That Pesky "Who" Question

Matthew 16:13-20

The questions we ask shape our drive - our desires and pursuits in life.  It starts at an early age.  Children who asks questions like “What are stars?”,  “Can I run faster?”, or “Can I sneak a bowl of chocolate chips without getting caught?” will pursue different paths in life than the children who sadly asks questions like “What’s wrong with me that other kids don’t want to play with me?” or “How can I do my hair so that people will see me as pretty?”  I call these kind of paradigmatic questions “driving questions?” 

Organizations also have driving questions as well.  If an insurance company’s foundational question is “how can we provide our clients with the best affordable coverage?” will do business differently than the insurance company who strives to answer “How can we produce more bottom line profit?”

Churches have driving questions.  We ask questions like, “How can we get more people to attend church?” or “What’s wrong that people don’t come to church anymore?” or “What’s wrong with us that people don’t attend our church?”  Our preoccupation with those last two questions is helping to feed the demise of the North American Church.  They may seem like good questions to ask, but they are a symptom of group depression and point us in the wrong direction.

In our Matthew passage this morning Jesus presents us with two questions that I think we would better spend our time pondering.  The first is “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” and the second is, “Who do you say I am?”  These are versions of what I call the pesky “who” question.  There are two versions of that question: the less personal and less powerful version which simply “Who is Jesus” and the more personal and powerful “Who are you, Jesus?”  The first question has us simply looking for information about Jesus.  The second one puts us in a relationship with him.  In that question we find the renewing of our minds that transforms us.

Take the Apostle Paul for example.  His story begins with him being a zealous up-and-coming Pharisee who had it in for the followers of Jesus.  His answer to the “Who is Jesus?” question was quite blatantly that Jesus was a blaspheming false prophet and his followers needed to be reigned in at all cost.  He started asking “who are you, Jesus” one day as he was on a trip from Jerusalem to Damascus to arrest Christians.  Jesus appeared to him in a bright light and confronted him.  At that moment Paul started to ask a new driving question, “Who are you, Lord?” realizing that there is only one person a Jew would call Lord.  Paul then spends the rest of his life as Jesus’ “Apostle to the Gentiles” preaching the Gospel and planting churches all over the Mediterranean world and he spent a great deal of his time suffering for Jesus and the church.

 “Who are you, Lord?” was Paul’s driving question.  In his Letter to the Philippians he makes this evident.  He wrote that letter from prison while under the imminent threat of execution and in it he very adamantly sums up his life’s purpose.  He writes: “I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Phil. 3:10-11). 

Back to Matthew, this little period of question and answer comes as the climactic answer to a driving question the disciples began to ask back in chapter 8 when Jesus calmed the storm.  If you remember Jesus was sleeping soundly in the back of the boat.  The storm is raging.  The disciples are afraid for their lives.  They awaken Jesus with an accusation that he doesn’t care that they are going down.  He gets up and rebukes them for their lack of faith: “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?”  He calms the storm.  The sea becomes utterly still.  At that the disciples are amazed and they begin to ask “What sort of a man is this that the wind and the sea obey him?”  “Who are you, Jesus?”

The next few months they have to struggle with this question as they wander around the Galilean countryside and points beyond.  They see Jesus cast out legions of demons.  He heals the paralyzed, the lepers, and the blind.  He teaches about the Kingdom of God.  He calls the Pharisees a bunch of hypocrites.  He raises a young girl from the dead.  He sends them out on a mission and they do these same things.  The Kingdom of God is at hand, even theirs.  Upon returning, Jesus feeds upwards of fifteen thousand people with two fish and five loaves of bread.  He walks on water and calms a great windstorm.  There again in a boat on a calm sea they come to their answer.  What sort of man is this that the wind and the seas obey him?  Well, worshipping him, they confess, “Truly, you are the Son of God.”  

Something that should profoundly strike us here is that when the disciples asked the pesky “who” question of Jesus, he answered them.  The answer came as they witnessed him at work in their midst and as he involved them in his ministry.  They found themselves changed by him. 

In my humble opinion, we do not spend enough time asking “Who are you, Jesus?”  Sadly and profoundly, “Jesus, who are you?” is not the question that drives our lives, mine included, and the ministry of our churches.

We spend a lot of time in our watered-down boats saying “Jesus, don’t you care that we are perishing?”  But we don’t stop to ask, “Jesus, who are you?”  We have our beliefs and the stuff we know about Jesus and having that we simply don’t think to ask our Lord the personal question, “Jesus, who are you?”  We seem to have missed the point that we are supposed to be being transformed by the Holy Spirit to be more and more like Jesus.  We are good, faithful members of churches but to actually call us Jesus’ disciples...well there's a difference between being a member of a religious institution called a church and being a disciple Jesus who wants to know who Jesus is and to be like him. 

Disciples are students of who Jesus is as a person present in our lives.  He isn’t simply a historical figure who teaches us stuff we would call truth.  "Who are you?" is a relational question.  Learning who Jesus is happens in relationship.  Praying the who question is a good place to start.  It is good just to sit and ask the empty spot on the couch next to you “Jesus, who are you?” 

When we read our Bibles, we should read them with the expectation that Jesus is going to share himself with us as we reflect on what we read.  There’s more to the Bible than just history and teachings about God.  We call the Scriptures "living" for a reason; through them he speaks. 

It’s also good to have a handful of friends that you meet together with and on a regular basis to talk about what the Lord is doing in your life.  Seeing others be encountered be Jesus helps us to know it when we ourselves are wrestling with the Lord.

Finally, Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to bind us to himself so that we might be in an unbreakable relationship with him.  He is in our “being” and we are in his.  The first thing Jesus is going to reveal to us about himself is that he is the beloved Son of the living God.  And since the Holy Spirit binds us to Jesus at the level of our very being this revelation Jesus gives to us of himself comes with us also knowing ourselves to be beloved children of God.  It is good for us to sing Jesus loves me this I know, but it would be more accurate to sing God the Father, almighty Maker of heaven and earth loves me in Christ this I know by the presence and touch of the Holy Spirit, but lyrically that’s just a hard one to put to music. 

“Who are you, Jesus?” is the most important driving question we can ask.  He will answer it and the answer will change us each.  It will change our churches.  Ask it.  Amen.

A Crumby Preoccupation

Matthew 15:10-28

Years and years and years ago I was an assistant manager of a steakhouse. If you’ve ever worked in the restaurant industry, then you know how crumby a restaurant can be.  Crumbs are everywhere.  Crumbs mean dirty.  Dirty says, “Don’t eat here.”  So when I was on duty out on the floor during the meal rushes and when the restaurant was empty between meals, you would find me neurotically pushing a carpet sweeper keeping them floors clean.  That experience has left my eyes irreversibly trained to notice crumbs on the floor.  Crumbs on the floor will be the first thing I notice when I enter a restaurant, a house, your house.  Let’s not even talk about restrooms.

People generate a lot of crumbs, children especially.  Being masterfully crumby, children wreak havoc in restaurants and create a lot of extra work for the person serving them.  I cannot tell you how disappointed the wait staff got when they saw a family come in with a small child who needed a high chair.  Children drop food, throw food, drool food.  The mess gets overwhelming.

When my children were small I was vary thankful that we had a dog.  A dog will clean the crumbs (and the kid).  Dogs love cleaning up under the table.  Every restaurant should have a crumb dog.  When a family with a small child comes into the restaurant the crumb dog would see the situation more graciously.  Instead of dreading the extra work of cleaning up the mess, the crumb dog would eagerly wait for the smorgasbord of bits that would soon be spread before it.  It wouldn’t even mind cleaning up the high chair.  The high chairs are nasty. Food gets smashed into every little crevice and they always seem to acquire the lingering odour of a full diaper.  A crumb dog will lick it clean.

Looking at our passage today, this Canaanite woman compares herself to a crumb dog eating the crumbs of the mercy, the grace, the loving kindness of  “Israel’s” God.  Being a Canaanite she lived with the religious stigma that she didn’t deserve the mercy, the loving kindness of Israel’s God the way Israelites did.  The Canaanites were one of the peoples of the Land that the Israelites didn’t completely annihilate when they returned from Egypt.  As a result her people suffered much stigmatization from the Israelites who conquered them.

There is something special about this Canaanite woman.  She appears to know something about Jesus that only the Twelve Disciples and Satan and the demons know.  She knows that somehow Jesus is the Living God of Israel in the flesh.  She calls him “Lord”.  The only person Jews call “Lord” is their God.  She makes her request of Jesus in the way one would ask God.  She continually cries out to him, “Have mercy on me, Lord.”  She kneels before him and begs, “Lord, help me.”  God shows mercy.  God helps us.

Mercy is a word we Western Christians tend to be a bit short-sighted in our definition of having spent some time in the exile of Medieval Roman Catholicism.  To us mercy largely means acquittal.  God doesn’t get us with the penalty that our sins deserve.  That’s majoring on a legal courtroom understanding of mercy that is actually quite minor in the Bible. 

The request for mercy is what one makes in the royal court.  It is a request for a king’s or queen’s favour towards you shown in acting on your behalf.  The Greek word for mercy is more or less the same word they used for olive oil.  Olive oil was a main staple of life for ancient Mediterranean peoples.  It was also a healing balm.  Such is the love of God.  In Hebrew the word for mercy means undeserved, unconditional loving-kindness.  In asking for mercy this Canaanite woman is asking King Jesus to show her the healing balm of loving-kindness that the Lord God of Israel promises to his people.

In her request “Lord, help me” the word she uses for help isn’t the word you use to ask somebody to come help you in the kitchen.  It’s the word you use to get a doctor to come running to help you in a gravely serious situation.  It’s the word typically used in desperate prayers for God to come and help. 

Her request was a gravely serious one.  Her daughter was possessed by a demon which was something only the Living God of Israel, something only Jesus could do anything about.  She has faith, faith unlike anything Jesus had been able to find in Israel not even among his disciples.  Remember, they are not in Israel anymore and it is this “Canaanite woman” (said with an air of indignation both because she’s a Canaanite and because she’s a woman) that has faith.

Among the Israelites the people who considered themselves to be the most faithful, the Pharisees, were like the crumb police in a restaurant – like me.  They were only concerned with religious rules and regulations, morality, ritual cleanliness – petty things.  They felt entitled to the loving kindness of their God and believed that anyone not ethnically like them to be unworthy of it.  They believed that “petty things” could separate a person from the loving kindness of God, from his coming to help them.  To the Pharisees, to be faithful was to be faithful in the petty things of outward appearances.  Jesus called that hypocrisy.

This Canaanite woman’s faith/faithfulness was her desperate, humble desire to have God heal her daughter of demonic torment.  A desperate and humble desire for God to help her daughter because he is loving-kind is what faith/faithfulness looks like. Add too this, that she realized that the God she was petitioning was somehow embodied in Jesus, something the Pharisees never saw.

Jesus’ response to her is troubling at first.  He’s silent, waiting to see how the disciples are going to react to this “Canaanite woman”.  Just days before, Jesus had fed the 5,000, walked on water, and calmed a mighty wind that was battering their boat with waves.  On that day they worshipped him and confessed him to be the Son of God.  So, knowing who he is and having been with him for so many healings we have to ask whether they will clue in and understand that his loving kindness could be for this “Canaanite woman” too, this non-Israelite.  How did they respond?  Indignance!  “Send her away.  She’s a bother to us.”  Their faith is still too little to grasp the full scope of the “loving-kind” nature of Jesus, the Son of God.

Sometimes the best way to get people to see that their beliefs and prejudices are wrong is to mimic them.  So, Jesus says to the women, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”  In great desperation, she falls to her knees and begs, “Lord, help me!”  But then, Jesus' response to this cry for help is just plain cold-hearted.  “It is immoral to take bread from children and give it to the dogs.”  He’s implying she is a Canaanite “dog” and it would be immoral for him to help her.

I would think that at this point his disciples would be saying to themselves, “This humiliating act of racist religious exclusivism is completely out of character for the Jesus we know to be the Son of God.  It is not what we are about.”

The early church had to overcome a lot of racial prejudice and religious exclusivity to be the Body of Christ into which God had called the Gentile peoples.  They had to welcome Samaritans, Canaanites, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, Scythians, barbarians, and so forth into the fellowship of the Body of Christ because that’s what God in Christ through the working of the Holy Spirit was doing.  It may have seemed to them that God was changing his stance on a few things. 

For example, roughly 1,300 years prior to Jesus' encounter with this Canaanite woman the Israelites were invading the Land of Canaan.  God had told the Israelites to annihilate the Canaanites because they were idolatrous and he didn’t want their ways to be practiced by the Israelites.  Through Moses God gave them laws that included such things as men who dress like women and women who dress like men should be stoned to death.  I suspect that’s how the idolatrous Canaanites dressed and acted when they worshipped their idols.  Among the people of God in Jesus’ day, the Pharisees, the religious crumb police, the law-abiders who judged what was moral, good, virtuous, and beautiful in God’s eye would have had nothing but disdain for this “Canaanite woman” particularly that she thought that Israel’s loving-kind Living God would have anything to do with her.  They likely would have said that her daughter was demon-possessed because she simply deserved it for what she was.  But Jesus the Son of the Living God of loving-kindness who helps us healed the daughter on account of the faith exhibited by her mother, a “Canaanite Woman”.

This is a lesson for us.  There are a lot of people outside the church that we look down our noses in disdain at.  We think “those people” immoral.  We quote scriptures about how God is going to get “those people”.  But among “those people” are some desperate people of great faith, who cry to our God for mercy, for help, but they can’t come to church to find it.  Why?  We the disciples of Jesus are too preoccupied with the crumbs!  Amen.

Stay in the Boat

Matthew 14:22-33

One of those false beliefs that plagues the church in these days of rampant narcissism is the idea that pursuing Jesus is something that I can and should do in “my” pursuit of a better “me”.  If “I” have enough faith in Jesus, “I” can leap over walls, move mountains, walk on water, tread on serpents, and soar like an eagle.  This story of Peter walking on water is one of the key passages this vein of thought relies on to undergird its point.  The story goes that Peter took that leap of faith.  At Jesus’ command he jumped out of the boat and actually started walking on water.  But, he took his eyes off of Jesus and then began to sink.  Christian self-help-ism tells us to “in faith take those risks of doing those things you’ve always dreamed of, do what you feel passionate about and if you stay focused on Jesus, miraculous things will happen”.  It’s bunk.

The problem with this way of believing is that it requires us to divorce faith from the real situations of life and to separate ourselves from the true relational love and support of genuine Christian fellowship.  The faith that Jesus calls us to is not found in heroic individualism and self-fulfilment.  The faith he calls us to is struggling together as his disciples with the troubling difficulties of life and recognizing who he is and that he is in the boat with us. 

Let me just cut to the chase here.  What Peter did in this passage was not admirably take a leap of faith and then blow it.  What he actually did was the polar opposite.  He put the Lord, his God, to the test. 

Here’s how it went down.  The disciples are in the boat in the dark of night in a windstorm that’s causing waves to batter the boat.  That word for batter can also mean torment or torture.  It’s violent, tumultuous out there.

I think we are supposed to be getting the image here of the first day of creation.  Genesis 1 says that darkness covered the waters and a wind from God was blowing over the waters.  The disciples being in this windstorm in the dark in a wave battered boat is a raw image of primordial chaos…the primordial chaos of the New Creation.

Genesis goes on to say, “Then God said “Let there be light” and there was light and God saw that the light was good.”  In Matthew, the light is a ghostly looking Jesus walking to them on the storm-tossed sea.  Being fishermen, they probably were familiar with rough water and so we find that they aren’t really frightened until they “see the light”, the ghostly Jesus.  Jesus tells them, “Take heart. It is I. Don be afraid.”  “It is I” there in the Greek is literally “I am” – ergo eimi.  The Hebrew name for God, Yahweh, simply means I am.  The light coming to the disciples in the battered boat in the midst of the darkness, in the midst of this mighty wind blowing is the Lord God himself.  Jesus is the Lord God himself.

In the midst of all this what does Peter do?  He puts this ghostly looking Jesus who has just identified himself as his God to the test.  He says, “Lord, if it is you”…command me to do something impossibly stupid.  What’s the test?  If the ghostly Jesus is God, then his word, his command, must come to its fruition?  If Jesus commands him to, Peter will walk on water.  What’s wrong with this picture?  God walks on water and if Peter can walk on water, then he would be a god like God as well.  That’s the issue Adam fell over.  Peter tested the Lord.

Where have we heard that tone of voice before?  Well, Satan.  When Satan tempted Jesus he used more or less the same question.  “If you are the Son of God, turn this stone to bread.” (4:3)  “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down”…from the pinnacle of the temple (4:6).  The High Priest when he had Jesus on trial said to Jesus, “I put you under oath before the Living God, tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God” (26:63).  Those who mocked Jesus on the cross said, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”  Peter has found himself in the company of those who put the Lord to the test of proving himself.  Ultimately, that’s what leaps of faith do.

Peter the Leaper is the “one of little faith” who nearly drowns.  He is the disciple who got out of the boat.  The other disciples stayed in the boat.  Throughout the history of the interpretation of this story, the boat is the church – the loving fellowship of the disciples of Christ.  Jesus brings Peter back to the boat and when Jesus gets in the boat, the wind ceases.  Those in the boat worshipped him and professed, “Truly, you are the Son of God.”  The first day of New Creation had occurred and it was good. 

In Christian fellowship, in the boat, is where Jesus, the Son of God, will come to us.  We don’t have to take heroic leaps of faith to find Jesus or to get him to prove himself to us.  Yet, if there is a risk Jesus calls us to, it is to the faithfulness of the cross-shaped way of life that we must take as we go about learning how to love one another as he has loved us, to love our neighbours as well.  Staying in the boat is putting the highest priority on how we love one another and our neighbours, on the quality of our relationships in Christ.  Getting to know one another by sharing our struggles and praying for one another and finding Jesus in the middle of it all making all things new.  I hope you can catch a glimpse of the profundity of what God in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit is doing among us in the midst of our relationships with one another 

One thing I saw in this passage this time through that I had never seen before was that Jesus made the disciples get into that boat and go to the other side of the lake.  He compelled them (that’s a strong word) to get in the boat for a journey that would find them out in darkness in a great wind on a violent sea.   More or less, he intentionally put them in harms way.  All the while, he was up on the mountain praying for them.  Then towards morning, he came to join them in the boat and the result of it all was that they now knew him, knew who he really is, the Son of God...and the walking on the water bit demonstrates that he is Lord of all Creation.

As disciples of Jesus we have to struggle with the notion that everything that happens to us, particularly even the worst of it, is the boat Jesus has put us in and he will use that to reveal to us who he is and make us new.  When we are out there in our battered boats he himself is praying for us.  When the time is right, he will come presently come to us.  But we have to remember that this happens in the boat.  Stepping out of the boat is a lesson we don’t need to learn.  Jesus is God the Son, the Word of God that must come to its fruition, the Lord of All Creation.  He prays for us.  When we are hurting the most.  He is praying for us.  He comes to us, he is with us in the boat of our fellowship with one another.  He is making us to be New Creation in his image.  We don’t have to be Lone Ranger faith-warriors.  We just have to stay in the boat.  Amen.