Faith Clings to the Ears, Not the Eyes (Matthew 15:21-28)
This year has been a big year for me with two big transitions. My sister and I got an apartment that was more of a financial burden on me than I was used to. And I was transferred from leading the youth ministry to leading the young adults ministry. And those two new adventures, while they were both exciting, also led to a deep feeling in me of instability. I tried to wear a calm face on the outside, but inside, there was a lot of trembling. As I started feeling that instability, I found myself grasping for stability and control in other areas of my life. If you’ve ever been walking down the stairs and have missed a step, I’m guessing your first response, your knee jerk reaction, was to grab for anything stable; a wall, a banister, a railing, your elderly grandmother, anything you could hold onto. Well, I was doing that in a more general way in my life.
This year more than most, I found myself doing things like cleaning my home vigorously to make sure it was presentable, doing lots of research on things that I was afraid of happening to me to make sure I could avoid some sort of catastrophe, dwelling on weird things people said to me to make sure I didn’t do anything to hurt them, to make sure I didn’t lose the relationship, thinking over all my past mistakes and bad decisions to make sure I wasn’t unworthy of the job I have. I had experienced this sort of ruminating and obsessing before in my life. And a couple years ago, it actually led me to wonder whether I might have obsessive compulsive disorder. Well, this year, with the help of Sonrise’s Mercy Ministry, I was able to find a therapist. And of all the diagnoses I had given myself over the years with the help of Reddit, Wikipedia, and WebMD, this one was actually accurate. I was diagnosed with moderate OCD.
At its root, OCD is the part of your brain that longs for comfort and certainty going on overdrive. As a metaphor, instead of gripping the railing only after you’ve slipped down a stair, it’s clinging to every railing for dear life to be certain that you won’t fall if you ever slip again. My brain is so unwilling to feel what we might call the negative emotions: pain, guilt, overwhelm, disgust, boredom, embarrassment, anger, or fear, that it goes to ridiculous lengths to predict and avoid anything that might cause me to feel any of those. And so, more than anything, I have learned this year that emotions really matter to me. Emotions paint a large portion of how I see the world…probably a larger portion than they should. A great deal of my decisions and thoughts come from emotions, sometimes emotions so deep I can’t even label them. And that means that the way I see the world, my goals in life, the people I hang out with, the things I see as good and bad, are all to some degree tied to my emotions.
And when it comes to being a disciple of Jesus, there’s a great deal of emotion involved. Many of the stories we read in the Gospels, many of the things we are called to do in the World, many of the things we have to endure, will send jolts of emotion through us. We might feel disgust when we are called to forgive the person who hurt us most in life. We might feel fear or embarrassment when we are told to preach the Gospel to all Creation. We might feel comfort when we see a prayer answered. We might feel wonder when we understand something new about God. We might feel excitement when we see someone else come to faith. Our walk with Jesus can be like a magnet for drawing out our emotions.
But, our emotions can also get in the way of following Jesus. They can cause us to stumble over Jesus’ teachings. My challenge to the young adults this Christmas was to read one of the Gospels for an hour, and to really think about what it means that God looks like this Jew from Nazareth named Jesus. And so, the day after, I grabbed the Gospel of Matthew and started reading right after the Sermon on the Mount. And I was shocked by how almost every paragraph and every story and every parable is pressing against the inclinations and assumptions, and even the emotions of the culture around Jesus. Jesus spent three years verbally slapping people in the face with a vision of God, with a picture of what it meant to live well, with a claim about the purpose of life, that must have wreaked havoc on them emotionally! I can’t imagine that the twelve disciples felt comfort or certainty about almost anything while they walked around with Jesus. They were entirely destabilized. If I were in their shoes, I would have been compulsively cleaning every home we stayed in just to feel some sense of normalcy and control!
So today I want to offer you a big idea, an idea that I would argue lies at the heart of the Bible’s teaching, and that idea is that faith clings to the ears, not the eyes.
As I wrote this message, I had two things in mind. The first was a conversation I had with a friend who was going through a really hard time, who felt like God had abandoned him, who felt like God was toying with him. And with that, all the times I’ve felt like God was angry with me, all the times I felt like God didn’t care about me, all the times I felt like God had turned His back on me because of His silence. And beyond even that, all the stories in the Bible where God doesn’t interact with people the way they think He should, and all the people who couldn’t see that God was living in their midst in the person of Jesus, and all the people who saw Christianity as foolish because it didn’t look successful or impressive from worldly standards. So, this phenomenon, this common story, of humans walking with a God who doesn’t look or act the way we think He should is the first thing I had in mind.
And the second thing I had in mind was a sermon I had read about a year ago. And this is probably a good time to tell you all that a chunk of this sermon is stolen. The good news is that the guy who wrote it has been dead for four hundred years, so I don’t think he can sue me for copyright infringement. Sucker. The guy who wrote the sermon was named Martin Luther. Not the Reverend King. Actually, the guy that the MLK Jr. was named after. The OG Martin Luther. And Luther wrote this sermon on a troubling story from the Gospel of Matthew.
So, without further ado, let me tell you the story. Jesus and His disciples are walking through Tyre and Sidon. They had previously been in Gennesaret, where Jesus was up to His usual schtick, healing people and upsetting the Pharisees. Now, it seems like their trip to Tyre and Sidon was supposed to be a vacation, because Matthew says they “withdrew” to Tyre and Sidon, and in Mark’s telling of the story, Jesus “entered a house and did not want anyone to know, yet He could not be hidden” (Mk. 7:24b). So as often happened to Jesus, His alone time became a flash mob as people realized the famous healer was nearby.
Matthew 15:22 says, “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’” (Mt. 15:22).
Now, right from the get-go, we have a couple of interesting details from this woman. The first is that she is a Canaanite. And the fact that she is a Canaanite is a reminder of where Jesus and the disciples are. They are in Tyre and Sidon. And Tyre and Sidon are not Jewish territories. They are neighbors of the Jews, but they are Gentile cities. So, this woman is coming to a Jewish healer, who is claiming to be the Jewish Messiah, but she is not a Jew. And that detail makes the next detail even stranger. She calls Jesus, “O Lord, Son of David.” She uses the title most used by Jews for the God of Israel (O Lord), and then a title that points to the messianic line, (Son of David). It seems to me that she sees Jesus as the divine Jewish Messiah. But again, she’s not Jewish. So, this is an odd interaction. There were Jews that couldn’t see Jesus as their Messiah, even after seeing signs and wonders and hearing all His teachings, and yet here is this Gentile woman who has never met Jesus, starting the conversation calling Him the Messiah. Wow! If I were Jesus I would be jumping up and down! This is a marvelous amount of faith!
But Jesus doesn’t jump up and down. Jesus doesn’t even do a little dance. Verse 23 says, “But He did not answer her a word.” (Mt. 15:23a)
Hmm. Why not? Why the silent treatment? Well, the disciples see that Jesus isn’t answering, and being the kind, compassionate souls that they are, they go and plead with Jesus, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” (Mt. 15:23b)
They give the same response that I give to my sister when her dog won’t stop barking. Please! Just shut that dog up. Put him in your room! And so, at that cruel and unfeeling request, Jesus jumps into action. But His response isn’t much better!
“He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’” (Mt. 15:24)
Jesus gives a shoddy excuse, saying, “Sorry, you live a little outside of my district. We can’t do anything about it.” This is the kind of excuse I would expect from a minimum wage employee at Macy’s who doesn’t want to help you with a refund.
“Sorry, only my manager can handle that.”
“Sorry, it’s company policy.”
“Sorry, it’s been longer than the 30-day return period.”
“Sorry, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ Would you like to speak with my supervisor?”
So, imagine for a minute, being this woman. The one person who might be able to heal your daughter of demonic possession has just flat out ignored you. But you decide to hope against hope that maybe He just couldn’t hear you, so you keep crying out. And then He turns to you and says the equivalent of “Sorry we closed five minutes ago. Come back another time.” What would you do? How would you react? How would you feel? Like I said at the beginning, emotions are powerful things, and I can’t imagine how strong the emotions are that this poor woman is feeling. Is she feeling betrayed? This was supposed to be the loving healer! Neglected? Why can’t He see that I’m desperate? Unimportant? Am I worthless to Him? Angry? Who does He think He is, turning away a helpless mother, and a child in need! Hopeless? Where will I go now? Who else can cast out demons?
If I were her, I would feel a swirling pool of all those emotions, and probably even more. I would probably get flushed in the face; my stomach would start to churn. I’d probably start shedding frustrated tears and feel that tightness in my throat that comes when I’m trying not to cry.
But this woman, far more faithful than me, chooses differently. Despite probably feeling all those emotions, she doesn’t take no for an answer. She believes Jesus will help her, even when the words coming out of His mouth seem distant and harsh.
“But 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.’” (Mt. 15:25-26)
We see Christmas cards with pastel paintings of gentle Jesus, with His gentle face and gentle hands, gesturing gently to the eye of the beholder. Well, that was not the Jesus this woman was encountering. She had come face to face with a brick wall of Jesus. First He ignores her, then He offers a lousy excuse for not helping her, and then He flat out insults her, and not just her, but her entire race. And most of you probably know this, but dogs in this time period were like vermin. Imagine you and your people being likened to rats or possums, or for Pastor Paul, nutria.
At this point, any of us would have scoffed and given up, or maybe we would have started a fight like we were in a Walmart parking lot. But this woman defies our expectations a third time.
“She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.” (Mt. 15:27-28)
This audacious woman triples down and starts to argue with Jesus! Luther says, “She catches Christ with His own words.” She will not be turned away. She knows that Jesus has good for her! And although her circumstances are dismal, and Jesus Himself is treating her like trash, she clings to the hope that Jesus really does love her. I hear in this story an echo of Jacob wrestling with God. In Genesis 32, Jacob, anxious about meeting his angry brother the next day, encounters a Man who he realizes is God. And Jacob and this Man wrestle with each other all night, and when God finally tells Jacob to stop all the wrestling, Jacob replies, “I will not let You go unless You bless me.” Here, this Canaanite woman was following in Jacob’s footsteps. She meets a Man that she realizes is God. They wrestle back and forth, and she refuses to let go of Him until He blesses her. She may not be an Israelite, but in her spirit, she is One-Who-Wrestles-With-God just like Jacob was.
Luther drills very deep into the Canaanite Woman’s heart in his sermon. He uses this story as an example of what it means to cling to the Gospel even when God Himself feels like He has turned against you. Luther says that in this story, Jesus makes Himself look and sound nothing like the good news this woman has heard about Him. Somewhere along the way, this Canaanite woman has been convinced that Jesus is good news for her and will have mercy on her. But when she meets Jesus, Jesus acts cold, dismissive, and rude. He devalues her and her people. Why would Jesus act this way with her? Luther says, “see in this example how Christ, like a hunter, [challenges] and chases [down] faith in his followers in order that it may become strong and firm.” Luther sees Jesus as testing her, drawing out what she really believes about Him. When everything about Him feels cruel and uncaring, will she still believe He is merciful and loving?
And this is the point where a question presses up against our faith. Do we believe God loves us even when God feels distant? Even when we don’t feel loved? Even when He hides His goodness from us?
Sometimes, we feel abandoned by God, like God has hung up on us. And maybe that makes us feel guilty, so we search for anything we might have done that could have caused God to hate us, as we desperately try to reconnect the line to God. Or maybe God seeming distant makes us feel angry. Like God doesn’t really love us, or God is playing games with us. Like God has unfairly judged us or has fallen short of His Word. Maybe you’re sitting in this room and every sermon you hear feels like a slap in the face, because God hasn’t shown up for you in years. Maybe when you pray, as one of my friends says, it feels like you’re praying through syrup. Maybe the time for God to show up has already passed, and He disappointed you. And the question for you becomes, do you trust that He loves you even when you can’t feel it?
Luther talks elsewhere about how the Gospel relies not on our eyes, but on our ears. And what he means by that is that our experience (what we see in our lives) and our understanding (how we think things work) are unreliable. You might call them blind guides. The woman in this story, Luther says, saw a Jesus that was very different than the Jesus she heard about. She heard about a loving Jesus, and she saw a cruel Jesus. Her eyes and her ears disagreed. But imagine if she had given up because of what she experienced, because of what she saw? Imagine if she let her eyes win, and went home when Jesus didn’t fit the picture of who she heard that He was. Our eyes, for Luther, represent our reasoning, our feelings, our own understanding of things. And as the often quoted proverb says,
“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding” (Prv. 3:5).
In order to trust in the Lord with all our heart, we can’t keep leaning on our own understanding. In Luther’s metaphor, our eyes have to do with our own understanding, how we feel, what we think, what we experience. But God’s Word comes to our ears with a different message. It questions our feelings, our thoughts, our experiences. The Gospel whispers into our ears and questions our eyes. Luther writes in his sermon, “All this…is written for our comfort and instruction…that we may not estimate Him according to our feelings and thinking, but strictly according to His Word.”
Let me tell you a story from my own life. Like I said earlier, I was diagnosed this year with OCD. But I think that my OCD has been with me for quite a while. I remember having symptoms of it even back in high school. In my senior year, I had just heard God call me into ministry, and I was trying to choose the right college to study to become a pastor. But I wasn’t sure which college was best. I prayed and prayed about it but never felt any clear response from God on where to go. I felt like there had to be a clear answer. So, I prayed harder and harder. And when I would pray, I would receive no answer. But because I was afraid of upsetting God, I kept pressing for an answer. I felt like God was going to be angry with me if I made the wrong choice.
I worked myself up over it day after day, sometimes to the point of tears. I began trying to force God to answer me, by doing things like pulling out a card from a deck of cards and saying that if it was a red card, it meant God was telling me to go to this school, and if it was black it meant a different school. But, I never felt fully convinced, so I’d redo it again and again. I was obsessed, and so I compulsively repeated the process. Over time, I began to ask other people what they thought, hoping they might be able to guide me, hoping maybe God could speak through them. But, thank God, rather than giving me an answer, most people pointed out that my understanding of God was really messed up. Luther might have said my eyes, my understanding, of what God must be like, was misleading me.
My understanding of God was that He was trying to trap me, that He wanted me to mess up, that He had little grace or mercy for me. Person after person tried to preach the gospel to me, that Jesus loved me, that Jesus wasn’t trying to catch me or trap me. But, my worries, my emotions, my understanding, my experience were all screaming so loud I couldn’t hear them. For a long time, I continued crying out to God for an answer. But over time, my ears began to hear the glimmers of good news. I began to wonder, “What if they’re right? What if I have a damaged picture of God? What if His silence doesn’t actually mean He hates me? What if God loves me even though He feels distant and silent? In short, what if the gospel I’ve heard is right, and my understanding is wrong?”
So, I took a leap of faith and chose a college. And it didn’t feel good at all. My emotions were all over the place. I was still so worried. My own skewed understanding still tried to drown out the gospel. But I was listening to my worries less, and was listening to God’s Word more. I clung to the Scriptures in that season firmer than most other times in my life. I needed to believe that God was gracious and merciful, and I was going to hold Him to His promises. Like the Canaanite woman, although I didn’t feel like God loved me, I was going to believe that He loved me anyway. I wasn’t going to let Him go until He blessed me.
Now, my story is certainly an odd one. I recognize that. But I think we all have moments when who God says He is and the way we understand or experience Him are not the same. Maybe, like me, feelings of guilt can make God seem like He hates you. Or maybe, feelings of sadness or depression can make God feel like He’s distant. Maybe when you’re angry, God feels like He’s being too soft on the people that wronged you. Or maybe when you’re grieving the loss of a loved one, God feels like He’s the monster that took them away. Maybe when you read Jesus’ teachings, it feels like He’s being unrealistic. Whether it be because of our emotions (what we feel) our understanding (what we think) or our experience (what we see), the gospel often gets drowned out by our own inner monologue.
But when Luther teaches that faith clings to the ears, not the eyes, he is pointing to the reality that, regardless of what it seems to us, our God is a promise-keeper. And the reason we read Scripture, the reason we pray, the reason we obey, the reason we all come to church to worship and listen is because somewhere deep-down, we believe God is a promise-keeper too.
So as we close, let’s imagine what this would mean for our lives. Jesus says our prayers will be answered. But some of you have been praying for a while and you haven’t seen an answer. Will you trust your eyes, and give up your prayers, or will you be like the Canaanite woman and believe the gospel you’ve heard despite the way things appear?
Jesus also says that if we take up the cross, we will find our life. But some of you have your eyes set on other things that you think might bring you life. Maybe it’s a relationship, maybe it’s a job, maybe it’s a new house, the approval of a certain person, a bigger bank account. And you feel like if you gave up chasing it, you’d miss out. Will you trust your feelings, your fear of missing out, or will you trust the words of Jesus?
Jesus says you are forgiven, and that you will be made perfect. But some of you have been stuck in a destructive habit or a stronghold for a long time, and you don’t see any improvement at all. And you feel guilt and shame, and you wonder whether you can ever escape this sin. Are you going to trust your past or are you going to trust the future that Jesus has promised you? And if you feel guilty and unworthy, will you trust in your heart? Or will you trust that, as 1 John 3 says,
“…whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart, and He knows everything.” (1 Jn. 3:20)
So often we live our lives standing at a fork in the road between trusting Jesus and trusting ourselves. But I think today’s story is a stark reminder that faith clings to the ears, not the eyes, that trusting Jesus will press us beyond the stories we tell ourselves, beyond what we think we know, into a place of complete dependance on the great Promise Keeper.
Let’s Pray.
Like I said, we will often find ourselves at a decision point, at a fork in the road between Jesus’ voice and our own. And I expect that for myself, my own voice will win out a lot of the time. Maybe you feel similar. The good news is that through the Holy Spirit, Jesus’ voice will slowly conquer all our inner voices. He is more than able to finish the work He has started in us. So as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10, as we share together in the body and blood of Jesus through cup and bread, I encourage you to ask the Holy Spirit to strengthen your trust in Christ’s promises so that your faith drowns out every other voice that might lead you astray.
Some last words from Luther’s Sermon:
“…oh, how painful it is to nature and reason, that this woman should strip herself of [herself] and forsake all that she experienced, and cling alone to God's bare Word, until she experienced the [reverse]. May God help us in time of need and of death to possess [similar] courage and faith!”
For Martin Luther’s Original Sermon: https://sermons.martinluther.us/sermon35.html
Sermon Questions:
Have you ever felt abandoned by God? Or felt like God was distant?
What emotions come with feeling abandoned by God?
Why do you think God chooses odd and unexpected ways, like in today’s story, of encountering people?
Is there something you are trusting God for today, even without seeing much fruit?
In what ways do you choose to lean on your own understanding rather than trusting the Word of God?