The Lord's complaint against His people begins as the Ten
Commandments begin, as all His complaints begin, with a recitation of what He
has done for them, what gives Him the right to either give Law or complain. They, and we, always need to begin at the
beginning, what God did for us that we could not do for ourselves that brought
us into a covenant relationship with Him.
Covenant relationships have expectations with them and the expectations
with this covenant are that they and we will be a chosen nation, a royal
priesthood, a holy nation, a people of His possession. We will, by our obedience to all He has
commanded, display both His glory and His image to the world. In Deuteronomy 10 Moses asks a question similar
to Micah's question, "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, and to keep
the commandments and statutes of the Lord, which I am commanding you today for
your good?" Micah says the answer
is simpler than keeping all the 613 laws, it is "to do justice, and to
love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God." These are the basics God asks of us as human
beings, everything flows from these things.
You don't see many people defined as Canaanites in the New
Testament. These, remember, were the
people displaced from the Land when the Israelites took over. Further back, they were descendants of Noah's
son, Ham, whose son, Canaan, was cursed by his grandfather, Noah after Ham
uncovered his father's nakedness in Genesis 9.
Canaan's first son was Sidon, where this woman was from. She is desperate for the healing of her
daughter, desperate enough to bear any insult.
The conversation with Jesus would certainly have been uncomfortable for
the disciples to hear, it seems that Jesus is a bit racist by referring to her
as dog since she is a Canaanite. Ultimately, even though Jesus says He was
sent to the lost sheep of Israel, He extends healing to her based on her
remarkable faith. If we want a clearer
demonstration of how we are to relate to even our "enemies" we won't
find it.
No one with Jesus wanted to be a Canaanite, no one wanted to
be thought of as a dog like she was.
Paul says to the church at Corinth that he, as an apostle, has traded
down in life from what he would otherwise be, what the Corinthians were. He lost his respectability, lost his position
in society when he became not only a Christian but an apostle, a leader in the
church. In my lifetime I have seen that
same thing happen, particularly in the place we live. Pastors, within the church, may have some
honor but in the city we are fools. He
tells them also how to live from that place and his words need to form us as
well as we live in an increasingly post-Christian world. "When reviled, we bless; when
persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we entreat. We have become, and are
still, like the scum of the world, the refuse of all things." Let us take these words to heart and become
as Paul, let us " to do justice, and to love kindness, and to
walk humbly with your God."
No comments:
Post a Comment