Faith Can Move Mountains

 

Faith Can Move Mountains

“This is John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead! That is why miraculous powers are at work in him.” – Mt 14:2  

Jesus, by his works, had put the fear of God in Herod the Tetrarch, who had John the Baptist beheaded. Herod was taken in by the daughter of Herodias (his brother Philip’s wife). Herod married Herodias against the advice of John the Baptist, which enraged Herodias. She had John the Baptist beheaded, much to the dismay of Herod. Now Herod was troubled when he heard of the miracles Jesus was doing in Judah and Galilee.

Herod’s statement suggests that even John the Baptist had performed miracles that drew sinners to repentance and baptism in the Jordon, though there is no such mention of John the Baptist working miracles in the Word of God.

We know Jesus’ disciples worked miracles when 72 of them were sent two by two to proclaim the Kingdom of God and call people to repentance ahead of Jesus’ arrival. The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.” – Luke 10:17. We are also aware that the same disciples were not able to heal the epileptic or the lunatic child (Mt 17:16). The rarefied atmosphere of being with Jesus and in the midst of miracles – Jesus feeding the five thousand; Jesus walking on the water (Mt 14:13-36) – seemed to make the disciples think about their ‘high’ places in Jesus’ messianic kingdom – a kingdom they imagined in the likeness of King David. This attitude also made them dismissive of people they thought were unworthy of Jesus’ attention.

We can see the display of such an attitude in the ‘Faith of the Canaanite Woman’ episode (Mt 15:21-28). “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us”, said the disciples to Jesus. What is remarkable about this episode is that Jesus is a foreigner in the pagan land of Tyre and Sidon.

For Jesus, the Canaanite Woman is a foreigner. “Thus says the LORD: Observe what is right, do what is just; for my salvation is about to come, my justice, about to be revealed. ⁶ And foreigners who bind themselves to the Lord to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants all who keep the Sabbath without desecrating it and who hold fast to my covenant—⁷ these I will bring to my holy mountain and give them joy in my house of prayer (Isaiah 56:6-7).

Many are startled by Jesus apparent rudeness to the Canaanite woman in Mt 15:21-28. Was Jesus rude? Far from it. In Mt 17:20-21, Jesus reprimands the disciples for not being able to deliver the epileptic child – when they had done so earlier when sent two by two. ^20-21 “Because you have so little faith,” replied Jesus. “I assure you that if you have as much faith as a grain of mustard-seed you can say to this hill, ‘Up you get and move over there!’ and it will move—you will find nothing is impossible.” “However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting”.

Compare the ‘lived life of the disciples’ with Jesus and the Faith of the Canaanite Woman. She overcome a ‘mountain of tests’ – first the plea of the disciples to Jesus to “send her away”, but she persisted, and then Jesus telling her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”; and “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs”;  but she responded with her faith which Jesus acknowledged: “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.

Now put ourselves in her situation. Would we have suffered Jesus’ apparent rudeness even for a moment? How would we have responded? When a man of God, in a moment of weakness, responds contrary to our expectations, we instantly condemn. We question his ‘ministry’.

A CNN Report on Jan 2, 2020, went to town with the clip of Pope Francis smacking the hand of the woman who grabbed it so hard that it nearly toppled him. But CNN chose to ignore the potential harm that could have been done to the 83-year-old pope and chose to put the pope in a poor light by showing the clip along with the coverage of Pope Francis’ message on World Day of Peace, speaking on the violence against women, pitching it as hypocritical. The incident happened the previous night. Pope Francis apologised for his ‘bad example’ at the Papal Audience.

The larger point: did CNN speak to the person(s) who were rude to the 83-year-old? It had happened twice before too. One time he fell into a wheelchair. The Pope scolded the young man for his selfishness. We think it is ok to be rude, but we bristle with hurt when someone else is rude to us. We like the media house CNN will broadcast to ten other people (at least our version of it). And those ten, if cut from the same cloth, will tell another ten.

The Canaanite woman stood her ground. “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.” She would not let go.

The lessons for us from the ‘Faith of the Canaanite Woman’ are: a) ‘Discernment’ – she did not know a lot about Jesus like the disciples; she was not an eyewitness to Jesus miracles; but in her heart she knew this foreigner is the only one who can deliver her “demon-possessed and terribly suffering” daughter; b) ‘Love for the Other’ – she did not come for herself but for her daughter and no mountains would be allowed to stand in her way – not even the disciples; c) ‘To be a sign’ – she was an early sign that Jesus was not sent by God the Father only “for the lost sheep of Israel” but for gentiles too; d) ‘Liberation of a disenfranchised class’ – Women, windows, children, and lepers had the lowest status in a male dominated Jewish society – in fact no better than dogs; the Canaanite woman is the rare case of a woman approaching Jesus with a petition, invariably it is a man of status who we see in the Bible doing so; the woman with the flow of blood did it clandestinely – for she was a woman and she was menstruating – taboo of the worst kind to be in the presence of men – and that too God Incarnate.

The Word of God repeatedly commends to us the merit of persistence, with the incident of the widow persisting with the judge until she got justice (Luke 18:1-14) or the friend arousing the neighbour from sleep for ‘three loaves of bread’ to feed a visitor (Luke 11:5-13).

I know of a person who approached the principal of a Christian institution to re-admit his son after completing a two-year transfer to another city. The principal looked at the marksheet of the preceding two years and refused to give admission. He told him to leave the office. The person left the office but sat in the private reception area in the hope the principal would have a change of heart. The principal did. The child was admitted. The person’s faith was vindicated. With his change of heart, the principal, too, made amends for a misjudged moment.

The only time we fail is when we don’t try hard enough to succeed. An aircraft gets off the ground from thrust received from the engine or the propeller. Where do we get our thrust? Is it just from our self-willed effort? Our mind and body? Or do we have access to a mysterious source? The Canaanite woman's source for healing of her child. Would the faith we profess stand when we are persecuted and insulted? Will we persist under duress? Or wilt under pressure, forsaking it? Then, where will we go when we need deliverance?

-        Mathew Anthony