The Lord does remember

Sermon for Reminiscere

1 Thessalonians 4:1-7  +  Matthew 15:21-28

We prayed in the Introit today, Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, For they are from of old. Let not my enemies triumph over me. God of Israel, deliver us out of all our troubles! Now, think about it for a moment. Why do we ask God to remember anything? Can He forget anything? He isn’t like us. We easily forget, and not just the little things in our daily lives. We forget the big things, too. Like the infinite power of God’s Word. Like God’s commandments. Like God’s promises. Like the Lord’s mercy and goodness. Like the real spiritual battle that is going on between the Church and her members on the one side and the demons on the other.

We may forget. But the Lord doesn’t forget. And yet, we ask Him to remember, to remember His tender mercies and His lovingkindnesses. What we’re really asking, then, is that the Lord would help us to remember those things, and that the Lord would help us now against our enemies, as He has so faithfully helped His people in the past. And He will! Because, you can be sure, the Lord does remember.

You remember, from last week, how God the Father sent help to His Son in the wilderness, after forty days of fasting and facing the devil’s temptations. He’ll send help to you, too, against the devil’s temptations, whenever you ask. But as we see in today’s Gospel, the devil doesn’t stop at tempting. He and his demons are active in the world in other ways, too, including tormenting people physically. He has been given room both to tempt and to torment mankind since the fall into sin. He’s restrained by God’s power; he’s not all-powerful. He can’t take hold of believers, as long as they continue to take refuge in Christ by faith, because where the Holy Spirit dwells, there Satan can’t dwell, even though he can still tempt. We’ll hear more about that in next week’s Gospel.

For today, we see how Satan, or one or more of his fellow demons, had taken hold of the daughter of a Canaanite woman and was tormenting her. And it “just so happened” that Jesus was visiting her country—the first and only time He stepped outside the borders of Israel, except when He was carried off to Egypt as a small child. The Gentile woman heard that He was nearby, so she hurried off to find Him. And when she did, she prayed, O Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is dreadfully tormented by a demon. It’s as if she had prayed, Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, For they are from of old. Let not my enemies triumph over me. God of Israel, deliver us out of all our troubles!

This Gentile woman was very different from the Gentiles do not know God, as Paul referred to them in today’s Epistle. If we were to list all the people in Israel up to this point (who were all supposed to know God) who called Jesus by this title, “Son of David,” that is, who openly confessed Him as the Christ, who was to be descended from King David, it would be a very short list. Two men, to be specific. Two blind men. That’s it. After this, there would be two more blind men in Israel who confessed Jesus to be the Son of David, and then, finally, the crowds on Palm Sunday outside Jerusalem who sang, “Hosanna to the Son of David!” But outside of Israel? This woman is the only one in history, until after the Day of Pentecost. So it was a remarkable confession of faith, showing that she must have heard enough about the God of Israel, enough of the Old Testament Scriptures, and enough about Jesus to put together that He was not only the Christ promised to Israel, but the Christ who would also be a Light to the Gentiles and their Savior, too.

With a confession of faith like that, and with a plea for help against the devil, you might think Jesus would have given her what she asked for immediately. But He had other plans, for her, for His disciples, and for us. He did not say a word in reply. Seems like the Lord doesn’t remember His tender mercies and His lovingkindnesses. In fact, it often looks that way, as the Lord often doesn’t send help right away, as soon as we ask for it. It looks like the Lord isn’t listening. It looks like He’s forgotten.

But, that’s impossible, because the Lord doesn’t change. He isn’t fickle. In Him there are no “shifting shadows” as James puts it. So there must be another explanation for His momentary silence.

The woman kept crying out. We know that, because the disciples complained to Jesus about it. They came and begged him, “Send her away! She is crying out after us!” They might better have prayed for the woman, Remember, O Lord, Your tender mercies and Your lovingkindnesses, For they are from of old. Even so, Jesus ignored their request. He simply answered the woman, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Again, it seems like a rather shocking statement to our modern ears, where everything has become about race and racial sensitivity. How do the Holy Scriptures help us to understand why Jesus would say this?

Well, remember, in the history of the world, there has been only one privileged race, and that was the race descended from Israel, and only until the coming of Christ to Israel. Of all the nations, God chose Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their descendants to be His, and He made some very specific promises to Israel in the Old Testament. Listen to just this one from Ezekiel 34: For thus says the Lord GOD: “Indeed I Myself will search for My sheep and seek them out. As a shepherd seeks out his flock on the day he is among his scattered sheep, so will I seek out My sheep and deliver them from all the places where they were scattered on a cloudy and dark day. And I will bring them out from the peoples and gather them from the countries, and will bring them to their own land; I will feed them on the mountains of Israel… Thus they shall know that I, the LORD their God, am with them, and they, the house of Israel, are My people,” says the Lord GOD.’ That was part of God’s covenant faithfulness to the people of Israel, whom He chose out of all the nations to be brought into a covenant with Him, to receive His Word, to receive His prophets, to bear His name in the world, and, finally, to receive His Christ and to be sought by the Christ, as a shepherd searches for his lost sheep. The fact is, at His first coming, Christ was not sent to evangelize the world or to help the world with its problems. He was only sent to Israel, in fulfillment of God’s covenant with Israel.

But that doesn’t mean His coming only had significance for Israel, or that the help of Christ would exclude the Gentiles in the future. On the contrary, He commanded His apostles after His ascension to preach the Gospel to all nations. And right here, in this encounter with the Gentile woman, He provides a solid justification for that plan, an undeniable example of genuine faith, which shines in this encounter more brightly than it shined anywhere in Israel.

She came and fell down before him, saying, “Lord, help me!” But he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” And she said, “Yes, Lord. But the dogs do eat from the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” It’s as if she had said, To You, O Lord, I lift up my soul. O my God, I trust in You; let me not be ashamed!

Lest anybody take offense at Jesus’ comparison of this woman and her daughter to a dog, He would’ve made the exact same comparison to you and me and to any non-Israelite. For as much as people affectionately refer to pets as part of the family, a dog has no real place in the family, no relation to the father of the family, no inheritance in the family, and certainly far less worth than the children. In that sense, all men since the fall into sin are like dogs begging at God’s table, with no real place in His family, no relation to the Father of the family, no inheritance in the family, and worth far, far less than the holy Child of God named Jesus. But God’s love for the human race caused Him to send His Son into human flesh, to bear our sins on the cross, and to reconcile sinners to God through faith in Him. To those who believed in His name, John writes, He gave the right to become children of God. And just as God gave the status of children to Old Testament Israel, so He now gives the status of children to all who believe in Christ Jesus, which now included the Gentile woman who knelt at His feet.

Oh, woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly. The demon has no power to hold the one whom Christ sets free. But why is Jesus so moved by the woman’s faith, to praise it as “great”? Because she doesn’t claim anything before God, as if it were her right or her privilege. Her faith is sincere. It’s humble. It’s persistent. It’s unabashedly hopeful, even when it looks like God won’t do anything to help. In fact, that’s when faith shines the brightest, when we don’t see God’s friendly face, when it looks like we’ve been forgotten by Him, and yet still trust that the Lord does remember.

And He does. The Lord remembers. Every word He has spoken. Every promise He has made. Even if you were still just dogs begging at the Master’s table, He would remember you with the crumbs of His mercy and love, which are more than enough. But now, through Baptism into Christ Jesus and through faith in Christ Jesus, He has joined you to His beloved Church and has made you His dear children. And He certainly remembers His children. As He says through the prophet Isaiah, Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of My hands!

The devil will hold onto this world for a while longer, and it will look like he has won. Scripture makes that plain enough. It will look like God has forgotten us, like He isn’t listening, like truth is lost, like joy is gone, like hope is dead. But then the Holy Spirit holds up this Gospel again of a Canaanite woman and of the Lord Jesus urging us through her example to keep the faith, to hope in Him, because in spite of all the world’s bluster and all the devil’s schemes, the Lord does remember. And when the moment comes for Him to step in against the devil and in support of His beloved Christians, no power in the universe will be able to stand in His way. Amen.