A Sermon on Matthew 15:10-28

Preached August 18, 2002

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

By Donald M. Tuttle

It has been said that there are only two certainties in life—death and taxes. I would like to add a third—"embarrassment."

Nobody likes to be embarrassed. But it happens—and it happens to all of us. We might be walking along when suddenly we tumble over an imagined line on the sidewalk. Our hands get scraped. Our knees might be bruised. But what is worse is that our faces get red because everybody is looking at us.

Or maybe we say something that, as soon as we say it, we know we shouldn’t have said, and are embarrassed by it. Such things happen.

But what I think is worse than embarrassing one’s self is being embarrassed by the behavior of someone about whom we care.

Years ago we had a friend in Kentucky with whom we often spent time. We enjoyed the friendship and the conversation. We would laugh and have a good time. The one thing we didn’t like to do with them was go out to dinner. The problem was that the husband never had a meal to his liking. The steak was always underdone or overcooked. The potatoes were lumpy or too thin. The beans were too crisp or mushy. The silverware had a water spot on the handle. It didn’t just happen occasionally. It was every meal. And our friend was not content to easily forgive such trespasses. No, he would call on the poor waitress making $5 an hour and harangue her on all that was wrong. He would loudly and embarrassingly demand satisfaction, even threatening to call the manager if he wasn’t satisfied. Meanwhile the rest of us would sit, hand hiding our face, eating what was for us a perfectly fine steak, better-than-mom-made potatoes and tasty beans with clean silverware. Yet we were embarrassed by his behavior.

Maybe you know what that’s like—to be embarrassed by someone you care about, maybe a spouse who drinks too much at the Christmas office party or the dad who comes in to meet your first love wearing shorts, white socks and penny loafers. If you have had that experience, you know it is painful.

You also know what it might have been like to be Jesus’ disciple because Jesus had embarrassed them.

First he got into a tiff with the Pharisees. We tend to caricature the Pharisees as intentionally evil people. But they were far from it. Instead, they were community leaders, men who had earned the respect of the people like the disciples. They were folks who devoted themselves completely to knowing the Hebrew Scriptures and living up to the them. Men like the disciples would never have imagined crossing a Pharisee.

But Jesus does just that. When the Pharisees ask Jesus why his followers don’t go through the ritual hand-washing that the truly devout did before eating, he accuses them of breaking one of the Ten Commandments—"you shall honor your father and mother." He calls them hypocrites and says they only give lip service to God.

Can you imagine the disciples’ embarrassment? For their entire lives they have been told to honor the Pharisees, to respect them, to defer to their wisdom. And now their leader—Jesus—openly shows his disrespect. He offends the most respected and valued religious leaders in Israel. The disciples were probably glad to leave that place and their embarrassment behind.

The only problem is that Jesus did it to them again. When they go into the region around Tyre and Sidon, a woman, a Canaanite woman, starts chasing after Jesus. First of all, she was a Canaanite, a pagan, long rejected by the Jews. In fact, when the Hebrew people took over Canaan, they were supposed to kill them all, such was the tension between them.

Of course, she was also a woman. Women were not supposed to address men or even approach them. They were to speak only when spoken to. Even if her daughter did need healing, she shouldn’t have been chasing after Jesus, causing a scene, creating a spectacle.

But more embarrassing to the disciples than the woman’s shouting was the fact that Jesus refused to do anything about it. "Jesus," they said, "she’s drawing a crowd. People are starting to stare. The neighbors are going to complain. Come on, Jesus, do something. Heal her daughter. Send her away."

But he doesn’t. "I’ve come only for the lost sheep of Israel," he says, letting the woman go right on crying and shouting and leaving the disciples mortified by a master who would do nothing about such an embarrassing scene.

Twice, in two different situations, Jesus left his disciples red-faced by his behavior. Twice he embarrassed them. Why?

Scholar Daniel Patte suggests it is because the disciples and Jesus viewed ministry differently. For the disciples, ministry was about keeping people happy and keeping the peace. For them, ministry should never offend or confront. It should never upset or displease. Ministry was to be so benign that it caused no concern for anyone.

But Jesus knew better. He knew that his ministry—and ultimately ours—is not dictated by people’s feelings or reactions or wishes. Ministry is doing what God called him to do. For Jesus, ministry is not about fearing what others will think or do, it is about being faithful to the will of God.

It is faithfulness to his calling that led Jesus to confront the Pharisees. They were to be shepherds of God’s people. They were to be guides for the spiritually blind. They were to be Israel’s leaders. But what Jesus found were men who had lost sight of their ministry and were standing in the way of God. They had become more concerned with the letter of the Law than its intention. They were more concerned with broken rules than broken hearts. They had become people who couldn’t look beyond the externals to see how they and others were using religious devotion to hide people’s violence, lust, greed and lies.

Jesus could have none of that. He didn’t care about their feelings. He cared about their souls and the souls of those around them. Being faithful to God’s calling meant he had to confront their sin, challenge their hypocrisy, and call them to repentance. Unlike the disciples, Jesus’ ministry was dictated by his mission, not concern for the Pharisees’ mood.

The same reality determined Jesus’ response to the Canaanite woman. "Heal her daughter. Send her away," the disciples said. But Jesus wouldn’t do it because his mission was clear. God had sent him first and--at this point—only to the people of Israel. Yes, the faith would spread. Yes, Gentiles would come to be incorporated into it. But the time had not come for a Gentile mission. That would ultimately be the disciples’ job. Jesus’ commission was clear—first to Israel. It was not that he didn’t care about the woman and her daughter. It was not that he was callous to their need. Rather, it was that he was faithful to God. Even when he did heal the woman’s daughter, it was not to launch a Gentile mission, but rather as a crumb of grace fallen from Israel’s table.

For Jesus, faithfulness to God, not fear of what people might think, dictated his ministry.

For years now, we have been told that the church needs to identify its purpose, to determine without a doubt what it is that God is calling it to do. And it is true. In more than 15 years of ministry, I have and continue to see the results of Christians and congregations who do not understand why they exist or what it is that God wants them to do. One result is that they become pre-resurrection disciples—they become people obsessed not with sharing the Gospel, not with feeding the homeless, not with making disciples of others, but people obsessed with keeping the peace, refusing to offend, protecting the image. They become people more interested in public relations than Jesus Christ. They walk around the church on egg shells, afraid that "So-and-So" will get her feelings hurt , or they hide their faith from neighbors or co-workers afraid someone will think they are a "goody-goody," or worse, a Bible-toting fanatic.

Yet the ministry to which Jesus Christ calls you and me and this church is too important to be cowed by such fears. There are too many people in this community who are captured by sin and need God’s grace. There are too many elderly living lives of quiet desperation who need God’s hope. There are too many children living in poverty who need God’s care. There are too many families coming undone who need God’s wisdom. There are too many people longing for meaning who need God’s guidance.

When we side with Jesus over the disciples, when we let faithfulness to God rather than fear of others dictate our ministry, we become an instrument in the hands of God, we become the Body of our Lord Jesus, alive and well and at work in the world.