, listening to the preacher, to be sure, but actually tossing around in my head a passage from a book I had recently read. The book was “What’s So Great About Christianity” written by Dinesh D’Souza. The book included a page where it described all the major religions as following books that told you what good works and deeds you needed to do to get to God. All, that is except Christianity, which, quite contrarily, says that you can’t get to God by your own works. It was necessary for God to send Jesus to us so that we can get to God through him; not by our own efforts. The question that was toying in my mind during that sermon was how I might build an object lesson that would illustrate that simple truth.

GK Chesterton had made note in his book “Orthodoxy” about the paradox at the center of the cross.

Quote from GK Chesterton (speaking about religious symbols in his book "Orthodoxy")

For the circle is perfect and infinite in its nature; but it is fixed for ever in its size; it can never be larger or smaller. But the cross, though it has at its heart a collision and a contradiction, can extend its four arms forever without altering its shape. Because it has a paradox in its center it can grow without changing. The circle returns upon itself and is bound. The cross opens its arms to the four winds; it is a signpost for free travelers.

As I thought about this image of a paradox and a collision of two pieces of wood, the answer to that question about how to create an object lesson suddenly dawned upon me. I would design a puzzle in the shape of a cross; two pieces of wood, locked together, that could not be taken apart by one’s own effort. It would be a puzzle that needed to be placed in different force field to be unlocked. A force field present everywhere in the universe, just like God’s love. A puzzle only unlockable by that force, just as the human heart, stained from birth with the effects of sin, can only be unlocked and cleansed by the belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus – God’s solution to our dilemma.

I rushed home after church and quickly created a design on my computer. We had Jerry, a Chinese exchange student, living with us. I gave him the task of looking up the Golden Ratio so that I could use it to create this puzzle with just the right proportions. And then I hurried out to my woodshop and cobbled-up the first prototype. And it worked! As designed! I called it the CrossPuzzle.

So now, sitting there in that porridge shop, I told Lu about this little puzzle that for some odd reason, the God of the universe had selected for me, out of all the 7.4 billion people in the world, to create. And he had laid it on my heart to share it with others; if only I could find some time!

1. I told her that if I was to take her question seriously, that I would like to get involved with this puzzle as a way of doing the Lord’s work. I laid out 3 main ideas to Lu that night: I would like to get the CrossPuzzle distributed across the USA. And I had recently found a way that might make that possible. It was a religious organization called Transport for Christ that worked with providing chaplains at truck stops across America. I thought that truckers would work particularly well with this puzzle because a) they like techy things and this puzzle is just that, and b) they are always meeting new people and this puzzle works well with new people, and c) truck drivers are the most mobile people in America; well suited for getting the puzzle across the country. 
2.  I would also like to get this puzzle made more inexpensively so that missionaries could feel free to give them away to people they meet.   
3. I would love to travel around and talk about the puzzle. It is so easy to use as a good sermon illustration. And God had provided me with so many good stories surrounding it.

It was late December 2013 when I said goodbye to Lu and headed back to America. Over the next months I worked on various items from that porridge shop list. I got in contact with the local man who was an organizer for Transport for Christ and I got CrossPuzzles sent to all the 44 chaplains across the USA. The puzzle was now on the road and quickly made its way to California and to many other states.

June 2014 rolled around and one day my boss called me into his office. “Ken,” he said. “You know that the FDA is being really slow at approving new anesthesia machines. Ours has not been approved, which means we can not sell it in the USA. That means that the cash flow is down and the Chinese are requiring that I lay someone off. And that someone is, unfortunately, you!”

Expecting that I would be devastated by this announcement, my boss, my old-time friend, was quite perplexed that I took the news so well. But rather than being devastated, because of that question asked months before, I felt that one door had closed, and another had opened. And now I had the time! When I called Lu and told her the news, she reminded me that we had talked about this 6 months before! So, it was that question that provided the seamless link between my old life as an engineer and my new life in ministry. Not that my previous life had not also been a ministry. But this was a season of life that God was providing for me to focus on doing his work whole-heartedly. So, there I was, a 59-1/2-year-old engineer, suddenly freed to follow God’s calling more intentionally on a daily basis. And Lu’s prompting to ask the innocent question had been partially correct: I had made decent money and more importantly, had chosen to live a modest life-style so I didn’t immediately need to look for a job with similar earning potential. It was a chance to live as Proverbs 21:1 suggests – to just follow God’s watercourse!

The logistics for following that watercourse came by way of another question asked by a young man from our church. Tyler told me one day, “I love the puzzle, but it’s too big. Can you make one pocket-sized?” I told him, “No, because it contains too much interior mechanism.” However, I went down to my shop and made up a ½ scale version of the puzzle and got it to work. But it is one thing to have a working model and quite another to have a mass-produced product. And God had a plan for that problem as well. One day, Andy, a man from China came to visit Vision Video where my wife works. When she heard he was from China, she suggested that I might want to meet him. Over an American supper I showed him the ½ style prototypes that I was making. He was quite excited about the concept and said that he could take these back to China with him and get them made much more inexpensively. That sounded great to me and I gave him several to take along.

Then the next twist in the path presented itself. My youngest daughter got pregnant. And then my oldest daughter got pregnant. Their families were so happy to be having babies so close together and my wife, Karen, was planning to be with them for some extended grand-mothering. The problem was that our Chinese “son,” Jerry, who had lived with us for three years while going through high school, had offered Karen and me a free trip to China to meet his parents. When offered the choice between China and being with the new grandchildren, Karen predictably chose the kids! So that gave room on the trip to take Tyler along, the guy who had suggested the cost-saving version in the first place. With great anticipation, the two of us watched Andy open the closet in his house in the coastal city of Qingdao, China, and retrieve the Chinese prototypes of the CrossPuzzle. And they looked great – except they didn’t work! They had copied the design exactly – except for the most important part. I lay in my bed that night wrestling with God about what to do. They had already quoted me a great price. If I told them that they needed to correct the process to add the extra parts, it was likely to double the price. God left me to stew in my distress for a bit and then provided the answer. I didn’t need to change the design. I just needed to change the instructions. And He even provided the wording for the change. The first line in the clue should say, “Jesus said, “If I be lifted up from the earth, I will draw all men unto me.” Such beauty in that solution! Here a Chinese mistake had given me a better instruction sheet and a cost reduction!

We took a leap of faith and had a company in Shenyang, China make 10,000 of the crosses. They had been making crosses and other Christian items for many years but had never made anything like this. One of the largest churches in Singapore gave out 2,500 of the newly minted crosses. Soon I was shipping them to countries around the world and translating the instructions into 8 different languages. It was not long before I needed to order another 10,000 of them.

God who has been providing the direction and vision into this product. It truly is a way for people around the world to open spiritual conversations with people that they meet. It has opened its arms to the four winds. It has been a signpost for the free traveler. It places something tangible in their hands that makes them want to tell others about the secret of the CrossPuzzle and the Good News of Jesus.  

The story has continued in so many unexpected and marvelous ways over the past 5 years. With 15,000 of these puzzles distributed around the world, my hope is that this kind of experience will be happening at many more places than I could ever have dreamed.


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Stories and Responses

Crosses to School 

Hello Ken,

I am a Sophomore at an art school in Bethlehem. I was given one of your small cross puzzles while doing Light the night with my youth group this past October 31^st.

I took it to my high school and showed it to several friends in some of my classes.  I was able to share the gospel while having fun with the puzzle. To my surprise in the middle of my history class, my teacher (who is clearly not a believer) asked me to stand up and explain to the class what I had been showing a few classmates before class.

I was able to stand up and clearly share the gospel using your puzzle.  While I was sharing one of the male students asked, “So basically you are saying we are all sinners?”  My reply, “Yes, everyone is, and we struggle with it our entire lives. But just like this puzzle, God created the perfect solution by sending His Son, Jesus to pay for our sins on a cross.” 

I am a quiet person, yet I was not nervous at all and the words just flowed.  After I was through the class just sat quietly.  My teacher thanked me, and I sat down.  I was grateful to be given this unbelievable opportunity to share the good news!

I will keep using this tool whenever I am able.

Thank you and Merry Christmas,

Ava

Crosses to Haiti

  

Packaging 200 Creole-language CrossPuzzles for Haiti (and another 250 in Sept 2019)

Crosses across China

For Easter 2019, my broker in Qingdao, China, put this message on WeChat. It was quite a risky and brave thing to do on this Chinese government-controlled version of Facebook. He was announcing the free give-away of 500 of the CrossPuzzles.

Free gift from the Yishu Family Home

　　Why send out such a gift?
　　Because of love.
　　Because God loved us first.
　　Because this love is so beautiful, we can't fail to pass it on.
　　So, Mr. Ken Rutt, the designer of the CrossPuzzle, and Mr. Zhang Jian, the producer of the puzzle, decided to provide this gift so that the cross, which contains the mysteries of the gospel, could be known and used by more people, creating the opportunity for more people to get the gospel.
　　Therefore, we hope that you are:
　　A Christian;
　　Willing to share the gospel;

Willing to use this gift to bring good news to more people!

Figure 1 Cross Distribution in China

What's in Your Balloon?

Here is something you can do if you are bored and searching for some puzzling scientific problem to solve. Go to your local Walmart and buy one their cheapy helium-filled balloons. Take it out to your car and release it so that it floats up against the ceiling of the car. Now drive across the parking lot and hit the brakes. Which direction does the balloon go? Does it go toward the front or the rear of the car. Now accelerate away from the stopped position. Again observe the movement of the balloon. Did it move in the direction that you had assumed it would move. Of course not! If it had, I wouldn't be asking you these dumb questions! But the fact that it did the exact opposite of what you were expecting, and the fact that I am pointing it out to you, means that now you need to figure out why it acts like it does!

I don't want to truncate your thought process as you ponder this phenomenon. But just to direct it slightly -- think about the situation in terms of the "spirit", or the gas, with which the balloon is filled. It is that in-filling spirit that causes the strange reaction of the balloon. And it takes only a small shift of focus to see that this as an analogous situation to what we are called to in the Christian life. Ephesians 5:18 tells us not to be "drunk with wine, in which there is debauchary; but to be filled with the Spirit." This filling causes some rather strange behavior on the part of those filled. Things like not returning evil for evil, going the extra mile, caring about the widow and the orphans -- in short, living in an "Upside-Down Kingdom" as Donald Kraybill wrote in his book many years ago. One can deduce from watching the reactions of the helium balloon what that expanded bag of latex is filled with. And one can also able to detect what the professed "Christian" is filled with when you see their reactions to the circumstances they are hit with. It's not something that can be faked, just like the balloon can't fake what it is filled with. It is obvious from observing the reactions. Two inflated balloons, held upright in an anchoring board, do not look any different than two people sitting side-by-side on a church bench. But release them from their anchor, and suddenly it is completely obvious what they are filled with.

But what is not quite so obvious is the cause of the curious behavior of the balloon that I alluded to above. Why does a helium balloon float to the rear of the car when one hits the brakes? Answering that question required me to rack my brains for several days and even reach out to my engineering professors. (This was back in the days prior to smart phones, so my professors were the best source of insightful information!) But the answer finally dawned on me. A helium balloon will always move toward the less dense air. In the case of the car suddenly coming to a stop, the air in the car has been traveling along with the car as it was moving. But when the car stops, the air continues to move forward, causing it to become more compressed up by the windshield. The balloon naturally floats toward the region of the less dense air at the rear of the car. No magic! Just physics!

Oh! And one final thing to plug into the analogy. A latex balloon filled with helium ends up sinking limply to the ground after several days. The skin of the balloon may look impervious to us. But to the likes of a very tiny helium atom, it is as leaky as our Southern border. Escape is always an option, and the gas slowly leaks out. Our bodies are also leaky "earthen vessels" filled with the Spirit, and we must be mindful to always keep ourselves close to the source of that filling. Fortunately, unlike helium, which comes from the radioactive decay within the earth's lithosphere and is only available as a rare side-product in natural gas production, the source for God's Spirit is inexhaustible!

The Magic Umbrella

This story grew out of the coronavirus epidemic in China. One of the girls I know in Beijing, Winnie, lost her job before the Spring Festival. This was about the time that the whole virus crisis began. The outbreak meant that everyone in Beijing was isolated to their apartments, unable to go out to their jobs or classes or shopping or to visit with friends. I was trying to instill a feeling to her that people should take advantage of this forced isolation to sit and write their stories. Winnie wrote up some of the stories of her growing-up days and shared them with me. One of them caught my eye as being particularly insightful. I set about to filling in some embellishments and bringing it to life. Here is Winnie’s story.

One of my earliest memories is when I was 4 or 5 years old. I remember wanting an umbrella – a bright blue umbrella – like the one I saw the little girl carrying down the street. I couldn’t stop thinking of holding that umbrella over my head as I danced through the water puddles. I asked my mother if she could buy one, just for me. She looked at me, a little smile playing upon her lips, and said, “But honey, you don’t need an umbrella if it isn’t raining!” I couldn’t believe it. I would have to wait for it to rain to get my umbrella! Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than a big rainstorm. But the sky seemed to be perpetually blue. There was not even a cloud in the sky. And this lovely weather went on for days. I could barely stand it. I so wanted rain – lots of rain. The weather forecast would say it was going to rain and I would get excited. But the forecaster was wrong – the sun continued to shine! 

And then one morning it happened! I woke to hear raindrops drumming on the rooftop and water droplets sliding down the windowpanes. I sprang out of bed like a cat and clambered down the stairs to find my mom. “Mommy, mommy,” I screeched in excitement. “It’s raining! It’s raining!”

My mother gathered my speeding body into her arms and gently told me that perhaps I should look behind my bed. I looked up at her with awe and wonder in my eyes. Had she been thinking of me and doing this special thing for me? I spun around, ran back to my bedroom and dove across the mattress. I peered down at the floor between the bed and the wall. And there it was! A bright blue umbrella; just my size. I reached down plucked it up with my eager fingers. I pressed the little button on the base that caused it to unfurl its brilliant canopy and I allowed it to float above my head.

I could barely contain my excitement as I slipped into my school clothes and rushed down to the kitchen again, the umbrella held high in my outstretched arm. I placed it carefully on the floor beside me as I gobbled down my breakfast. I was so eager to head off to school in the pounding rain with my bright blue umbrella held proudly over my head. But first I gave my mother the biggest hug. She had been thinking about me all the time. And she had bought me the very best gift; a magical umbrella that not only kept my head dry, but which also warmed my heart!

Christ at the Apex

Grace Hall at Cabrini University in West Philadelphia received some of my special attention the other day as I was sent there with a co-worker to fix one of its many skylights. A triangular window in one of them had shattered and it needed to be replaced. The glass had been hanging there in its frame for several months as we waited for its specially constructed replacement to arrive. The space below had been cordoned off for safety reasons. After the installation, as I set about removing the barriers, the new window drew the attention of several professors and administrative staff. They were staring upward at the newly installed triangular piece of glass and marveling at how nice it looked. 

"Oh!" I said. "What is really special about that piece of glass is that, if you stand on this particular piece of tile," I moved to the center of one of the floor tiles, "and look through the very top apex of the glass on any cloudless night of the year, you will be see the North Star!"

The men stared at me skeptically. Then one of them, dressed in a suit, exclaimed, "You are full of crap!" (Well, those weren't his exact words, but they are close enough to get the point across.) 

"Yes!" I admitted. "That was fake news! But in fact, if you had given me a bit of time to calculate which tile to stand on, that could be possible. The North Star never moves in the heavens you know!"

This gave me an idea for a senior project at this religiously affiliated school. Why not have the creative graduate make my quick fabrication into reality there within Grace Hall. They could do the work of determining where one would need to stand to see light from the North Star shining through that skylight glass and then paint a set of footprints onto the floor at that position. Or better yet, why not paint a portrait of Jesus on the inside of the skylight surface and footprints on the floor. Then, standing in those footprints and looking into the eyes of Jesus, one could always see the North Star in the clear night sky. That may serve to remind the skeptics of the unmovable light of Jesus which has served as the guiding light for society for all these centuries -- just as that polar star has served as the guiding light to generations of sailors.

In any event, the ability of that guy in the suit to quickly and emphatically pass judgement upon my hasty fabrication, restores my faith that these professors, teaching in the hallowed halls of higher education, can still detect fake news when they hear it!

OK! So I'm a Bit Annoyed!

DirecTV
Customer Service
PO Bx 6550
Greenwood Village, CO 80155 

RE: Account #26403xxx (or maybe #7270xxx)

Dear Customer service,

This is regarding the bill that you have taken to sending me every month to tell me that I owe $94.40 on my account #26403xxxx. This, as you have explained, is for unreturned equipment that you have not received. As you can see from the attachments, and hopefully from your customer notes (if you keep such a thing), I returned my equipment per your instructions on 9/18/2019 at my local UPS store. They were the last custodians of the equipment and they documented it with the attached receipt. If the system that you set up with them to get this equipment returned broke down or if your receiving department is derelict in their duties, that is hardly my responsibility. So, you might understand why I resent all the time that I have had to spend on the phone and with customer service at the “greatest communication company in the world” trying to resolve this issue. As you might be able to read in my attached conversation notes on 11/14/19, your customer service person actually went off for several minutes to another department and came back with the welcome news that they had found the equipment and my account balance was being changed to zero. Unfortunately, your person did not document that breakthrough in corporate efficiency and the person I talked to on 12/14/19 could not find the records. Go figure!

 I did the due diligence of stopping again at the UPS Store today and talked with Dan who has been handling this complaint. He says you can gladly call him if you wish. 215-256-xxxx.

I will be keeping a copy of the stuff that I am sending you today so that next month, when you again send me the arrears notice, I can simply put these papers in the mail and resend them to you. 

For what it’s worth…

Ken Rutt

A Consumption Tax - (An Exercise in Voluntary Socialism)

Written November 5, 2012

Yesterday at church we were having a lesson on stewardship (care for) the earth. We were talking about the verse in Genesis 1:28 where it says God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” We were trying to understand what this should mean to us as we so uncaringly consume all this energy and resources. 

My brainstorm was that we, as a church, should impose a consumption tax on ourselves. For one week out of the year (at least to start) we should add up all our non-food purchases, gas, electric, merchandise, whatever we buy that week. Then we should take 10% of that total and pay it into a church fund. This money would then be given to some worthy cause that goes to help those who are in the unfortunate position of being exploited by our desire to have cheap goods and energy. The European Union has done this in principle by placing a high tax on each gallon of gasoline sold. It has caused a dramatic drop in consumption and a rise in energy awareness. I think if we as a church would voluntarily do this to ourselves, it could also make us more cautious (at least for that one week) about what we are consuming. It seems that no one ever starts to care about something until it costs them money. This voluntary “tax” would be a way of experiencing the pain of consumption but in a way that it allows us to make smart and helpful choices with that pain. Pain is, after all, supposed to help guide us away from the thing that is hurting us. If our over consumption is hurting us -- and hurting the world -- we need to feel that pain and do something about it. The pain of the smog-filled sky over Beijing is a pain that no American would stand for long if it was their hometown. But we don’t feel it from this side of the globe, so we don’t care about it. We need to start to care and come up with some good ways to channel that care into appropriate actions! Perhaps a tax on excessive consumption could serve as a starting point.

Note from December 28, 2019: This exercise is likely to become involuntary under the direction of a lot of the socialist candidates in today’s Democratic Party of Historical Amnesia. They would claim that this path will lead to a society of social equality and bliss. Why not experiment with it and see if all their promises are true. (Maybe we could prove all past experiments to be wrong. Maybe utopia does not necessarily lead to terror!) But at least this is an experiment that we can experience, learn from, and then stop. Not so with a government program of which Ronald Reagan said, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this earth is a government program."

Digging Down Deeper

What is it that lies buried beneath the surface? What treasures lurk beneath our feet -- or inside the pages of a book? The scripture, Matthew 15: 21-39, had been the focus of our small group Bible study. We haf found that it is a collection of three distinct stories about Jesus’ ministry. What struck me, for the first time, was their interrelationship and the potential, underlying structure that they were intended to convey.

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!