From Best Sermons, Vol. X, edited by G. Paul Butler (New York: Trident Press, 1968)

A GAUNTLET WITH A GIFT IN IT
by Paul Scherer

My subject is borrowed from those lines of Mrs. Browning:

God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,
And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,
A gauntlet with a gift in 't.

Not that this story of the Syrophoenician woman records any such "sharp and sudden" answer. Jesus did not thrust the thing she prayed for in her face. Quite the contrary. But I like that figure of the gauntlet with the gift in it. In medieval times throwing down a gauntlet meant the issuing of a challenge: and that's what keeps going on here, back and forth. The whole movement is a kind of drama in three acts. In the first, the woman of Canaan issues her challenge to Jesus, just as we issue ours to God: "Have mercy on me." And as so often with us, the curtain goes down without an answer. Nothing happens. In act number two, picking up her gauntlet at last, Jesus seems to do more than fling it back, and that none too gently: "It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs." In the third act, she stoops to accept what is in effect His challenge to her: "Truth, Lord: yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table." When suddenly she discovers in the gauntlet a gift: "0 woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt."

It seems to me that from the start her case is quite remarkably our own. The challenge of some entreaty is thrown at God's feet: "Lord, help me." And little if anything seems to come of it. Call it the riddle of unanswered prayer, if you wish, with only this one proviso, that you understand there is no such thing. Let's say rather that the story is a sort of parable under which you can make out the features of every unsatisfying experience we have with the Christian Gospel: times when the claims that are all too often entered for it just don't work out—nobody makes them good; when we are over here, and God is over there—urgent human need and clamant human faith on one side, with Almighty power and Eternal love on the other—everything exactly right for a miracle, except that something is unaccountably wrong, so that all we seem to get out of it is a sort of mystifying rebuff. What's the reason for that? Is any light thrown on it there in the coasts of Tyre and Sidon?

In this instance at least we are bound to say at once without any hesitation at all, it's quite obvious, that the difficulty lies primarily with Jesus Himself. And it cannot be reduced, I think, to such naive terms as that He wants to test her faith, or is trying to show His disciples that she has more than they have, so much more that she isn't to be discouraged by any obstacles—all on the off-chance that they will have the grace to hold her faith up beside their own and get the point. It has even been argued that by His very inattention and apparent harshness He hoped to stir their compassion, of which you would say on the evidence that they had not too great a store: hoped to provoke them to a quicker mercy the next time somebody came appealing to them from beyond the bounds of their own Jewish tradition. None of it offers any very significant clue. In the Gospel record the passage is given a place which attaches to it a far greater importance than any of these interpretations would suggest. It's introduced at the very turning point of Jesus' life, in the hour when He had to make the most momentous decision He ever made, as if once more He were facing the dark temptations of the wilderness. To say that in such a crisis He was engaged in some experiment with this woman, or with His disciples, using her as an object lesson, scarcely makes sense. He didn't indulge in that kind of thing.

But I want to speak of His "problem" later. Meanwhile, because the hopes we cherish seem so consistently deferred, and the "happy issue" out of all our afflictions, as the collect has it, is for so many so interminably postponed, we have a "problem" of our own. And frequently enough it isn't located where we think it is. With the result that we rarely if ever get a good look at it: we are too busy looking where it isn't. Every time our moral integrity nets us something less than the peace we think it should; every time the second mile we are willing to go, perhaps even the third, fails to bring us much farther along; every time matters quit moving to suit us, in spite of our pious fidelity to "all good counsels and all just works"—right away we regard the strange phenomenon as one of the perplexities of the faith, one of the so-called problems of religion! Before you can snap your fingers, quick as thought, we have located it somewhere among the inscrutable ways of Providence. It's God alone who is the puzzle! We ask Him to guide us, and He allows us to go wrong. "From the crafts and assaults of the devil," says the ancient Litany of the Church—we often sing!—"Good Lord, deliver us." It sounds all right set to music. But you know what comes of it. "From war and bloodshed," "from sudden and evil death,"—all you have to do is to read the story of the last fifty years for comment. "Give to all nations peace and concord." "We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord." And Vietnam bursts into flame, and the Cold War goes on. We can't make Him out. He isn't the God we've been looking for. He's a conserver of the wicked, and a prodigal waster of the righteous. Job said it, why shouldn't we? Nothing is to be gained by trying to keep it a secret.

Some appreciable gain may be had, though, by not plunging into that mystery ahead of time. There is one prior consideration to be reckoned with, and it's this: that the mystery is not always or altogether in God. It is barely possible that where we are concerned some change has to take place in us here, on our side of life, before anything can happen over there on His. I do not believe there is any hint of that in the story. All that can be said is that when this woman of Canaan addressed Jesus as "Son of David," we are supposed to understand that she was paying Him such high honor as few if any at home had gotten around to yet. It may have been nothing more than Matthew's way of putting things, adding a little Hebrew touch to Mark, or drawing on some source of his own; but if there was as much of the heathen in her as there is in us, she may have been framing her lips to a strange language which she thought Jesus might at least acknowledge, if not accept, piecing it together out of the whisperings that were going the rounds as far away as Tyre and Sidon. If she could only get hold of the god's name, and pronounce it correctly, so ran men's minds, it would serve as a charm in her mouth to maneuver, or possibly to compel, the deity at the other end to do her bidding!

I am sure that's pressing it too far. We are not to spin it out in any such fashion as that. Still, it's true that for us at any rate there is a moment when importunity, which is all right, tends to slide over that way almost insensibly into magic, which is all wrong. Jesus is forever insisting that we should pray resolutely for what we want, even stubbornly, like the widow who kept pestering the judge for an injunction against her enemy, refusing to take "No" for an answer, plucking at his sleeve, following him into his chambers, saying, "Please, sir!" But to implore is not to exploit. We exploit God when we try to use Him for purposes of our own. That we can't is a tough lesson for us to learn, and God many a time has to use sinewy means to teach it. When you put bluntly this saying of Jesus, "I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel," you get something which very often is bluntly true. "What you are asking of me is not my business." Again and again when we reach out our hands to God that's what He seems to say. And again and again, I have no doubt, that's what He means to say! It isn't His business to gather up all the feathers after we've made them fly, and tidy up the whole place for us. It isn't His business to do away with all the tragic chances of human existence for me and my wife and my son John; to resolve my complexes, provide me with peace of mind, undergird my way of life. It isn't His business to give people some guerdon of global stability; and if that's what a man wants, or a nation either, as the upshot of returning to religion, they'd both better quit returning and promptly: they might conceivably stumble on a little honesty down the road back to where they were before!

"He answered her not a word." If that's how it is with you too, instead of asking right off about God, or about religion, if there is anything in it, or about prayer, if it's worth the trouble, why not put it to yourself, soberly; before you say "Almighty God, our heavenly Father," put to yourself the question that takes precedence over all the others: "Whose business is this that I'm spreading out before Him? Is it His? And what is more, how much of what isn't His is mine?" It may well help to clear the air, like a strong wind blowing. The weight which properly belongs on your shoulders will be back where it should be; but now He'll be under it with you, and everything you hope for and all those you love will be there in His hands.

But Jesus had His own "problem" to wrestle with that day. Here is something even more important, and I want to turn to it. There was a reason why He didn't take up her challenge at once, a reason that had to do with Him, not with her; and there was a reason why, when He did take it up, He seemed only to fling it back. This is the second act of the drama, and let's not try to soften it any, or make Him conform to our ideas of gentility. "It is not meet to take the children's bread, and to cast it to dogs." Just like that. Take the word to mean little dogs, pet dogs, lap dogs, it still means dogs. The trouble with us is, we don't understand how tortured it was, this thing He was saying, or the agony of soul out of which it came.

He had brought His disciples with him, mile after mile over here, north and west of Galilee, twenty miles it was, onto foreign soil; because He was beginning to catch the unmistakable drift of things back home. They were having a good deal less to do with His gospel than before, there where God had sent Him to do His work. They didn't so much like anymore what He was saying, and they didn't like what He was doing. If only He could get away and think it through, maybe He would know better what it all meant. So He entered into a house, "and would have no man know it: but he could not be hid." When suddenly here was this woman, crying at the edge of the crowd, pressing through, in between and around, nearer and nearer: while His mind was being torn by the one last desperate choice He had to make—between getting away, with life over here, and going back, with death over there! He may even have gotten up when He heard her and left the house.

His disciples, though, came trailing after Him, begging Him to do what she wanted and send her away; not because they were interested in her, but because they were interested in themselves. She was a nuisance. They were out of patience with her. And the only satisfaction they got was this almost absentminded word of His about "the lost sheep of the house of Israel," as if He were talking to Himself, the bitter struggle underneath triggered to the point of breaking up through the silence into speech. That was the task God had set Him, and His thoughts kept running on it: the poor, the outcast, the downtrodden of His own people. They were the chosen sons and daughters of God: He had been born to that conviction. Through them God would work. And He had nothing to show for it now but the storm that was blowing up there in the land that He loved. Herod was seeking His life. Everywhere He had gone there had been sidelong glances and men muttering. But you couldn't fly off at a tangent—or could you?—just because there were clouds on the horizon. The devil had wanted Him to do that in the wilderness. You had to go on with God's appointment, for life or death! And the woman stole up: "Lord, help me." It was "the children's bread" she was after—and it wasn't fair! In God's name, what sense did it make? Back to Jerusalem and Calvary? Was that it? As the shadows closed in.

May I stop the movement there long enough to suggest something to you before we listen to another word? When God flings that kind of challenge in front of you; when He refuses outright, or says that if anything can happen at all you'll have to wait for it, or warns you that when it does happen it may not be what you want: don't write it off, bleak and blank, as if it were some passionless and arbitrary will that just knows best and brushes you aside with a gesture, like a child sent back to its toys. Those lines of the Rubaiyat are devilish:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

Your tears? If Jesus means anything, the tears are in God's eyes! It's a human way of speaking, but nobody from Genesis to Revelation was ever afraid of that. What if it were the only way of speaking humanity has! If there is no struggle in God's heart to correspond with this that's going on in the heart of Jesus, then the Old Testament and the New have been at great pains to say nothing at all. Every time these pages allow us to listen in on God, He's oddly like this Man of Sorrows. Here He is in Hosea: "Ephraim is joined to his idols: let him alone . . . O Ephraim, what shall I do unto thee? . . . I taught Ephraim how to walk, I took him up in my arms . . . Ephraim, how shall I give thee up? . . . I am God, and not man." So in Isaiah, in Job, in the Psalms. Between our need and God's answer, there's always a struggle in Him that stands in the way.

Say it's the struggle between His wisdom and His love, and you may not be far wrong. We suppose that with Him it's all as simple as Yes or No. And it can't be. Now and then we think life itself is that simple; and it never is. You can't resolve anything into this or that: only into this, with one train of consequences, or that with another; maybe into neither. And God cares about it, and cares about the consequences. This morning when you got down on your knees, His knowledge of the long future must have been a burden to Him: He had so much more to think about than you had, weighing it all, and what would come of it. Perhaps some day we'll learn to trust Him for His wisdom, trust Him for the weight of the love that rests so unremittingly on His heart, leaving what we ask for where Jesus left it there in the garden: "Nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done!"

"The children's bread"—you couldn't cast that to the dogs. It wasn't fair. The rabbis made quite a' thing of it. Maybe Jesus was quoting them, half in irony and half in recoil, against the enlarging issues of His own experience. Here was the point where all at once He saw the road veering off from the people of God and running over among the Gentiles, and though loving His countrymen as He did He had to settle for it, and for the Cross! We know something of that bread, who it was; and they were tossing it out, would have none of it. "And Jesus departed from thence, and came nigh unto the Sea of Galilee." His journey into the coasts of Tyre and Sidon had gotten Him on toward His death. There was nowhere else for Him to go—He had become so entangled in His love; for love, you see, if you will not mistake my saying it, is God's weak spot!

And so, in the third act of the drama, the woman snared Him there. Snared Him in His own words, as Luther put it, who dwelt on this passage with great fondness. In His part speech, part reverie, she overheard Him, caught the hidden Yes lurking under the No, and act three opens. Quickly she took up the challenge, with this unspeakably radiant thing on her lips: "Truth, Lord." It's as if she had said, interrupting, "To the dogs? But that's exactly what I want to be! For 'the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters' table.' " And she found what He wanted her to find, "a gauntlet with a gift in it." "O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt."

I wonder now if we have "got our statues against the sky," as Virginia Woolf once wrote in her diary. Are you ready for what has to be said? Shall I say it? When everything looks just right for a miracle—your need over here, and God's power over there—but something seems unaccountably wrong, and the issue is postponed, could it be that just there and then the wisdom and the love that stand in God's way are stubbornly at work? That He's never so idle as He seems, or so silent as you think? There are afflicted people who need desperately to understand that, and lonely people, and unfortunate people, and people who have no patience left, and no hope left, and want to take life itself in their hands and throw it away as if it were nothing. What were the wisdom and love of God doing besides saying "No" the night Jesus prayed, "Father, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me"? I can give you the answer now: they were taking up a cross and holding it with tense muscles against the horizon of human life for all the ages—for you and me—to see it. What were the wisdom and love of God doing as Paul kept praying about his thorn? You know very well what they were doing: they were taking grace after grace and hiding it all away in that wild apostle's soul.

There was a lad once, not yet seven years old, sitting on his father's lap, waiting for the doctor to come. He knew that what had to be done would hurt: there wasn't much known then, out in the country, about local anesthetics. And he was sobbing as if his heart would break, whispering, "I don't want him, please don't let him come!" But a buggy drove up. The doctor came in and laid out his shining instruments under the lamplight on the table. One by one the father unclasped his son's fingers, with a look on his face that perhaps has never had to be on yours. Together they held the boy. What was wisdom doing then? And love? And do you think there is nothing like that in God?

It's our poor tragic wisdom down here that so often goes about mistakenly, what we call our love that looks around so pathetically among its treasures, then chooses something that's all wrong, and offers it there in its hands with a proud, smiling face. God's wisdom and God's love move down out of the past and future, casting about for the best He has. Why do we take up His will and stare at it, and connect it only with broken plans, and blind alleys from which there is no escape, and graves being filled with heavy, falling earth—as if all our dear hopes had been taken captive by it, by some sad, mysterious purpose, and made to surrender their short, bright lives in pitiful submission? Are there none to bear themselves like a jubilant host before it, with a spirit

Like the eagle's, who soars to meet the sun,
And cries exulting unto Thee, Lord God, Thy will be done!

Will you set some trinket against His wealth? Some random little gleaning against His harvest? "I will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son." And I never can get on with it; because He breaks it off. This God who has His own way of answering prayer. "My son! My son!"

"O woman, great is thy faith." Take the memory of His compassion with you to the foot of the Cross. Then look up at Him. The issue will be as near His wisdom and His love as His power is able to bring it. You can never hoard that—or can you? Hug it close, when you know it wants to break through to somebody else—right where you are.

Let us pray. What we ask of thee wisely, 0 God, do thou of thy great bounty bestow; with all that we so deeply need and know not how to ask: that in the knowledge of thy love we may have the peace that comes not of our striving but of thy gift, through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

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