Sunday Sermon Manuscript for August 16

The Gospel That Crosses Boundaries

Matthew 15:21–28

Jesus crosses over, a woman crosses to him, and the church crosses together.

The Boundary We Cross Alone, the Gospel We Cross Together

1. Summer seems to have slipped away, and before we knew it we have arrived at the threshold of autumn. Time always runs ahead of our awareness, and the seasons seem to push their way into our lives in an instant, crossing over the boundary of a single moment. Before we have had the chance to prepare, the season steps right up to us, crossing its own border to reach us. Today I want to share the Word with you about exactly this — what it means "to cross a boundary."

2. These days the singer and JYP founder Park Jin-young has been holding Bible lectures and open "gospel seminars," and he is having an influence on a great many people. Not long ago I read an article that he had rented the clubhouse of a golf course near Los Angeles to hold one of these seminars. The Park Jin-young I remember is, as you well know, someone who made his name through a boldness that broke the taboos of his era.

3. With provocative lyrics and costumes he drew both controversy and attention at once; as the head of a management company, he tirelessly set out to make Korean music known in America — a person who has always carried a challenging, boundary-pushing image. That such a person should become absorbed in Christianity and start lecturing on the Bible is bound to draw people's interest; and it seems there are quite a few who find it refreshing.

4. And yet, as a pastor, there is a part of me that is a little concerned. Above all, my concern is this: without any deep grounding in church history, systematic theology, or biblical theology, he takes pride in "interpreting purely from the text alone," while in reality he is tearing down, by the force of personal conviction, the framework of doctrine that a long tradition has guarded.

5. If you look at what he teaches, he divides the gospel into two — the gospel of Jesus and Paul's gospel to the Gentiles — and explains them as separate things. And his understanding of the Trinity stands at a distance from the church's orthodox confession. For instance, he treats the Holy Spirit as somehow lighter than the Father and the Son, or explains the Spirit as though it were "a part of God's Spirit" — and this is quite different from the confession of the orthodox church. Controversy follows him that this resembles the teaching of the Salvation Sect (구원파), which he himself denies; but rather than arguing over whether that connection is true or not, my concern is that there is a clear danger in the very content of what he is teaching.

6. To share such things privately, one to one, would not be a great problem. But when he holds full-fledged lecture events and teaches countless people on YouTube, I found myself thinking that when an unexamined, private doctrine spreads as though it were the truth, the ripple effect is bound to be greater than we imagine.

7. Is this person's problem simply that he never attended seminary? No, it is not. The truth is that the gospel, by its very nature, always crosses boundaries. The gospel always presses out beyond our fences. So the real question is not "does it cross the boundary, or does it not?"

8. The real question is "how does it cross?" Alone, or together? By a single person's conviction, or upon the confession that the whole church, following Jesus, has built up over long ages? This is precisely why, in every service of worship, we confess the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed.

9. It is because we must remember that this confession is by no means a light thing — that the long tradition and the hard struggle of the church are held within it. My hope is that today's Word will confirm for us where the standard lies for the boundary the gospel crosses. The gospel always crosses boundaries. And today's text shows us the very first scene of it.

Jesus Was the First to Cross That Boundary (v. 21)

10. The text begins like this: "Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon" (v. 21). Here, "that place" is Gennesaret — that is, the region of Galilee. In the scene immediately before this, Jesus had been in dispute with the Pharisees and scribes in Gennesaret and Galilee over the law of purity.

11. It was a quarrel about the ritual of cleanness — that they ate without washing their hands. In that dispute Jesus turned it back on them: "It is not what goes into the mouth but what comes out of the mouth that defiles a person," rebuking the hypocrisy of those who only pretended to be clean on the outside. And then, leaving that very place, he went to the Gentile land of "Tyre and Sidon."

12. The same Jesus who had just been arguing over what it is that truly defiles a person now crosses over, in his own body, into the Gentile land that the Jews regarded as "unclean." The truth he had declared with his lips, he now shows with his footsteps.

13. The word rendered here as "went" is, in Mark's Gospel, the verb "to depart." The verb Matthew uses, "went," carries a more expanded meaning than the verb "depart" that Mark uses. Where Mark uses a verb that simply means to change location, Matthew uses a word that signifies a transition — a conscious "crossing over." In this way Matthew adds the sense that Jesus' going to Tyre and Sidon was not merely a movement between regions, but a change, a turning point.

14. In other words, Jesus "deliberately, and quite intentionally, crossed that boundary." The gospel always crosses boundaries. And today's text records that it was Jesus who took that first step.

A Woman Crossed That Boundary to Reach Him (vv. 22–27)

15. In that very place he had crossed over to, Jesus meets a woman. The text records it this way: "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'" (v. 22).

16. This "Canaanite" woman, Mark's Gospel calls "a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin" (Mark 7:26). Yet Matthew deliberately changes this to the name "Canaanite," bringing sharply into view that she is a woman of a people historically bound to Israel in deep-rooted enmity.

17. For Israel, Canaan was a wall that could not be crossed, ethnically and religiously — and to that is added her being a "woman." Even one of these three would have been reason enough to have nothing to do with her; yet Matthew deliberately sets upon this stage a figure who stands in the most excluded place of all.

18. And Jesus treats this woman in a way that would have been familiar to any Jew. First, he is silent. In verse 23 we read that Jesus "did not answer her at all." To this woman's cry, he was deliberately silent. When the disciples, unable to bear it, ask him to send her away and be done with it, in verse 24 Jesus meets her with cold words: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

19. It sounds as if he is drawing a sharp line: "I have come for the Jews; the Gentile has nothing to do with me." And still, when the woman kneels and clings to him (v. 25), in verse 26 Jesus seems to raise the wall even higher with a saying: "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."

20. In this exchange that runs from silence to refusal to insult, the woman's response is astonishing. The higher the wall rises, the less she retreats; instead she offers Jesus a confession that not even the disciples had made. She calls him "Lord!" She kneels and worships, and cries out to Jesus as though she were "the full and rightful heir of Israel's tradition of lament."

21. And decisively, when Jesus says, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs" (v. 26), the woman answers like this: "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table" (v. 27).

22. In Greek, the words for Lord (kyrios) and dog (kynarion) sound alike in their pronunciation, yet mean the exact opposite. The woman first grants Jesus' word: "Yes, Lord, that is so." And then she rearranges its meaning: "But in fact, even the dogs…." When Jesus approaches her with the word from the lowest place, the woman answers with wisdom and grit.

23. In truth this woman's response does not fit our common sense. Faced with a wall that keeps rising higher, it would seem more reasonable to stand up and argue back. To face down silence and neglect and insult with our heads held high — that is the ordinary response we know.

24. Yet this woman does not fight back; instead, she takes hold. She takes hold, saying even the crumbs will do. And it is right here that Matthew is showing us why Jesus crossed that boundary and, in a Gentile land, came to meet this Canaanite woman. The gospel always crosses boundaries. To the place Jesus first crossed over to, this time a woman crossed over — by faith.

The Church Crossed That Boundary Together (v. 28, and Us)

25. In verse 28, Matthew's Gospel, with the phrase "Then Jesus," reveals that everything in the way Jesus had dealt with this woman until now had been quite deliberate. It appears as if he had provoked this woman on purpose. And at last the word he speaks is this: "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed at that very hour.

26. And yet this one person's crossing was, in fact, the very boundary that one day the whole church would cross together. After the destruction of the Jerusalem temple (AD 70), the "Matthean community," which had until then remained like a sect within Judaism, underwent a great change. Until that time they had been Jewish Christians who had not left the synagogue, living under one roof with the Pharisees even as they argued with them.

27. But in the reordering that came after the temple's destruction — as the role of the synagogue was strengthened and the Pharisaic party rose as the leading power — the Matthean community finally came out from within the Jewish community, was established as an independent community of Christ, joined itself to Paul's ministry, and came to confess a gospel that embraces the Gentiles.

28. When we understand this background, we can see that just as Jesus crossed that boundary in his own body, this community, now come out to a new place, is also being encouraged to cross the boundary and welcome the Gentiles. The petition they once prayed in the Lord's Prayer — "Your will be done" — is now being fulfilled in the life of a Gentile woman.

29. Returning to where we began: I personally support Park Jin-young's spiritual journey. My only hope is that, rather than treating what he has grasped by a single personal conviction as though it were the whole, he would look a little more deeply into the whole history and understanding of Christianity, and into its theological struggles. His problem, in truth, is not that he "crosses a boundary." I said the gospel by its nature always crosses boundaries — but his problem is that he tries to cross that boundary "alone, and without any testing."

30. Because the boundary the Canaanite woman crossed today — the boundary by which the gospel reaches the Gentiles — is precisely the boundary that one day the whole church crossed together and guarded together. When Paul was ministering, as we read in Acts 15, the apostles gathered together in Jerusalem and agreed together that the gospel of Jesus Christ is given to the Gentiles in the very same way. The church confirmed together that the gospel the disciples experienced and the gospel Paul proclaimed are not two, but one.

31. And when, after Christianity began, the questions surrounding the Trinity grew deep, the church gathered again and again — beginning at Nicaea in 325 and continuing over more than a hundred years, in place after place — until it came to confess that within the oneness of God there are three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, sharing the same essence, power, and eternity. Upon this faith, which we confess today in the creed, all of Christianity stands together.

32. And so the doctrine of Christianity did not simply drop out of the sky one day. The entire foundation of the faith we confess today was built up over a long time, discussed together by the church and labored over together by its theologians. That is why it is not, in fact, possible to claim that one has understood the whole of Christianity by one's own thinking alone.

33. For there is a clear reason here, and a clear background. To put it another way, the Apostles' Creed and the councils are not a brake that blocks the crossing of boundaries; they are the event in which the whole church confirmed together and guarded together the very crossing that the Canaanite woman had shown us first. And so personal faith and the discernment of the community are not pointing in opposite directions, but in the same direction.

The Gospel Always Crosses Boundaries — Never Alone, but Together

34. Recently I read a piece that laid out the conditions for a growing church. The conditions for a church to grow — what an appealing subject that is! The findings for American churches and Korean churches differed a little from one another, but there was a common thread. It is a community that has not splendor but simple discipleship, with a high level of participation among its members; a community whose pastor's leadership is not authoritarian, whose life is shared up close with the people; and, above all, a community that does not hesitate to change — this is the church that grows.

35. And here "not hesitating to change" did not mean noisily starting up new projects, but rather opening the boundaries of the church ever more universally and inclusively, and communicating with its neighbors. In the end, the growing church was a church that keeps opening its own boundaries.

Conclusion — Where Is Our Tyre and Sidon?

36. The gospel always crosses our boundaries. Jesus crossed first; a woman crossed over toward that grace; and the church even now is crossing together. So then, where is our "Tyre and Sidon" today? Who are the people we thoughtlessly regard as "dogs" and keep outside the table? What thresholds and boundaries are drawn right now within our Yeolin Church?

37. Before that boundary, the faith that takes hold and says, "Even the crumbs will do" — that very great faith is what brings the wall down. In truth, that is also the reason our Yeolin Church stands where it stands today. For an open church is always born out of an open gospel.

38. And in that place of faith, Jesus says even today, "Let it be done for you as you wish." Just as the woman's daughter was healed at that very hour, I believe that in the very place where we open our boundaries, the kingdom of God draws near.

39. Beloved members of Yeolin Church, the gospel always crosses boundaries. It is my earnest hope that today, too, all of us — you and I together — would be those who cross that boundary not alone, but together.