This evening, for our sermon, we're going to be taking a look at the shortest parable that's found in the Gospels, and that's in Mark 7. And so, we'll turn there, but first, let's join together in a word of prayer, asking God to bless the Word. Heavenly Father, we thank you and praise you that we are given the privilege now to hear from you. We pray that you would speak by your Word, and that we would hear. Please bless this word and help us to glorify Christ as we hear it. In his name we pray. Amen. So turn with me, please, to Mark 7. Mark 7 is found on page 975 in your Bibles that you can find in your pews. And our sermon passage this evening, we're going to be reading from verse 1 through verse 30. But for the sermon, we're going to be taking a look specifically at verses 24 through 30. And so I will read this for us this evening, starting at verse 1 of Mark 7. The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were unclean, that is, unwashed. The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing. When they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers, and kettles. So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, Why don't your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with unclean hands? He replied, Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites. As it is written, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain. Their teachings are but rules taught by men. You've let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men. And he said to them, you have a fine way of setting aside these commandments of God in order to observe your own traditions. For Moses said, honor your father and your mother, and anyone who curses his father and mother must be put to death. But you say that if a man says to his father and mother, whatever help you might otherwise have received from me is korban, that is a gift devoted to God, then you no longer let him do anything for his father and mother. Thus you nullify the word of God by your traditions that you have handed down, and you do many other things like that. Again, Jesus called the crowd to him and said, Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. Nothing outside a man can make him unclean by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a man that makes him unclean. After he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about this parable. Are you so dull, he asked. Don't you see that nothing that enters a man from the outside can make him unclean? For it doesn't go into his heart, but into his stomach, and then out of his body. In saying this, Jesus declared all foods clean. He went on, Whatever comes out of a man is not what makes him unclean. For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly. All of these evils come from the inside and make a man unclean. And now we come to the passage that we'll be looking at this evening. Verse 24. Jesus left that place and went into the vicinity of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know it, yet he could not keep his presence secret. In fact, as soon as she heard about him, a woman whose little daughter was possessed by an evil spirit came and fell at his feet. The woman was a Greek, born in Syrian Phoenicia. She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter. First, let the children eat all they want, he told her, for it is not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs. Yes, Lord, she replied, but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. Then he told her, for such a reply you may go, the demon has left your daughter. She went home and found her child lying on the bed and the demon gone. The word of the Lord. people of God if I were to ask you how you would describe Jesus I'm guessing that you would answer the same way that I would if somebody asked me how I would describe him I would describe Jesus as good and kind and caring and compassionate righteous and strong and holy and all of those are right categorizations of our Lord Jesus I'm confident that if I asked you how you would describe Jesus that no one here would describe him as rude or callous or ethnocentric and yet a quick read through this passage leaves us with something of that notion of who Jesus is he seems hesitant to heal the daughter of this woman and he goes further by telling a brief parable in which he compares her and her people to dogs. This passage seems to be a discordant note in the otherwise beautiful melody of the Gospel of Mark. So why does Jesus speak to her like this? Why does he use such harsh words? Is he attempting to exclude her, to make her feel like an outsider? No. Not at all. What I hope that we'll see after we take a look through this passage is that far from being a passage about excluding individuals, Mark uses this story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman to show us that it's not religious rituals and it's not an ethnic heritage, but rather humble faith in Christ that makes up the people of God. And as we talk about that, we're going to be addressing it in three points. First, we're going to be talking about Gentile dogs. Second, we're going to be talking of children of God. And last, we're going to be talking about faith in Christ. And so, with that, let's turn to our first point, Gentile dogs. Now, in our story that we read, we see that Jesus left the place that he was and went into the vicinity of Tyre, into Syrio-Phoenicia. That's why the woman is called a Syrio-Phoenician woman, because she lives in the area of Syrio-Phoenicia. It's distinguished from Libyan-Phoenicia, which is in North Africa. And Tyre and Sidon were two areas within that broader area of Syrio-Phoenicia. And we're not told why Jesus leaves to go to this area. Maybe he needed to rest for a while, recuperate. We hear a lot about his miracles and his teachings. So maybe he needed to get away, spend some time alone, maybe teaching his disciples for a bit. If that's the case, then Tyre would be the perfect place to go. Syrio-Phoenicia would be an ideal location. It had very few Jews and it had very many Gentiles. And so maybe it was that the fame of Jesus had spread throughout all of Israel but hadn't yet gotten to Syrio-Phoenicia. Maybe the people in Tyre hadn't heard about the teaching and the miracles of Jesus. But we find out that Jesus' fame had spread even to the Gentile areas of Syrio-Phoenicia. because immediately a woman comes and falls at his feet and asks him to heal her daughter. So even the people in Tyre have heard about the works that Jesus had done. And in the passage, we're given three words to describe this person that comes and falls at Jesus' feet. And it's interesting because these three descriptors read something like a crescendo of demerit about this individual. First, we see that she's a woman. And at this time, rabbis were nervous to associate with women. Sometimes, some rabbis would keep themselves from associating with women. And so, the fact that she's a woman seems to be the first strike against her. The second is that she's a Greek. She's a Gentile. And those of us who know our Old Testaments, as I'm sure many of us do, know that in the Old Testament, Israel was commanded to keep themselves from other nations, to keep themselves from marrying Gentile nations, from intermixing with them. Because marrying with Gentile nations could lead to bringing in of their gods, could lead people away from the teaching of the one true God. And so the fact that this woman was a Gentile, a Greek, is a second strike against her. But the third and the greatest is the fact that she is Syrio-Phoenician that she's from the region of Tyre. Tyre and Israel had a very great and storied history all throughout the time of the Old Testament and in between the time of the Testaments. What started out as a great relationship between King David and Solomon with the king of Tyre, in fact the temple was built with some of the cedar trees from Tyre, quickly turned sour. Jezebel was from Tyre. She came from More than that, the prophets Ezekiel and Zechariah both decried Tyre for its wealth, for its excesses. They promised judgment coming to Tyre for all of the evil and the idolatry that it had participated in. In the intertestamental time period, there was a revolt that had taken place in Jerusalem, in Israel. It was led by a man named Judas Maccabeus. There had been an army that had come in and taken Israel captive. And he led a revolt and cleared Israel of this army. And just when it seemed as though Israel was again going to have peace, Tyre rose up and marched out to meet Judas Maccabeus and his forces in battle. Tyre rose up. You see, Josephus, at the time of Jesus, around the time of Jesus, has said that the people of Tyre were notoriously our most bitter enemies. It would be as though an individual from an Al-Qaeda terror cell came and asked Jesus for help, asked Jesus to heal their child. And so in this context, perhaps we expect sharp words. And that's what it seems as though we get. Jesus tells her a brief parable saying, First let the children eat, for it's not right to take their food and give it to their dogs. The meaning of this parable is fairly evident. Jesus is saying, First let me go to the Jews, for it's not right to take my teaching, my miracles, from the Jews and give it to Gentile dogs. Why this harsh language? Surely politeness wouldn't have been too much for Jesus Christ, for the Son of God. Why couldn't he say, I can't heal her. So sorry. Why did he have to use the term dog? Why is this? Well, to explore this, we need to move on to our second point, Sons of God. As we move to that point, we turn to the central part of our passage, what could be called the battle of wits that takes place between Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. And here's the way that the exchange goes. Let me read it for us. Jesus says, First let the children eat all they want, he told her, for it's not right to take the children's bread and toss it to their dogs. Yes, Lord, she replied, but even the dogs under the table eat the children's crumbs. Then he told her, And so we see three things here that tell us that Jesus is not attempting to exclude this woman, but rather to bring her in. First is his use of first. He says, first let the children eat all they want. He doesn't refuse her. He says, first let the children eat what they want. Now this first implies that there could be a second. Somebody that would come after the children have eaten. Able to partake of the food that they have had. So this first indicates not that Jesus is refusing her, but that there's a priority of mission, that he comes first for the Jews and then for the Gentiles. But it's not a refusal. Second, we can see that he uses the word dog. This seems like such a harsh word. And in some instances it really was. There are two uses in the New Testament of the word dog. The first use is the mangy mongrel that would rove from village to village full of all uncleanness. These were the kind of dogs that would be filled with impurities, things that were unclean. The people would refrain from touching these mangy beasts because to touch them would become unclean themselves. And so because of the unclean nature of these dogs, some Jews took this as a fitting descriptor of Gentiles, called Gentiles Gentile dogs, because they were unclean, because they shouldn't be touched. But you see, this isn't the word that Jesus uses in this story. He uses a very different word. It actually appears only twice in the New Testament, only in this story and in Matthew's account of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman. And the word that Jesus uses is something of a house pet. It's the sort of dog that you would keep inside, that you'd let jump on your lap, that you'd let run around with your children. It's not the sort of beast that you would come outside, that you would keep outside. Some individuals, some commentators, think that this solves the problem. He says he's actually complimenting the woman when he calls her a dog. And I don't believe that we can go that far. But it does do something very interesting, doesn't it? In the story, in the parable, it puts the Gentiles, this woman, it puts the dogs inside the house. And so Jesus says, first, not refusing her. And then he uses a word that allows her to be inside the house, inside the home, inside the community. Do you see how he's not refusing her? The third is the clearest. The third is that he heals her daughter, doesn't he? And so if his teachings, if his miracles are only for his children, then what has he done? He's treated this woman as a child, as a daughter. He's treated her as an insider, a part of the community. Luther puts it this way. He says that this woman takes Jesus at his word, and he treats her not as a dog, but as a child of Israel. This is fascinating, isn't it? She accepts her humble position. She accepts this categorization as a dog. And she, in fact, rejoices in it. She says, yes, I understand, but that means that I'm inside. That I can have a part of what you've offered to your children. And what's an interesting note, some commentators point this out. She said, the dogs eat of the overflow of the table. And you see, the area of Tyre, the region of Tyre was a very wealthy area. It was only a very wealthy person that could conceive of having so much food that some of it would spill over the table to the dogs underneath. And so Jesus is telling a parable that this woman is uniquely positioned to understand and be able to respond to. He's not keeping her outside of the community. He's in fact welcoming her in. And far from trying to exclude her, it's here that we see a reversal of what's taken place earlier in Mark 7. What happened earlier? First, the Pharisees come and speak to him. And now if anyone, if anyone's to be an insider, surely it's the Pharisees, surely it's the teachers of the law. But yet what happens? To those, Jesus gives a very clear and a very sharp rebuke. He says, you've exchanged the word of God for the traditions of men. He says, you've defied the word that Isaiah gave you. You've stopped listening to Moses. To those who seem to be on the very inside, he speaks of as if they're on the out. They don't understand him. They don't get what he's coming to say, coming to do. And so if anyone, if anyone wants to be on the inside, it's the Pharisees. And yet, it's clear that they are the ones that are on the outside. They don't understand. And then second, what does he do? He declares all foods clean. This is amazing. Because the Jewish life was so regulated by dietary laws, by what would make an individual unclean. They would keep, they would abstain from certain foods. But what does Jesus do here? He declares them clean. And immediately after declaring them clean, he goes and speaks with a Gentile woman from Syriophenicia, from Tyre. He's giving us an object lesson of what it means that all foods have been declared clean. No more is my ministry just, are my people just the Jews. The boundaries expand beyond just Jewish lines. And so here we begin to see the fulfillment of what's told us in Psalm 87. Let me read for us from Psalm 87. Here's what it has to say. It says, He has set his foundation on the holy mountain. The Lord loves the gates of Zion more than all the dwellings of Jacob. Glorious things are said of you, O city of God. I will record Rahab and Babylon among those who acknowledge me. Philistia too. And Tyre. Along with Cush. And we'll say, this one was born in Zion. Indeed of Zion it will be said, this one and that one were born in her, and the Most High himself will establish her. the Lord will write in the register of the peoples, this one was born in Zion. What a glorious fulfillment. And we see it coming to full fulfillment right here as Jesus turns to a woman from Tyre and treats her as a daughter, says that she is a part of his community. And so far from Jesus attempting to exclude someone based on religious rituals or because of an ethnic identity, Here, Jesus is showing us that Psalm 87 is coming to fulfillment. That not just in Israel, but also too in Tyre. Also too, there his children may be found. What a glorious truth for us that not just Israel, but also, also in the rainforests of Uganda, there Jesus' children can be found. Not only in Israel, but in Escondido, California, God's children can be found. And those of us who are here who are a part of this church or a part of another church that believes the Bible, that trusts Christ, that looks to the Lord only for their salvation, we realize that we were enemies. We were like those who came from Tyre. That at some point, either us or our parents or our grandparents, one of us did not know the Lord. We were enemies. But what did God do? He made His enemies children. He took from His enemies and He made them part of His community. What a glorious truth that we who were far off, who were enemies, are now his sons and daughters. Now, how did this take place? It was by faith in Christ. And that brings us to our third point, faith in Christ. You see, it's the faith of the Syrophoenician woman that received such a glowing response. And the faith of that woman was implicit all throughout this story and Matthew's account of it makes it explicit. In Matthew's account, Jesus says to her, Woman, you have great faith. It's faith. It's not religious rituals. It's faith that makes this woman a child of God. That's what makes her a daughter. And this theme of faith runs all throughout Mark's gospel. In Mark 2, there's a paralyzed man that Jesus heals. He says, your faith has healed you. In Mark 5, he heals a woman that's been bleeding and he says, your faith has healed you. Whenever he chastises his disciples in the book of Mark, it's because of their lack of faith. And here it's the faith of this Syrophoenician woman. A woman who would seem to be an extreme and a total outsider that Jesus praises. And because of it, he treats her as a daughter and he heals her little girl. Kelvin speaks about this. He says, This woman's faith was so extreme because she had a sliver of his teachings. And yet, even with this sliver of Jesus' teachings, she was willing to empty herself and cling only to the hope that was Jesus. That he could heal her daughter. This is indeed great faith. And so we see that it's not religious rituals, it's not an ethnic identity that forms the people of God, the children of God. It's one thing, it's humble faith in Christ. That's it. If you have this humble faith in Christ, then you're part of the inside. You're part of his children. You're in the house. And this means several things for us, doesn't it? Well, it means firstly that we need to make sure that we're not setting up any religious rituals or we're not looking to an ethnic identity to establish if somebody is part of the covenant community. It's faith in Christ, isn't it? It's faith in Christ from first to last. And there can be times that we forget about this. I had a professor at Wheaton College. He was my Greek professor. His name was John Lonsma. He's from Grand Rapids, and his grandfather was a Baptist minister in Grand Rapids. And he said that his grandfather would walk to his congregation, and he said that sometimes some of the members of the Christian Reformed congregations would seriously and literally hide in the bushes and pelt him with rotten vegetables as he walked to his congregation. And he told it with a smile, sort of poking fun of me and my people. But you could tell that there was some pain to that story. What had happened is that a group of people had forgotten the fact that faith in Christ is what defines us. And so they had treated their brother like a dog. People of God, he was our brother. There are many ways that we might do this. Children, I don't know if you're ever sitting at school and you see somebody looking for a place to sit, but you keep them outside. You don't want to be identified with them. If they have faith, they're your brother and they're your sister. You need to treat them as such. The rest of us, the way that we speak of those who we're less familiar with, people in other traditions, we must watch our tongue and be careful when we speak of them. Because if they have faith in Christ, then they're our brother. They're our sister. The second thing that we can learn from this is that there are times, aren't there, where we feel as though we are enemies of God. I don't know if you've ever felt this way. But there's times where we feel distant. We feel as though our own actions must surely keep us from God. We think, I'm such an enemy, how could Christ ever welcome me in? I've made such an error. And we let guilt cripple us. Now, people of God, what we learn from this is even the most notorious, the most vicious enemies are welcomed by Christ. There is never a time where He will drive you away. If you come to Him, He will never, ever drive you away. And if you look to Him in faith, then you are one of His children. And He will treat you as a father. And He will show you the love and the compassion that He is so filled with. He will never drive you away. There is no individual that's too much of an enemy to be brought into the community of Christ. And so if you feel far from Him, come to Him. If you believe in Him, He will accept you as a son or as a daughter. Because He loves you. And the third thing that we're to remember is the way that He expressed that love for us. And for the fact that the faith that we have is a gift from Him. And it came because of Jesus. It's a gift that comes. And we need to realize that the reason that we're a covenant community is one reason. It's because Jesus allowed Himself to be treated as an outsider, didn't He? He was taken outside the city walls. And more than that, he was treated like a dog. He was beaten and he was whipped and he was hung from a tree. And he died for you and for me. And then he also rose again from the dead. And in doing this, He created that community. He made us. He secured our salvation. Our faith is a gift from Him. And we are a part of this community of faith solely because of the gracious work of our Savior, Jesus Christ. Never forget this. That because of Jesus, we who were enemies are now welcomed in as sons and as daughters, just like the Syrophoenician woman was. It's Jesus' work. And so as we leave this place and as we live this week, let's remember that we have a Father who's ours, who even when we were enemies decided to make us His children, to make us His. And that He accomplished this by the blood of Jesus, by his death and his resurrection. And so let's live in that glorious truth and remember that those who also have this faith in Christ are our brothers and are our sisters. Let's do this always and only to the glory of our God who has made us his own. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we do thank you and praise you for this glorious truth that you are our Father. And we thank you for the fact that you have made us yours. We know that we were powerless to save ourselves, that we were powerless to believe, and yet you gave us this great gift. Now help us to live in the reality of that truth. To love our brothers and sisters. to recognize them as children of God. And help us to always praise Jesus for the indescribable gift of his life, his death, and his resurrection and for because of this work making us a part of your community. We glory to be in that community. Thank you. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Now, this gift of faith is a great gift. And it comes to us solely because of the amazing grace of our God. And so, let us turn to number 380, amazing grace, and let's sing all of the verses. Remembering that there was a time when we were lost, but now we have been found because of the work of our great God. There was a time when we were on the outside, but we were brought in because of the work of Christ. Thank you.