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May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Our text for this morning is the Gospel lesson taken from the 15th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Faith and repentance. These are two words that are very common to us in the church, but I wonder if we often really reflect on what they mean. The story of the Canaanite woman and Jesus gives us, I think, the perfect opportunity to reflect on both faith and repentance. What is faith? I suppose if you asked ten random strangers on the street, as it were, you probably wouldn’t get ten different answers, but I imagine there would be quite a few variations.
What about what you hear from your favorite radio or TV evangelist? What wisdom concerning faith do you find on your friends’ Facebook pages or other areas of the internet? Well, I looked and I found these gems: It’s your time. Activate your faith. Achieve your dreams and increase in God’s favor. Have faith and believe in yourself. Keep the faith. Hold on. Things will get better. Let your faith be bigger than your fear.
What about repentance? What if you asked ten strangers on the street what repentance was? Probably you would get a lot of, “I have no idea,” or on the other hand, maybe saying you are sorry for something bad that you’ve done. What about us? How are we as Christians to understand faith and repentance? For us, faith is very specific. It’s very specific.
And this story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman is perhaps one of the most beautiful expressions of faith and, I believe, repentance in Holy Scripture. The Augsburg Confession, one of the founding documents of Lutheranism, defines repentance in this way: Repentance consists properly of these two parts. One is contrition, that is, terrors, smiting the conscience through the knowledge of sin. The other is faith.
Consider now the Canaanite woman. Do you notice how she approaches Jesus? “Have mercy on me, O Lord.” This is an approach of penitence. An approach of unworthiness, realizing her unworthiness to come before God and ask him anything. “‘Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David. My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon,’ she cries out. She’s not a Jew. She’s a Gentile. There would appear to be no particular reason that she would be seeking out the Jewish Messiah other than perhaps she’s heard of his reputation, nor does she appear to be a Jewish proselyte.”
Jesus’ disciples, however, have their own opinion of her. They find her quite troublesome and annoying, pestering Jesus to such a degree that the disciples beg Jesus, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” Jesus, just wave your hands already, heal this lady’s daughter, and let’s get out of here. And so Jesus replies to his disciples, and no doubt within earshot of the woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
What are the disciples thinking? Perhaps they don’t want Jesus’ presence to be known. Maybe they’re kind of traveling incognito, and the best way to keep their cover would just be to heal the woman’s daughter. But Jesus appears strangely unwilling. This woman is a Canaanite, after all, not deserving of the services of the Jewish Messiah, or perhaps that’s what we’re supposed to think. And yet she presses on.
Her next act is an act of worship. She cries out to Jesus again, “Lord, help me.” And then perhaps one of the most frankly bizarre responses to be recorded from the lips of Jesus: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Wow, sounds like she’s been put in her place.
At the end of Matthew chapter 14, shortly before this encounter with the Canaanite woman, Matthew records the miraculous feeding of the 5,000. You know the story. Five loaves of bread and two fish become enough meal to feed an entire small city. And right after our gospel, at the end of chapter 15, Jesus takes seven loaves and a few small fish, and this time feeds 4,000 men plus women and children.
And right smack dab between these two miracles, where physical bread is given in abundance, we have the story of the Gentile woman. What’s the topic of conversation? Bread. Again, bread. Jesus has given more bread to those people than they could have possibly imagined. Given the bread to the children, the children of God, the people of Israel—tons of it.
But it’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. And this statement is in part a metaphor, probably in the way you usually think of it. It’s like Jesus saying, “Hey, you’re not part of the family of the children of God. You don’t deserve the good things I have brought for them,” but it goes even beyond that.
Remember what Jesus says in the Gospel of John: “I am the bread of life. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Jesus is the bread that’s not for the dogs, but for the children. And God puts us in our place, if you will.
What’s our typical response? “What did I do to deserve this, God? I deserve better than this. God, haven’t you been watching all the good works I’ve been doing? Now you’re treating me like this?” But not this woman. No, her heart is full of humility and repentance. She does not become defensive.
Instead, she acknowledges her unworthiness to even make the request. In fact, in her humility, she does Jesus one better. Did you notice that Jesus calls the people of Israel children, and the woman calls them masters? “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” What humility. What an expression of faith.
When Jesus fed the 5,000, the disciples collected 12 baskets full of the leftovers. John’s gospel tells us that after the feeding, the people pursued Jesus, hoping that he would become their king so they could have, no doubt, free bread for life. But all this woman wants is a few crumbs. “Jesus, I don’t need much of you. You’re so merciful and powerful— a crumb, a crumb, the smallest imaginable piece of you. That’s all I need. And of that, I’m not even worthy to ask.”
This is a life of repentance, of penitence—not just a single act of it, not just a single, “Oh, I’m sorry that I did X, Y, or Z.” Her entire attitude toward Jesus is one of repentance, expressed by her humility and her faith. Jesus’ response: “Oh woman, great is your faith. Be it done for you as you desire.”
She had received more in that one instant, more from that crumb of— more from those words of Jesus, words that she received in faith—more than the thousands and thousands who had their bellies full with bread when Jesus fed the multitudes. For they would become hungry again. She received infinitely more. She received the bread of life. Receiving Jesus himself, the bread that if anyone eats of it, they will have eternal life.
You and I, we’re partakers of the same bread. For you see, we too come to God as did this woman, as beggars, as dogs. Yes! We have no standing before God based on our own merits or our own worthiness. Yet he gives us bread. He literally gives us himself. Not only, as we say in the catechism, he provides me richly and daily with all I need to support this body and life, but he also gives us himself, himself as the bread.
I don’t know if you’ve ever wondered why the communion wafers we use are so small. I wondered if that was a cost-cutting measure. Wouldn’t more of Jesus be better? No. A bigger piece of bread? All it takes is crumbs. The smallest piece of Jesus is more than enough to sustain faith, to forgive sins, to unite us with his body, to unite us as one another together in the fellowship of the body of Christ, the church.
That’s all. Just a few crumbs from the master’s table. That’s all we need. And so we too receive the bread of life. We come before God in repentance, sorrow over our sinfulness, acknowledging our unworthiness to even be in the presence of God.
In humility, we come to the sacrament, and in faith—faith that here sin is forgiven, faith in the merits and worthiness of Christ, faith that his death and resurrection forgives our sins, faith that in this meal Jesus gives us his true body and his true blood to eat and to drink. For the remission of all of our sins, to lead us to everlasting life.
So you see, faith for us is not some abstract thing. It’s not merely positive thinking. It’s not a happy attitude. It’s not the hope that, “Oh, well, things have to get better.” Faith has an object. It is trust. It is trust in someone. It is trust in Christ. Trust that for his sake, according to his mercy, he receives us as we are—no better, no worse than this Canaanite woman—poor, miserable sinners.
Faith that as we are drawn to him in humble repentance, that for Christ’s sake, he welcomes us into his presence. Faith that he washes our sin away in baptism. Faith that he feeds and nourishes us with himself in the bread and wine, the body and blood of Holy Communion. Faith that he is the bread of life. And that even though we only need crumbs, He gives of himself daily and generously.
In the name of Jesus, amen. And the peace of God, which passes all understanding, will guard and keep your hearts through faith in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.
