Jesus Listens

“Jesus Listens”—September 5, 2017 

“Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for your as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.’” [Matthew 15:21-28]

Let me tell you one reason I love Jesus:  he listens.

That by itself—the act of listening—is a radical, and powerful, act.  And to be truthful, it is unexpected, really, for someone in a position of power and authority.  Most powerful people—kings, pharaohs, Roman governors, high priests, and presidents—have a way of thinking themselves to be the be-all, end-all, and to be the final word on any given subject.  They have no need to listen to those who are “beneath” them, after all.  Most people in authority—well-educated scribes and Sadducees, Pharisees and royalty-approved prophets, well-respected pastors, preachers, and rabbis, scholars, and so-called “experts”—are the same, too. They figure that they are “in the know” already and therefore must be right in their conclusions on any given subject.  You tell yourself you don’t need to listen to anybody else if you let political power and intellectual authority go to your head.

And Jesus, by all accounts in the Gospels, is someone who has the Right to claim both Power and Authority.   For whatever other details they envisioned, one thing the ancient prophets of Israel all agreed on was that the promised coming Messiah would command

power and authority.  The great and future descendant of King David would carry the old David’s mantle of wisdom and strength, and in that case, everybody would have expected the Messiah to be powerful and bold when he made official pronouncements.  Everybody would have expected the Messiah to speak like he was the final word on the subject, and therefore that there was no real need to listen to anybody else.  The Gospel-writers are clear that they are all convinced that Jesus is none other than the Messiah—the anointed rightful ruler of God’s people Israel—and therefore you could imagine someone saying, “Jesus is the Messiah: he doesn’t need to listen to anybody.  He’s the king, after all.”

But wonder of wonders, even though every other person with power and authority we have known has a way of getting enclosed in an echo chamber where all they can hear are their own powerful, authoritative words, Jesus is different.  Jesus listens.

And listening, genuinely listening to someone else, is a radical, courageous, world-changing act.  And it is much harder than simply making pronouncements with your ears covered; much harder than we give it credit for, usually.

It is always easier to deal with messy situations by simply declaring that you are right and reciting a list of pre-learned talking points to back yourself up, than it is to actually listen to someone else, wherever the conversation may take you both.

It is always easier to just stick to the accepted conventional wisdom that everyone expects you to agree with, than to let Mercy move you to pause… to be still… and to hear someone else where they are at.

And this is where Jesus is different—and where Jesus shows us an entirely different way of being the Messiah than we ever expected from any other Power or Authority.  Jesus owns his power and authority… by listening.

This story is one of those case in point moments.  The conventional wisdom of the day is that Messiahs don’t have to listen to anybody, especially not outsiders of no standing, no power, no authority, and no leverage.  And yet here is this blessedly persistent woman—who is first warned, and then given an explanation, and who yet persists in speaking to Jesus nevertheless. 

Jesus could have pulled rank.  He could have said, “Look, lady, I decide who I heal and who I don’t, and you can’t tell me what to do.”  We have all known voices of Power and Authority who sound like that, who simply decree they don’t have to listen to anybody outside their own echo chamber.    

Jesus could have insisted he had come to help only Israel First—in fact, he sort of gives this one-off comment that suggests he would be well within his “rights” only to care for people of the “in-group” of fellow Jews like Jesus himself and his disciples.  We have all known voices of Power and Authority like that, too, who are so damned obsessed (and yes, I mean that literally—it is a “damnable” obsession) with looking out for their own self-interest that they will not even consider the needs of someone outside their own group or their own agenda.

Jesus could have just appealed to his having the “right” theological answer and made an Official Statement declaring his rightness.  After all, yes, it was possible to read the Prophets of Israel’s past and to conclude that the Messiah’s official mission was only to gather in the “lost sheep of Israel.”  Jesus could have just left it with his Official Statement and declared that helping any outsiders (and this woman is an outsider—living outside Israel in the district of Tyre and Sidon, and from Canaanite ancestry) was sliding into mission creep, and he just couldn’t help.  Jesus could have said, “Sorry, lady, I know your child didn’t choose to be an outsider, and I know that there’s nothing she did to deserve this rotten turn, but hey, I am only here to help the citizens of Judea, and not Gentiles.  I’m not here to look out for the interests of Canaanites—only the Kosher people.”  We have all known voices of Power and Authority who said as much to the Canaanite women and their children in our own day.  “Nothing personal, but I’m just not here to help the likes of… YOU,” they say, insisting at the same time that it’s nothing personal, and that they are just following the letter of their official duty to look out for their own first.  We have all known voices of Power and Authority who take their need to sound right and orthodox and turn it into an idol of pride without noticing it has become a golden calf right under their noses.

And even though Jesus appears to head down each of those paths at the start of this story, it turns out that Jesus—like a fox—has a way of leaving false trails, too, as signs of ways he could have gone, but didn’t. 

Most importantly—and most powerfully and most authoritatively of all—Jesus never stops listening.  In all of this story, Jesus never stops listening to the woman on her own terms.  He even keeps the conversation going when all of Jesus’ would-be advisors (the disciples) say that he should end the discussion and just leave the woman alone.  He engages in the back-and-forth with her, almost winking as he pushes back on her replies, to see what she really thinks and what she thinks she has come for.  Jesus keeps listening, even though this woman, as a “Canaanite,” was born to the wrong group of people in the wrong place. Jesus keeps listening, when every other voice of Power and Authority would just call it a day, dust off their hands, and say, “I’ve made my decision.  There’s no help for you.  That settles it.”

Jesus keeps listening.  And there is the wonder—there is the shocking moment of this story.  Honestly, by the fifteenth chapter here in Matthew’s Gospel, it’s already abundantly clear that Jesus CAN do miracles and wonders.  He has been casting out demons practically from day one, and he has even shown evidence of healing people from a distance with a simple word, too.  All of that is established.

What is surprising here is that Jesus listens to this woman when he had reason to ignore her, and when the majority opinion of his inner circle would have been saying, “She’s too demanding.  She’s being rude.  She’s refusing to stay in her place.  She’s acting like she’s entitled…”  What is surprising is that Jesus, even though this anonymous woman has no leverage, no credentials, no pull, and nothing she can offer Jesus in return, stops to consider the needs of a young girl who has been put in a situation of desperation that she never asked for or chose for herself.  To all the other voices of Power and Authority, this young woman’s daughter is a nobody, and therefore, she is expendable.  Who cares what happens to her, right?  For that matter, if Jesus had stuck with taking a hard line against this foreigner woman and told her a decisive, unyielding NO, it might have boosted Jesus’ favorability ratings with the Pharisees back in Judea, and might have increased Jesus’ popularity in the next round of Galilean polls.

But still Jesus listens.

And because he listens, he acts.  He heals the woman’s daughter—creating a miracle that never would have happened if Jesus had been a Messiah like every other voice of Power and Authority in history.  Any standard-model Messiah would have silenced the woman and walked the other way with an indifferent shrug.  Any lesser savior would have said, “Look, I’ll consider her case with heart,” and then just blew her off anyway.  Any other Lord would have said, “Since you can’t do anything FOR me, you don’t MATTER to me,” and would have basked in the sound of his own voice as he made the pronouncement. 

But because Jesus listens, the second wonder—the actual healing—can happen.  The girl, who was a faceless nobody as far as anybody else could tell, is made well.  The woman, who was ignorable at best and an “unworthy foreigner”—one of “the dogs,” even!—at worst, is listened to and extended the same level of respect and honor that 1^st century society only reserved for men of the right class and standing.  Because Jesus listens, the old lines are erased, old walls are broken down, and it becomes clear that Jesus’ messianic mission is wider than anybody had guessed up until that moment.

Jesus listens, and all of a sudden, everything is different—yes, for this woman, and yes, for her innocent daughter, caught up in a dire situation she did not choose, but for all of us.  I am an outsider in the story of the people of God—and a Gentile like me can only say I get to belong in the great Story of God’s grace because this Jesus has shown grace to an outsider, a foreigner, like me.  I only belong in this community we call the Church because this same Jesus has a way of widening the circle and crossing boundaries, even if there was an orthodox “right” answer that Jesus could have recited to shut the door on me.

This is why I love Jesus.  He listens.

Look, dear friends, we are going to continue to face situations—maybe even daily—where it will be easy simply to retreat to reciting the talking points we have learned before, the “right” answers that conveniently reinforce what we already think.  It will be tempting in those moments, when we run into a voice like this Canaanite woman’s that challenges our neat-and-tidy correctness, to ignore them, or to un-friend them on social media, to refuse to listen because we have told ourselves we already HAVE the right answers, and to dismiss people who complicate our picture of the world because they are expendable to us.  It is always easier in this life to make pronouncements that we have told ourselves are already the “right” answers and stay in the echo chamber where we only ever even hear things we already agree with, than it will be to take the time and let someone complicate our world… by listening to them.

But this Jesus, whom we say we love, he does the hard thing.  Jesus listens.  And that makes all the difference.

Be one who listens today, too.

Lord Jesus, when we are quick to shout out our final answers, stop us up short and make us to listen where you speak, so that your Mercy may grow wider than we ever dared imagine.