Proper 18
Isaiah 35:4-7; Mark 7:24-37
Please subscribe to this podcast on Apple or Spotify.
N.B.: I would encourage you to listen to this sermon as I tend, as always, to go “off script” a bit from the manuscript that follows below.
I.
I would like to draw your attention today to the three forms of restoration that the Messiah promises to bring about.
The first is the restoration of justice. In Isaiah 35:4 God tells the prophet to:
Say to those who are of a fearful heart,
“Be strong, fear not!
Behold, your God
will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you.”
The coming of the Messiah, the coming of Christ, is the coming of a kingdom, and, as in all kingdoms, kings have authority. The coming restoration, therefore, will be a restoration of authority, law, and order.
There will divine vengeance meted out on the wrongdoer and recompense made to those he has wronged. All wrongdoers will be punished. All victims will be made whole.
The second restoration is the restoration of nature, the reversal of the curse. You will recall the words of the curse on nature pronounced by God at the time of man’s fall:
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field (Gen. 3:17-18)
Listen closely as Isaiah 35:5-7 recounts the consequence of the curse and the reversal:
Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened,
and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
then shall the lame man leap like a hart,
and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.
For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,
and streams in the desert;
the burning sand shall become a pool,
and the thirsty ground springs of water;
the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp,
the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
The blind man has his eyes opened. The lame man leaps, streams of water penetrate the desert, and the burning sand becomes a pool.
It is important to remember in your dark moments of pessimism that we do not face extinction, but, rather we are promised a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. 21:1).
I recently listened to the audio book version of Annie Jacob’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. Her book is a not a relic of the Cold War, like The Day After, which, if you were alive in the 1980s, you certainly remember watching.
No, this book was published in March of this year, and is still just as relevant, because, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist notes, the hands of the Doomsday Clock remain set at 90 seconds to midnight “due to ominous trends that continue to point the world toward global catastrophe.”1
Jacob’s book is informative and fast-paced — I couldn’t stop listening until it was done — yet it assumes the evolutionary and materialist worldview of all doomsday thinking: that man is the master of his fate, for good or evil.
Isaiah’s promise of restoration is a polemic against such thinking.
The third restoration is the restoration of spiritual and physical health. In our text today Isaiah speaks only of physical healing, the curing of the blind and the lame, but today’s reading from Mark makes it clear that the Messiah will heal both body and soul.
In Mark 7:25, 29-30 we read about the spiritual exorcism of a demon from a young Greek girl and we also read about the physical opening of a deaf mute’s ears and tongue — another Greek pagan — by Jesus in the gentile region of the Decapolis.
Jesus rather unflatteringly refers to the Greek woman as a dog, which cannot simply be ascribed to Jesus Jewish prejudice towards gentiles showing through, but rather, must be read as a comment on her spiritual condition.
As a pagan, she was without the benefit of God’s Torah, His law, His word. The effects of the fall and of God’s curse were not mitigated or mediated in any way.
Paul writes in Galatians 3:24-25:
Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith.
But the Greek woman (and her daughter) did not have the benefit of this guardian. So, like all pagans, she had sunk morally and spiritually to the level of a dog.
Incidentally, think about that when you are tempted to slack off in your Bible reading. It’s like not fastening your seatbelt, right? You are depriving yourself of this guardian.
Even though we don’t need the law in the same way now that Christ has come, God’s word still offers us guidance and protection. Paul writes in 2 Timothy 3:16 that:
All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.
But the point of this encounter is to underscore that the gentiles (and, by extension, all nature) are not so far gone that God has lost contact with them.
As the Creator, all creatures belong to God, and thus are never beyond His reach.
And because they are not beyond God’s reach, there is hope for their restoration.
II.
Let’s take a closer look at Jesus’ exchange with the Greek woman.
We are told that she is “Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth.” This is all that Mark tells us about her, other that we know she is also a mother. Mark is writing for a Jewish audience, so this point is significant.
Jews in every age have faced annihilation, sometimes by direct violence, but more often, over the long centuries, by assimilation into the pagan world that surrounds them.
Assimilation was no less a threat to Jewish identity then as it is today. Hence, there were strict rules about associating with gentiles or coming in contact with elements of the natural world that might defile a Jew.
I covered this extensively — and Jesus’ critique of this kind of spiritual micro-management — in last week’s sermon.
Turning now the details of this exchange in Mark 7:25-26 we read:
But immediately a woman, whose little daughter was possessed by an unclean spirit, heard of him, and came and fell down at his feet. Now the woman was a Greek, a Syrophoeni′cian by birth. And she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.
I’ve covered the fact that this woman is Greek as well as the significance of that fact, but let’s look at two more things.
First, her physical posture. She falls down at Jesus’ feet. This is the proper response to God. This is the position we have to take before we can ask God for anything. Yet so few, Jew or gentile, give God this deference and respect, either then, in the pages of the New Testament, or now.
I once had a hair-raising taxi ride in Manhattan. Hair-raising, because the sun was setting, and my cab driver, a Muslim, was speeding to discharge his fare in time for him to pull over and pray.
You’ve seen Muslims pray. It is a form of physical prostration. The word Islam itself means submission. Like all heresies Islam distorts the truth and makes a caricature of it.
They are right in that we should submit ourselves physically to God. They are wrong to direct their submission towards a black stone in Mecca.
The second thing to notice is why she assumes that physical posture. Certainly, it is out of profound deference to Jesus, both as a man and as a teacher, but more importantly, she assumes this humiliating position to pray, to beg — and not on her own behalf, but on behalf of her soul-sick daughter.
I’ve known of parents who have prostrated themselves before a hospital bed to pray, to beg, for the life of their child.
But how many know to whom they were begging?
How did the woman know?
Mark doesn’t spell out how she knows, but he gives us two clues. The first in verse 24:
And [Jesus] entered a house, and would not have any one know it; yet he could not be hid….”
And the second clue is in verse 25:
“But immediately a woman… heard of him.”
I said before that the proper response to God is to come and bow down before Him, but the proper response to the gospel, to hearing that Jesus has come and is in your midst is to tell others.
This proclamation, this telling other, by unknown evangelists, names and people Mark does not bother to mention, alerted the woman that restoration was coming, that her daughter could be healed.
An opening had been made.
She only needed to ask.
A ray of hope pierced the chaos and dark night that possessed her daughter.
She only needed to pray.
Prayer worked then as it does today. It gives us an opening to God and to each other.
To God, because prayer works to reverse the effects of the curse.
To each other, because in prayer we link arms and discover together that we can approach boldly the eternal throne:
Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need (Hebrews 4:16).
III.
Now, the Greek woman does something that all pagan men and women do, in fact, it’s something that all unregenerate men and women do, or, at least, that they try to do.
She does not accept the consequences of God’s curse.
Her daughter’s mind is destroyed, and her soul is captured by the possessing demon.
Thomas a Kempis wrote in his spiritual classic, The Imitation of Christ:
Jesus hath many lovers of His heavenly kingdom, but few bearers of His Cross. He hath many seekers of comfort, but few of tribulation. He findeth many companions of His table, but few of His fasting. All desire to rejoice with Him, few are willing to undergo anything for His sake.
The same is true of our attitude towards God’s blessings and God’s curses.
We all expect God to bless us, yet seldom stop to think how much we deserve God’s curse.
Isaiah tells us of God’s promised restoration: “the eyes of the blind shall be opened,” waters shall break forth in the wilderness,” “burning sand shall become a pool” (Isaiah 35:5-7).
But this restoration is promised only “those who are of a fearful heart” (Isaiah 35:4).
A fearful heart is not one that is frightened or timid or lacking in courage. A fearful heart in the biblical sense is a heart that is set on God and eager to keep His commandments.
Deuteronomy 10:12 describes this fear, calling it a requirement for Israel:
And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
The man or woman who fears the Lord and keeps His commandments can expect His blessings.
That same God-fearing man or woman will also understand that the implication of not keeping God’s commandments is to come under God’s curse.
God describes the implications, the working out of His curse in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28.
In describing the advantages that the Jews had over the gentiles, Paul writes in Romans 3:2 that the “Jews are entrusted with the oracles of God.”
This gave them extraordinary interpretative and explanatory power.
They could look at the world around them, at their own status as God’s own, and interpret the rise and fall of the pagan nations (as well as their own unfaithfulness) in terms of God’s revealed word.
The Greeks had only nature from which to develop their philosophies (Romans 1:19-20; 1 Cor. 1:22).
The Jews had the oracles, the Torah, the written word of God.
We see that explanatory power on full display, and with blunt directness too, when Jesus calls the Greek woman a dog:
And he said to her, “Let the children first be fed, for it is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Mark 7:27).
That might seem hard to us. Prejudicial. Bigoted. Dare I even say, racist, and, of course, it seems sexist.
After 2,000 years of Christianity, what Christian would call a woman a dog, especially when she is begging for her child’s life?
Yet Jesus says:
“It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”
This is why it is important not to try to be more Christian than Christ.
Ask yourself: who are the children?
The children of the covenant. The children with the fear of the Lord in their hearts.
What is their bread?
Leviticus 26:3-4 tells us that their bread is “rains in their season.”
It is land increasing its yield.
It is trees yielding their fruit.
It is the bread of peace. Leviticus 26:6 says, “I will give peace in the land, and you shall lie down, and none shall make you afraid.”
Deuteronomy 28 echoes with similar blessings, and this blessing, Deuteronomy 28:4, would have been particularly poignant for the woman to hear, given her own, accursed offspring:
Blessed shall be the fruit of your body.
Instead, the Greek woman was all too familiar with the curses of Deuteronomy 28, even if, as a outsider, someone a member of the chosen race, these curses were not directed specifically at her.
Consider especially verses 18 and 28:
Cursed shall be the fruit of your body… The Lord will smite you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind.
If this is the curse God pronounces on those who break the Torah, how much worse the condition of those who do not have the Torah to begin with?
The woman’s daughter, the fruit of her body, was cursed with the madness and confusion that comes from an unclean spirit.
The woman is not a daughter of Abraham.
She is outside of the covenant with Israel. She has no access to the mediating sacrifices of the Temple and the priesthood to make atonement for her sins.
She has no benefit of Torah instruction to train her or her daughter in the way that she should go (Proverbs 22:6) — instructions that would have kept her from shameful associations and stopped the wicked behavior that summoned the demon in the first place, and invited him to make his home in her daughter.
She has come to the end of this sad procession of generations, from Eve to herself, and now this distant granddaughter of Eve — the Greek woman’s child — is possessed by same spirit that overcame Eve.
The curse has run its course. Its effects are devasting and total.
The woman is reduced to the status of a dog.
But the time has come to break the curse.
IV.
There is an opening in this story wide enough for hope to get through.
It’s implied in Mark’s version of the story and made explicit in Matthew’s.
In Matthew 15:28, Jesus says:
“O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Her desire was for her daughter to be healed. But how did she express that? How did she show Jesus that she had faith?
When Jesus rebukes the woman, calling her a dog, He is saying that she is a sinner, an outlaw, someone not under Torah, none of His concern.
She is someone in whom the curse has run its course so thoroughly that her offspring, her demon-possessed daughter, has lost touch with any remaining shred of humanity.
Neither the woman, nor her daughter is entitled to bread of the covenant.
But what about the crumbs, especially the crumbs that might fall from the table of the new covenant? (1 Cor. 10:16)
And so, the woman — still prostrate and on her knees — summons the faith to say:
“Yes, Lord; yet even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (Mark 7:28).
Though the curse is so devastating that, left unchecked, those under it will lose contact with their humanity, it is impossible for God to ever lose contact with any of His creatures.
Jesus tells us in Matthew 10:29:
Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground without your Father’s will.
The fall is devasting in its consequences, but it is not beyond God’s will.
We may be reduced to the status of a dog, but God cannot lose us.
Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.
Isaiah promises to those of a fearful heart:
Be strong, fear not!
Behold, your God
will come with vengeance,
with the recompense of God.
He will come and save you.
The curse of God’s vengeance is too much for us to bear. It robs us of our humanity. It robs us of contact with each other.
To restore our humanity and to restore that contact with each other Christ, for a moment, had to lose both his humanity and contact with God.
I said before that God could not lose contact with any of His creatures. That is true.
But the second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, is both fully God and fully man.
Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:21 that:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
God, being all-holy, has no experience of sin, but in that moment, that moment when “he made him to be sin who knew no sin” the Father turned His wrath away from us — wrath which for our sins would have utterly destroyed us — and turned His wrath on His Son and His Son was consumed.
For a moment contact was lost:
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “E′lo-i, E′lo-i, la′ma sabach-tha′ni?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34).
But for the fact that Jesus is God, He would not have survived this loss of contact, and we would be lost, cursed to the uttermost.
But since Christ became sin, we are now become the righteousness of God.
For a moment contact was lost, deep in the mystery of the Trinity, that relationship of three divine Persons, but since God can never lose contact with His creatures, and lest of all Himself, restoration is always possible.
An opening has appeared.
It’s small crack a first, letting in a tiny shaft of light, a little ray of hope, but then the stone of the tomb is rolled away, Christ is restored to life, and we are restored with Him.
He who was thirsty on the cross (John 19:28) now fills our parched mouths living water to drink (Isa. 35:7; John 4:10; John 7:38).
The curse is broken and we are saved to the uttermost (Hebrews 7:25).
V.
Christ becomes the opening through which our prayers ascend to the Father.
John 19:34 tell us of that moment during Jesus’ crucifixion when:
…one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once there came out blood and water.
Water, symbolizing baptism, the sign and seal of our faith (Romans 4:11), and blood, symbolized by the wine in the cup that Jesus shared with His disciples at the Last Supper.
But even more symbolic is the pierced side, the small opening left by the Roman spear, wide enough for all the humble redeemed to make their way through, but narrow enough to keep everyone else out — those who are truly dogs.
Revelation 22:15 puts it this way:
Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and every one who loves and practices falsehood.
In Mark 7:32-34 Jesus comes to the Decapolis, another gentile region, and men pray to Jesus to heal their deaf-mute friend:
…they brought to him a man who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech; and they besought him to lay his hand upon him. And taking him aside from the multitude privately, he put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and said to him, “Eph′phatha,” that is, “Be opened.”
It takes Jesus to make this opening — remember He is the door (John 10:9) — but now that the church has this opening, she can do three things.
First, the church can pray. She can ask God for material and spiritual relief.
We do this together when we gather corporately, we do this privately when we pray for each other, and we do this individually, when we spend time alone with God.
Later, in John’s gospel, when Jesus is preparing to physically leave His disciples, He repeatedly assures them (and us) that when we pray in His name, His Father will give it to us:
Truly, truly, I say to you, if you ask anything of the Father, he will give it to you in my name (John 15:16; 16:23, 26).
Second, the church can worship. She can call upon the Lord. The phase “call upon” is associated with the earliest recorded act of worship of God by name in the Bible.
Genesis 4:26 tells us that in the third generation after Adam:
To Seth also a son was born, and he called his name Enosh. At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord.
Thousands of years later, through the evangelism of Paul and the other apostles, men and women once again have learned to worship God in the right way, by calling upon the name of the Lord.
In 1 Corinthians 1:2, Paul addresses the church in Corinth writing:
To the church of God which is at Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours.
Finally, the church can give thanks. We give thanks for the sacrificial and atoning death of Christ on the cross which gives us this opening to God and to each other through prayer.
The key to this opening, to this door called Jesus, is the same key the Greek woman discovered.
That key is faith.
And that faith is a gift from God:
…this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God— not because of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Give thanks for that faith, or, if you have not yet received it, follow the example of this Greek woman. Find your way through the same opening that she found. Pray for this gift. You will not be denied.
Let us pray:
Grant us, O Lord, we pray thee, to trust in thee with all our heart; seeing that, as thou dost alway resist the proud who confide in their own strength, so thou dost not forsake those who make their boast of thy mercy; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Questions for reflection and discussion:
1. According to Isaiah the Messiah will first restore ____________.
2. The second restoration will be of ____________.
3. Nature will be restored by reversing the ____________.
4. The Greek woman falls down at Jesus’ feet to show Him ____________.
5. The Greek woman assumes this physical posture in order to ____________.
6. Prayer gives us an ____________ to God and to each other.
7. Prayer works to reverse the effects of the ____________.
8. The fall is devasting in its consequences, but it is not beyond God’s ____________.
9. The curse is so devastating that, left unchecked, those under it will lose contact with their ____________.
10. The second person of the Trinity, Jesus Christ, is both fully ____________ and fully ____________.
11. Christ becomes the ____________ through which our prayers ascend to the Father.
12. What three things can the church do through the “opening” that is Jesus Christ?
Parents and Grandparents, you are responsible to apply God’s Word to your children’s lives. Here is some help. Young Children – draw a picture about something you hear during the sermon. Explain your picture(s) to your parents or the minister after church. Older Children – Discuss with your parents one or both of the following: 1) What is something that you’ve always wanted to have? What did you do (or would you do) to get it? 2) Explain what it means to gain special access (or an opening) to someone important. What would you do if you had such access?
(1) justice; (2) nature; (3) curse; (4) deference/respect; (5) pray; (6) opening; (7) curse; (8) will; (9) humanity; (10) God/man; (11) opening; (12) pray, worship, give thanks
“Doomsday Clock,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, accessed September 6, 2024, https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/.
Share this post