Matthew 15:21-39
21 Then Jesus went out from there and departed to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And behold, a woman of Canaan came from that region and cried out to Him, saying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed.”
23 But He answered her not a word.
And His disciples came and urged Him, saying, “Send her away, for she cries out after us.”
24 But He answered and said, “I was not sent except to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
25 Then she came and worshiped Him, saying, “Lord, help me!”
26 But He answered and said, “It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs.”
27 And she said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
28 Then Jesus answered and said to her, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be to you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
29 Jesus departed from there, skirted the Sea of Galilee, and went up on the mountain and sat down there. 30 Then great multitudes came to Him, having with them the lame, blind, mute, maimed, and many others; and they laid them down at Jesus’ feet, and He healed them. 31 So the multitude marveled when they saw the mute speaking, the maimed made whole, the lame walking, and the blind seeing; and they glorified the God of Israel.
32 Now Jesus called His disciples to Himself and said, “I have compassion on the multitude, because they have now continued with Me three days and have nothing to eat. And I do not want to send them away hungry, lest they faint on the way.”
33 Then His disciples said to Him, “Where could we get enough bread in the wilderness to fill such a great multitude?”
34 Jesus said to them, “How many loaves do you have?”
And they said, “Seven, and a few little fish.”
35 So He commanded the multitude to sit down on the ground. 36 And He took the seven loaves and the fish and gave thanks, broke them and gave them to His disciples; and the disciples gave to the multitude. 37 So they all ate and were filled, and they took up seven large baskets full of the fragments that were left. 38 Now those who ate were four thousand men, besides women and children. 39 And He sent away the multitude, got into the boat, and came to the region of Magdala.
Introduction
In the Bible there are two basic categories for all of humanity. You have one group, Israel, or the Hebrews, or by Jesus’s day they came to be called “the Jews.” This is the nation of people that God selected among all the nations of the world to be His priestly nation, which would minister to all the other nations of the world.
All the other nations of the world that were not Jews were called “Gentiles.” This is the basic set-up in the Bible. You have Jews and you have Gentiles. And Jesus mission, the reason He took on human flesh, was to come to Israel. His mission was to His people, His priestly nation. All throughout the Gospel of Matthew this was clear. Jesus is preaching to Israel, commanding them to repent. Their nation shouldhave been the one that obedience to God would have been easy. They had every possible advantage, God spoke directly to them. He gave them His Words. He chose to dwell among them on earth in the Temple. They had the most direct access to God out of any people on the planet. Yet they were incredibly wicked people. And Jesus ministry to them was to preach repentance to them. You have sinned grievously and you need to make it right. The signs and the miracles that accompanied His preaching were for the purpose of demonstrating His Word is God’s Word. That’s the entire point of Jesus ministry: Israel’s repentance.
Jesus in Exile, A Canaanite Woman Answers His Riddle (v. 21-28
But in our passage today, Jesus leaves Israel for the region of Tyre and Sidon. This is the area around modern Lebanon. This is Gentile country. Why Jesus went there is anyone’s guess. He had just been threatened by the Pharisees and Scribes in the previous chapter and is forced to flee. In the book of Samuel, David fled to the Philistines when Saul attacked him. So it seems that Jesus is doing something similar right now. And as He is traveling through this area, a Gentile woman comes to Him. This woman is desperate. She cries out to Jesus begging Him to help her demon-possessed daughter. And notice what she calls Him when she cries out to Him. “O Lord, Son of David.” She knows something about Jesus. She knows who He is. She knows that He is the heir of David. She knows that He is the King which Israel has been waiting for. She clearly knows what most of Israel refuses to recognize.
And how does Jesus respond to her? He ignores her. This does sound like the nice, friendly, Jesus so many imagine. This seems cruel and heartless. Jesus does not respond to this woman.
The disciples respond to Jesus, and it seems at first glance that they are just wanting to get rid of her, saying “send her away for she cries out after us.” But if their meaning was just to get rid of her without helping her, Jesus reply to them does not make much sense. They mean “quickly heal her daughter, Jesus, and get her out of here, she is annoying us.”
Jesus reply to them is “No, I did not come for her. I came for the lost sheep of Israel.” Jesus is pointing out clearly that His mission is for Israel, not for the Gentiles.
The woman, however, was determined. She would not take no for an answer. She was determined that her daughter be rescued from demon-possession and she knew that Jesus could do it. She comes up to Jesus and now begins to worship Him. She bows down and prostrates herself at His feet. You can imagine this scene in your mind. Here is the woman desperately begging Jesus to help, literally at His feet saying “Lord, help me!” And Jesus finally stops ignoring her.
And what does He say? It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Maybe the situation and the context are not readily apparent to you. Here is a Jew calling someone from another ethnicity a dog. And in the ancient world, people didn’t keep dogs as pets, at least not like we do. Dogs were filthy, flea-ridden varmints that dug through garbage like raccoons or rats. To call someone a “dog” was an insult and a slur. To put it in modern context, Jesus might as well have called this woman an “n-word.” And look how she responds to this slight.
Rather than becoming indignant, she bears it in stride and answers him back, almost as if she is answering a riddle. “Yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs eat the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
Jesus behavior toward her was itself a parable. It was a test. A riddle. Like so many other places in the Bible it was a (metaphorical) food test. And she shows tremendous faith. And Jesus recognizes this tremendous faith, saying “O woman, great is your faith.” Let it be to you as you desire.” And He healed her daughter.
Contrast this woman with how Israel has responded to Jesus throughout Matthew’s Gospel. Israel already has every advantage. They are the people of God, they have the Law, they have the prophets, they have the Temple. And now Jesus comes directly to them and heals them and preaches to them. Israel gets red-carpet, curbside service. And how do they respond? They reject Him.
This woman on the other hand, absolutely desperate begging for Jesus to help, first is ignored, then is told she is not going to be helped because she is a gentile dog. And how does she respond? She recognizes Jesus as Israel’s King, she calls Him Lord, she worships Him, and she affirms His mission to Israel while still asking for scraps from His table. Jesus sets up every possible obstacle for this gentile woman and she finds away around them. Jesus clears every obstacle for Israel yet they refuse to come to Him. This Canaanite woman demonstrates just how faithless Israel is.
The Gentiles Ascend the Mountain of God (v. 29-31)
Jesus leaves that region and goes along the edge of the Sea of Galilee and goes up on a mountain and sits down. Matthew gives us this detail for a reason. Where else did Jesus go up on a mountain and sit down? In the sermon on the mount. Sitting down is what teachers did. It is the opposite of today, the pastor stands while he preaches a sermon while everyone else sits. But in ancient Israel, and much of the rest of the ancient world, a teacher would sit down before his students. Sitting down was a posture of authority. Like a king sitting in his court, on his throne. And from this posture, people came to Him, bringing the lame, blind, mute, maimed, and others with them. They brought these people right to the feet of Jesus and he healed them. It is noteworthy that in Mark’s gospel, we are explicitly told this scene happens in Gentile territory. Matthew is quite a bit more discreet. Matthew says that the multitude marveled when the saw the mute speak, the maimed restored, the lame walking, the blind seeing and they glorified… whom? The God of Israel. Why would Matthew use that specific title here for God? If they were Jews, of course they’d be glorifying the God of Israel. It would go without saying. You would only point out the God being glorified was the “God of Israel” if the people glorifying Him were not from Israel. This is important context for the rest of this passage. He is still in Gentile land with Gentiles.
Feeding the 4,000 (v. 32-39)
Jesus has compassion on the multitude, yet again. They have spent three days with Him without anything to eat. Now they have to walk miles and miles home, and to do so without having eaten in days might literally kill them.
And the disciples ask “Where could we get enough bread in the wilderness to fill such a great multitude.”
Do you see the irony in that question? 1. Jesus already did that a chapter ago feeding 5000 people with five loaves and two fish. 2. Where in the Bible did a great multitude get bread in the wilderness? In the Exodus of course. The disciples are like Israel grumbling against Yahweh in the wilderness. But what does Yahweh do? He feeds them anyway. And here He does again.
Jesus asks them how many loaves they have. Seven, they answer, along with a few little fish. So He has the people sit and he takes the bread and fish and gave thanks and broke them giving them to this disciples who then give them to the multitude. The people eat their fill, and they take up seven baskets full of fragments. And the number of people those seven loaves fed was four thousand men, plus women and children. After this the story ends with Jesus going away from them, back to Jewish territory, to the region of Magdala. Matthew is showing us the episode of Jesus among the Gentiles has come to a close.
Conclusion
What can we take away from Jesus’s time among the gentiles? Well, at first, Jesus is making clear that His mission is to His people, the lost sheep of Israel. He did not come for the other nations. He came for Israel. He comes to them, is rejected and murdered by them, raised from the dead, ascends into heaven to rule heaven and earth. And before He does, He sends out His apostles and His church to do what? Their mission, Our mission is to the nations. Jesus’ mission was to Israel, His church’s mission is to all the nations of the world. His reign and rule are being realized in all the nations of the world. That is what our mission is. And in this section of Matthew 15, we see a preview of this. Jesus is assailed by this Gentile woman. He refuses to help her. He is steadfast that His mission is to Israel. The bread of Israel belongs to Israel. God’s grace to Israel belongs to Israel, but this is the thing about God’s grace. There is so much of it that it just overflows wherever God pours it out. To change the metaphor, God was pouring His grace into Israel’s cup and it spills out and starts to fill the other nation’s cups around Israel. The crumbs from Israel’s table spill over for the dogs. Jesus cannot help but bless the Gentiles. He cannot help but show them God’s grace. And as soon as He drops a crumb on the ground for this gentile woman to eat, it is like a child dropping a French fry on the boardwalk. Out of nowhere thousands of seagulls descend to consume that fry. Jesus sits down on that Gentile mountain and thousands of Gentiles come to eat from His hand.
What we are seeing in this scene is not just another miraculous feeding. When I was a little kid learning the Bible in Sunday school, I never understood why there is the Feeding of the 5000 and the Feeding of the 4000. It seemed sort of superfluous. And after all, John’s Gospel tells us that there were all sorts of miracles Jesus did we were not told about. Lot’s of stuff that Jesus did beyond what was written. So why was this included then? Because the first feeding was bread for Israel’s table, and the second is crumbs for the dogs. The first is God’s grace being poured directly on Israel, and the second is a demonstration that God gives so much grace it cannot be contained.
This is also a picture of what our worship looks like. In the Bible when you worship you are ascending a mountain. The architecture of the tabernacle and temple was such that the floor was flat. There are no stairs in the Bible’s description of them (even if you sometimes see illustrations the show stairs. There were none). The is because they are mountains turned on their sides. The courtyard, holy place, and holy of holies are a horizontal mountain to the heavens. And worship in the new covenant is no different. The people ascend this holy mountain and come to the true holy of holies, Jesus Christ. They ascend this mountain to go directly into His presence, he sits to teach them, they ask for things from him (healing), He feeds them, and them sends them away.
That is precisely the same thing that happens when we gather before God’s throne to worship Him. We ascend His mountain as we come before Him, we are cleansed by Him to enter into his presence, we are at His feet as He instructs us from His Word, we ask Him to heal us and care for us through prayer, we eat bread at His table, and He sends us out into His world.
In this passage Jesus shows us how God’s grace spills over to us. Every week, we are the four thousand who gather before Jesus’s throne, being taught by Him, healed by Him, and fed at His table. Sometimes people will say “I don’t need to go to church to be a Christian.” Technically, yes, this is true. But it would be like being one of these Gentiles, when Jesus visits your territory, and you have the chance to go into His very presence to be taught by Him, healed by Him, and fed by Him and saying “I don’t have to.” Yeah, that’s true you don’t have to. But you get to. Why wouldn’t you want to if you could? Yes, you could say “I don’t have to eat that cut of $250/lb wagyu filet mignon if I don’t want to.” But why would you ever say that! You get to feast at the table of the king of heaven and earth, who spoke all things into existence, who maintains the universe by the word of His power. “Yeah, I think I’ll just catch the livestream of the service.” That is like saying you could eat that wagyu beef but you’d rather watch a YouTube video of someone else eating it.
That is how we have to understand worship. We gather here not just to hear a sermon and learn a thing about the Bible. We gather here to go before the actual presence of the Living God. He is right here with us. We sit before His throne, and He is receiving our worship and feeding us with His words and with the body and blood of His Son. That is why we come here. So as you go, remember, you gather before the presence of Your God who feeds you from His hand. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen!