When we last left Jesus and the disciples, they were sailing slowly on the Sea of Galilee, headed in the direction of Gennesaret on the western side.

You’ll remember that it had been a dark and stormy night, although that’s all behind them now. 

Now, the sun is coming up, and between the disciples’ sense of awe at Jesus and their own exhaustion from sailing through the storm, I’d have to guess that everything is pretty quiet on that boat. 

One of the former fisherman takes the tiller just to give the poor helmsman a break, and as the western shore gets closer and closer, it’s not just the landlubbers who start to seem brighter and brighter. 

As they sail up to the shore, there’s the bus they’d chartered, waiting for them, with its driver absorbed in the newspaper and completely unaware of any storm, any peril, any anything. 

Even so, he sees them as they hop on.  

No smiles, no nods, no good mornings.  

They climb aboard wearily. 

Jesus is the last one on, sitting in that front seat on the right that’s just over the driver’s shoulder. 

But the driver can’t help but notice that Jesus is sitting there by himself and not chatty in his usual way. 

This time, there’s no Peter sitting next to him with maps and a clipboard. 

No Judas trying to get him to go through his receipts.  

No Thomas peppering him with questions.  

After a little while, they pull over for breakfast somewhere, and as so often happens, Jesus ends up getting into it with some hotshots from Jerusalem – something about how the disciples are an insult to the faith. 

The driver knows that it’s standard enough stuff for this crew, but this time, it seems as if it gets to Jesus.  

When they get back on the bus, he starts talking about how ugly words can be…how some people make religion into a bunch of rules about things like eating, when it’s clear that what comes out of your mouth says a whole lot more about you than any morsel you decide to put into it. 

He says that, the master, and it turns out to be kind of conversation stopper for the whole bus, because who’s going to venture a comment after that? 

And besides, they’d piled on from the boat, all tired and wet and lost in thought to begin with.  

II.

This is all a pre-quel to this morning’s Gospel, of course. 

I offer it as a way into one of the oddest and most unsettling stories about Jesus that we have in all of Scripture.  

It’s a story that some Christians find hard to read, and most find even harder to square. 

The Jesus who loves sinners…the Jesus who stands on the side of the forgotten and the dispossessed…the Jesus who sees through the superficial labels that the wordl puts on people…heck, the Jesus who teaches kindness and patience and humility…well…you wouldn’t get him confused with this guy. 

This guy gets approached by a desperate woman with a sick girl back at home, and at first, he ignores her.  Then he calls her a name that polite folks don’t use on Sunday morning. 

Who is this guy?  

If it were Peter or one of the other disciples, the story would make more sense.  

We’re used to their lapses as if they were our own. 

I mean, just last week, we were talking about Peter and the storm and the boat and the sinking in the water and the ye of little faith, and all that.  

But what are we supposed to do with this? 

III. 

That’s why it seems so important to begin with how exhausted they all are, even Jesus.

It hadn’t always been like this. 

Back in the early days, when they’d all been brighter eyed and bushier tailed, Jesus wound down the Sermon on the Mount by criticizing the very things that seem to be coming out of his mouth this morning. 

Back then, he’d preached, “You’ve heard it said, ‘Do not give dogs what is sacred.’ You’ve heard it said, ‘Do not throw your pearls before swine.’” 

And he went on, “But I tell you: ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened” (Matthew 7:6-7). 

That was then.  

It seems as if the shoe is on the other foot, now. 

It seems like now, words are allowed to be ugly, after all.  

Or, at the very least, as one commentator puts it, in this story, Jesus “gets caught with his compassion down.” 

IV.

Who hasn’t been there? 

“Caught with our compassion down”? 

Who hasn’t felt that urge to pull away from all of the everything? 

I had a pastor friend years ago who was driving a U-Haul from Virginia to a new position in Connecticut in the days before you could plug in your cell phone and talk “hands free.”  

And all along the way, every fifty miles or so, his phone kept ringing and ringing with people from back in Virginia who somehow hadn’t gotten word that he and his family were not only leaving, but in fact, had left—and these people were calling about this and that, with each concern something it was now squarely on someone else’s shoulders to do.  

Each time, he would dutifully answer, driving the truck with one hand and cradling that phone in his ear as he hurtled north on 95.  

Each time, he would dutifully explain.  

All things considered, he did quite well. 

He made it as far as the Palisades in New Jersey before finally pulling over, taking his phone and throwing it off the side of the cliff and into the Hudson River.  

But up until that point, hey: he wasn’t going to let anyone catch him with his compassion down.  

V.

It seems odd, I guess, to say that when we get caught with our compassion down, we need God.  

In moments like that, we need so many things. Most are closer to hand and far easier to provide. 

After all, why bring God into it when a nap would do it?  Or a day away from our screens? Or a chance to vent for an hour to a willing ear? 

And don’t get me wrong: such offices are holy enough. Bless each one of them. 

But the thing that gets my attention is that it’s not just those things by themselves, restorative as they are.  

It’s that, as the writer Francis Spufford puts it, there’s something that “breathes and shines through” them, if we have eyes to see. 

In fact, as he says, there is something that “breathes and shines through us if we let it.” (Unapologetic, 197, my italics).

And that is the thing we need most of all.  

Spufford describes the church’s work as being, like Christ himself, “a channel by which mending enters the world.” 

And it seems to me that what Jesus needs most in this moment we’ve been talking about is just that: some kind of mending. 

And for that, he needs God. 

He needs a way to reconnect to what it is that breathes and shines through all of the things, even the ones that have brought him to this point…this point where it seems like he’s ready to throw his cell phone off the nearest cliff. 

VI.

And at that very moment…right at that cliffside moment…it’s this woman, this mother, made bold by love and desperation, who reminds Jesus how to be the Son of God.  

Because at that moment, something shines through her. 

Whether it’s her earnestness, her daring, or just her plain sass. 

She’s not Jewish, they’re not in Israel, it wasn’t a proper woman’s place to speak to a man in public without being spoken to. 

At first he ignores her, then he outright insults her, but she won’t fold.

“I’m not trying to talk my way into your party,” she says. “I’m here for the crumbs.”

VII.

I may have mentioned this before; if I have, I apologize. 

But a few years ago, Liz and the girls went to an event in Stamford where, it turns out, Paul Simon was invited to come on stage and play a song.  

It was outdoors somewhere.  One of those little stages where you hop up one step and stand on that industrial fake green grass. 

Anyway, when it was time, Paul hopped up with his guitar in a beat up old guitar case, gave it a quick tune, adjusted the mic, tapped it to make sure it was working, sang and sat down. 

I’m sure Paul was great.  

But what was more striking was that, in those short moments, what shined through was that he wasn’t carrying himself like a superstar, surrounded by folks to take care of things for him.    

He was just a guy with the band. 

VIII.

Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not suggesting that in this morning’s gospel, Jesus is holding out on the woman like some sort of temperamental superstar.  

But something shines through her.

In this moment where he finds himself falling back on all the old rules in order to make her stop, it’s as if he hears himself talking – really hears himself – and he remembers that he’s never been much of a rules guy. 

When it comes down to it, he knows a whole lot more about scrounging for crumbs than he ever will about fine dining. 

He knows who his people are.   

Maybe he remembers the mountaintop, so many miles ago now, where he’d spoken about a whole new set of rules and given a vision of a new people.   

Jesus comes back to himself.  

He comes back to the love of God. 

Whatever it is that shines through her, in response, something comes to shine through Jesus once again.  

In some sense, it’s not just the sick girl back home who is healed.  

Both Jesus and the girl’s mother are healed, too – all three of them are mended in this exchange – and all three of them depart, rejoicing.  

IX.

It’s an unsettling story at first, isn’t it?   

It’s unsettling to imagine Jesus feeling fed up with being Jesus-y. 

Like everyone else, we count on him for that. 

But its deeper message is to look below surfaces—to look below our superficial impressions, whether they’re impressions of someone very different than we are, or even our superficial impressions and expectations of God.  

Look below the surface for what shines through. 

Because when life seems hardest and most depleting, there’s something there if we’re willing to look.  

Something shines through to remind us how much God loves us and to help us find our way. 

When we see it, we come to recognize ourselves again and find it in us to go forth, rejoicing.  

Amen.