Mark chapter 7, I just want to begin by reading our text, verses 24 through 30.
And from there he arose and went away to the region
of Tyre and Sidon.
And he entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet he could not be hidden.
But immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him and came and fell down at his feet.
Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
And he said to her,
Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
But she answered him, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.
And he said to her, For this statement, you may go your way.
The demon has left your daughter.
And she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.
This passage is one that has confused
Jesus' words to this distraught mother smash to pieces our common ideas of gentle Jesus, meek and mild.
One commentator notes that we like to read when Jesus rebukes the Pharisees and the Sadducees and the scribes.
We think those religious nuts deserve it, but we are very uncomfortable with Jesus' hard words to a distraught mother, to a loving mom.
How could she deserve for Jesus to speak to her in this way?
So how do we make sense of this passage?
How do we make sense of these seemingly harsh and even insulting words of Jesus?
I think the best way to understand the text is in the light of Jesus' earthly mission.
So I'll make three statements.
This is what the whole sermon is going to consist of is three statements about Jesus' mission.
And that last one is going to involve a concluding challenge for our response to Jesus and his mission.
So statement number one, Jesus did not come in his first incarnation to be an earthly king.
Jesus did not come to be an earthly king.
Verse 24, And from there he arose and went away to the region of Tyre and Sidon.
So some pastors and theologians believe or teach that Jesus came offering himself as an earthly king to the Jews, to the people of Israel, and that it was only because they rejected him as that that he went to the cross and that all the events that precipitated from there happened.
But we just recently went through Mark chapter 6 verses 30-46 where Jesus feeds the 5,000 and in John's telling of that same story, John chapter 6 verse 15, the crowd wants to take Jesus by force right then and there and make him their earthly king.
To make him the one who's going to stand against the Romans and Jesus avoids them.
He withdraws from them and gets away from those who would make him a mere earthly king.
Here in our text, this is just a short time after that, and Jesus withdraws from the area where most of the Jews were altogether.
Tyre and Sidon is very up in the very far northwest corner of Galilee, is a predominantly Gentile populated region.
And Jesus pulls away.
It seems like he wants to rest.
He certainly wants to be alone.
Verse 24 says, He did not want anyone to know where he was.
He's pulling away.
And I think this is important for understanding our text and understanding Jesus in general.
Jesus was not trying to win any popularity contests.
Jesus was not trying to make people like him.
He wasn't even coming, first of all, to win hearts.
He came first and foremost to die so that he might save his people from their sins.
Prior to his death, his ministry consisted largely of teaching his disciples how to understand the Old Testament in light of him and in light of his coming, and ministering to the multitudes, his ministry of teaching, but also healing and casting out demons, putting his divine power and person on display.
And one of the key themes of Mark, though, is that as he did this, as he taught, as he put his power on display, people didn't get it.
People didn't understand.
Even those closest to him did not understand.
They missed the signs.
They didn't understand the teaching.
Chapter 7, verse 17, we looked at last week, when he had entered the house and left the people, his disciples asked him about the parable.
And he said to him, then are you also without understanding?
Over and over in Mark's gospel, people don't understand what Jesus is doing.
And that's important.
Because the woman in this story is going to stand in stark contrast to all those Jews who didn't understand Jesus, this Gentile woman does.
Second statement, Jesus did come first and foremost to the Jews.
Verses 25-27, Immediately a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit heard of him, came and fell down at his feet.
Now the woman was a Gentile, a Syrophoenician by birth, and she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter
And he said to her, let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
So we see in verse 25 that even though Jesus didn't want to be found, he couldn't stay hidden long.
That very common word in Mark's gospel, immediately here, immediately he is found.
Someone hears about him in town and who is it that finds him?
Well, first of all, it's a woman whose daughter has an unclean spirit.
And unclean spirits, demons, these are a common occurrence in Mark's gospel.
Chapter 1, verse 21, Jesus casts out a demon from a man in the synagogue.
Chapter 3, verses 11 and 12 tell us that people with demons were being brought to Jesus and the demons were speaking to Jesus.
Chapter 5, we saw the man over in the Decapolis who was living among the tombs, was breaking chains apart because of his demon possession, and Jesus freed him as well.
In fact, chapter 3, that I just mentioned there, says that there was a crowd of people who had come from this region, from Tyre and Sidon, down to where Jesus had been.
And it's possible that this woman would have been among them.
Like, she may have seen Jesus perform this very ministry of casting demons out of people.
We're also told that she is a Gentile.
Some translations say Gentile, some say Greek.
Literally, it means Greek, but it's not saying she's Greek ethnically.
It's saying culturally she's from a region that had been dominated by Hellenistic Greek culture.
So when Alexander the Great conquered so much of the world, that region, so like that part of southern Europe and then through Asia Minor and over into parts of India, where the term that's used for that is that they were Hellenized.
They were made like that by
Alexander stamped the culture wherever he went.
And so even after the Romans came in, the Romans themselves were influenced by Greek culture.
Greek was the common language, the lingua franca, the language of trade.
And so this woman is culturally Greek, but it also says she's a Syro-Phoenician by birth.
So Phoenician would be her ethnicity.
That's the, in Matthew's gospel, it says she's a Canaanite.
So this is the people group that she's from, the Phoenicians or the Canaanites.
Syria is the region.
So the, the Romans had broke up their kingdom, their empire into different administrative districts.
And so she was from the administrative district of Syria, which was North of Israel.
So she's culturally Greek.
She's ethnically Phoenician.
She's geographically Syrian.
And in a sense, what we're getting is like a threefold repetition of she's not a Jew.
She's not a Jew.
She's not a Jew.
She's Gentile, Gentile, Gentile.
She is not.
One of God's chosen people.
But this woman, who is not a Jew, not a Jew, not a Jew, comes and begs Jesus to heal her daughter.
And our expectation, reading about this Jesus who has been healing people and casting out demons and showing his power in this way, we're expecting some kind of kind and compassionate response.
And instead, what we find is an insult.
Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
The Jews understood themselves as the children of God, and they called Gentiles dogs.
And Jesus just repeats that to this woman, like, you're among the dogs.
Why would I give you the children's bread when they should be fed first?
The children of Israel, Abraham's descendants, clearly saw themselves as the children of God, and that's not wrong.
We could look all kinds of places in the Old Testament to see this.
I just want to read Isaiah 43 verses 1 through 7.
But now thus says the Lord, he who created you, O Jacob, he who formed you, O Israel, fear not.
For I have redeemed you.
I have called you by name.
You are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.
And through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you.
When you walk through the fire, you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior.
I give Egypt as your ransom, Cush and Seba, in exchange for you, because you are precious in my eyes and honored
And I love you.
I give men in return for you, peoples in exchange for your life.
Fear not, for I am with you.
I will bring your offspring from the east, and from the west I will gather you.
I will say to the north, Give up, and to the south, Do not withhold.
Bring my sons from afar, my daughters from the end of the earth, everyone who is called by my name, whom I created for my glory, whom I formed and made.
God is speaking specifically there to the people of Israel.
He is saying, You are my people.
You are my chosen ones.
I love you.
I created you for my own glory.
In Paul's epistle to the Romans, he asks, Is there any advantage to being a Jew?
Chapter 3 and verse 2, he says, Yes, much in every way.
They were given the oracles of God.
They were given the law.
They were given revelation.
Prophets came to the people of Israel over and over and over again.
The gospel, chapter 1, verse 16 of Romans, it says, is first of all to the Jew.
We see this emphasis in Jesus' own ministry.
He didn't conduct a worldwide tour.
Jesus didn't go traveling everywhere.
He didn't go to the great
powers or centers of power or learning in his day.
He didn't travel down to Alexandria in Egypt.
He didn't go up to Rome.
He didn't go to Athens.
He didn't go to any of the places we might expect someone trying to start a worldwide movement to go to.
He stayed in this little tiny strip of land on the eastern side of the Mediterranean that God had given to his people.
He stayed in Israel.
Jesus makes explicit in Matthew's more detailed
Explanation, or telling of this story, who he came for.
Matthew 15, beginning in verse 21, Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.
And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David.
My daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.
But he did not answer her a word.
So this is some of the stuff that Mark skips over.
And his disciples came and begged him, saying, Send her away, for she is crying out after us.
He answered, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.
But then we get the part that Mark gives us.
She came and knelt before him, saying, Lord, help me.
And he answered, It is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
But verse 24, he says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house
of Israel, Jesus came, first of all, as the Jewish Messiah, as the heir of King David, as Abraham's chosen seed.
So the Gentiles, who had been, by and large, for the previous 4,000 some years of history, rejecters of God, persecutors of God's people, they had no right to expect anything good from
Even if Jesus is the Jewish Messiah, why in the world would that mean good news for the world?
God does not owe the Gentiles anything.
He doesn't owe any of us anything.
So while Jesus' remark strikes us, it strikes our modern Gentile ears as really harsh.
It's not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.
His statement is not out of line.
I read some people who said, well, this just proves that Jesus isn't actually sinless.
Look at, he speaks harshly here to a woman.
No, he is absolutely right.
It would have been wrong for Jesus to disobey the Father in redirecting his mission on earth.
But that brings us to statement number three.
Jesus, as the chosen seed of Abraham,
did come to bring blessing to the Gentiles.
All the nations of the earth, God says in Genesis 12, will be blessed through Abraham's seed.
We're not going to turn there right now, but in Galatians, Paul points out that seed there is singular, not plural.
And it's through the seed, capital S, of Abraham, Jesus, that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through.
How would you respond
If you would ask Jesus for help, and he replied, that wouldn't really be fitting given your status as a Gentile dog, would you be hurt?
Offended?
Taken aback?
Would you stomp away, pouting because of how he had spoken to you?
Probably how I would have responded.
This woman doesn't miss a beat.
She says,
Yes, Lord.
Just acknowledges, takes his premise for granted, is okay with it.
Yes, Lord.
But even the dogs, yeah, even dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs.
This woman understands something that the disciples still had not seen.
They still hadn't got.
And that is the overflowing and abundant nature of God's grace.
Chapter 6, verses 51 and 52, after the disciples had watched Jesus feed the 5,000, and they're out on the boat, and they see, they're struggling against the wind, and they see Jesus walking, and they're terrified of this ghost that they see on the water.
He comes into the boat, tells them, do not be afraid.
The boat gets to the other side.
The wind ceases.
And it says, verse 51, second half of the verse, they were utterly astounded because, verse 52,
For they did not understand about the loaves, but their hearts were hardened.
They were afraid.
They had fear in the midst of hard circumstances because they didn't understand about the loaves.
What did they not understand about the loaves?
That if Jesus was there, they had everything they needed.
They had provision.
They had safety in Christ.
He could provide everything that they needed.
This woman comes to Jesus.
She does not claim rights.
When Jesus says, you don't have a right for what you're asking to, she says, yeah, I know.
Yes, Lord.
She does not demand privileges.
She does not ask Jesus to divert his mission away from, first of all, his people, the Jews, to the people of Israel.
Instead, she says, yes, Lord, but here you are.
And maybe some of that bread will crumble down and land on the floor so I can lick it up.
This woman grasps that salvation is not something to be earned or deserved.
The Jews had the advantage of having the law, but that made their condemnation more clear if they did not receive that law, that salvation by faith.
Romans chapter 3, where Paul had said, is there an advantage?
What advantage has a Jew?
What value of circumcision?
Much in every way.
To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God.
But then down in verse 9, he says, Are the Jews any better off?
No, not at all.
For we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under sin.
He then quotes from the Psalms, verses 10-18.
Just a litany of quotes from the Psalms explaining everybody sins.
Everybody falls short of God's standard.
Verse 19, Now we know that whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world held accountable to God.
For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes the knowledge of sin.
The whole purpose of the law
The law written on the heart and then the law written down in the book is to help us see that as sinners, as those who are descended from Adam, we stand before God as those who are judged and guilty because we fall short of His standard.
But like last week, what we see there in Romans 3 is that though the law
shows us God's righteous standard and shows us how far we fall short of it, on its own it can't save us.
All it can do is show us that we stand condemned before Him.
But verse 21 of Romans 3, Now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe.
For there is no distinction
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.
This was to show God's righteousness because in His divine forbearance He had passed over former sins.
And this we see in the Gospels was Jesus' plan all along.
He came first and foremost for the lost sheep of Israel.
But those weren't the only sheep he had in mind.
They weren't the only ones who were going to benefit.
John chapter 10, Jesus is telling those who are listening that he is the good shepherd.
Verse 14 of John chapter 10, I am the good shepherd.
I know my own and my own know me just as my father knows me.
And I know the father and I lay down my life for the sheep.
And I have other sheep that are not of this fold.
I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.
So there will be one flock, one shepherd.
What this woman understands is that those as those other sheep who hear the voice of Jesus
They don't need Jesus' first focus to be on them.
They need the side benefits of being Gentiles brought into the promise.
One crumb of the bread of life is all you need to satisfy all of your needs.
For this statement, verse 29 says, for this statement, you may go your way.
The demon has left your daughter.
And some commentators may just
This is one of those passages where commentaries aren't super helpful because they just say silly things sometimes.
People say, well, it's because she had such a quick wit to come back with that comment.
It is kind of quick-witted, but that's not the point.
The point is that she is trusting Jesus and responds to him with a bold, humble faith.
Jesus always responds to faith in the Gospels.
If people trust in him, he gives them what they need.
Not always what they want, but he gives them what they need.
And she has a bold, humble faith.
It's humble because she knows who she is.
She knows she's a Gentile.
She knows she's among the dogs.
And she doesn't argue about it.
She just accepts that premise and says, Yes, Lord.
But would you, in your kindness, let crumbs fall from the table?
She's bold because she knows who He is, and she knows that He is able to address all of her needs.
That's part of what makes her humble.
Sometimes we think of humility as not asking for things.
Not, well, I don't want to ask anything for myself.
But if you aren't asking God to provide for your needs,
What you are saying is you think you have a better handle on what God is going to address than he does, or what he's able to address than he does.
Humility prays.
Humility comes to him boldly over and over again.
This is exactly what Peter says in 1 Peter 5, I think you might have looked at it last week, where it says, Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God that in due time he might exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him because he cares for you.
The logic of biblical humility is that it boldly comes to God to ask for all of your needs to be provided for.
And she receives what she needs, verse 30, she went home and found the child lying in bed and the demon gone.
And we are in the same position fundamentally as this woman.
We are unable to help ourselves.
We are unable to address our deepest problems and satisfy our own
needs.
Do not let that weakness, that low standing before God, keep you away from Him.
Do not be offended by the hard words of Jesus about your sinfulness, about your neediness, about your lowness.
Instead, approach Him like this woman did, with bold, humble faith.
Humbly, admit your sin, your natural uncleanness, your inability to save yourself or help yourself.
And boldly approach, knowing that He is able to wash you, to heal you, to help you, to provide your every need.
And have faith, not only that He is like that, but that He would be like that towards you.
Hebrews 11.6 says, Without faith it is impossible to please Him.
Those who would please God must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who seek Him.
In order to please God, you must believe that He will reward your seeking Him.
So I'll finish with Jeremiah 29.
Jeremiah 29.
Verses 12 and 13.
It says, Then you will call upon me, and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.
You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart.
Would you pray with me?
Father God, would you help us to seek you, to see ourselves as low and needy, and to not hear your words that condemn our sin and be offended by them
But to just know that you're the only one who can solve it.
We can't fix ourselves before we come to you.
We have to come to you to be healed, to be forgiven, to be clean, to be right with you.
You have to do it all.
And so we boldly ask that you would.
And we ask that with that, then you would provide everything else that we need.
You who did not spare your own son, but gave him up for us all.
Would you also, Father, graciously give us everything we need?
We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.
