Dear Friends,
The story we’re about to read in Matthew is very troubling. A foreign, marginalized woman implores Jesus to heal her daughter. By the end of the story, Jesus has done so, but in the interval between her begging for help and the healing, Jesus says some terrible things to her. There seems no way around it: his treatment of her is inexplicable; he is arrogant, racist, sexist, and just plain mean.
We may believe that Jesus is truly human, but we don’t want him to be too human. Before reading Matthew 15:21–28 and finding out what the hubbub is all about, take a moment for a prayer for illumination:
Merciful Savior, your suffering has saved our lives, secured our future, and restored us to relationship with God. Remove the shame and fear that cause us to cower in your presence. By the power of your Spirit, open our eyes and hearts to your Word of love, mercy, healing, and blessing. Through Christ Jesus our Lord, we pray. Amen.
It’s important that Matthew begins by recording Jesus’s travels. He “went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.” This is an area well north and west of Jerusalem and Jesus’s hometown of Nazareth, and due west of Caesarea Philippi, which will be the setting of this coming Sunday’s reading from Matthew. Tyre, Sidon, and Caesarea Philippi are all outside the territory inhabited by Israel. A few villages in the area may have included some Jews, but this is predominately a Gentile area. It’s an entirely unfamiliar, likely unwelcoming, place for this itinerant Jewish preacher. So we have to ask, what is the one who was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24) doing there?
Matthew refers to the woman as a Canaanite in verse 22. Only in Matthew and in two brief references in Acts is Canaan mentioned in the New Testament. Mark’s gospel also includes this story, but Mark describes the woman as being “a Greek, a Syrophoenician by birth.” (Mark 7:26). Mark’s depiction of the woman is more precise and accurate. But Matthew’s goal is not accuracy. His saying that the woman was from Canaan is like us saying that Robert DeNiro is from New Amsterdam rather than New York.
By calling her a Canaanite, Matthew is reaching back to the earliest memories of the people of Israel and recalling and affirming the enduring expanse of God’s history with them. He wants his congregation of Jewish-Christians (and us) to recall the entirety of their history, beginning with God’s covenant with Abraham and Moses; continuing with their settlement in the promised land, which had been inhabited by the Canaanites; and persisting even now, in the times in which Matthew is writing.
He is also universalizing the story: it’s not about a single incident in a rural setting north of Israel; it’s about God’s ongoing history with God’s people, a relationship that will soon expand to include even those who were vanquished as enemies, as we’ll see.
And by calling the woman a Canaanite, Matthew is reminding us of how lowly her status is. She is not only foreign and thus pagan, but also stateless. The Canaanites inhabited the promised land before the Israelites settled there, and they’ve now utterly vanished. There are no Canaanite scrolls or writings; there is no longer a land of Canaan; her heritage is virtually non-existent. Whether we imagine her to be from Greece, Syrophoenicia, or the now vanished land of Canaan, it is clear that the woman is neither of the house of Israel nor a likely friend to any who come from there. Understanding that she is an outsider is crucial to this story.
In these eight brief verses, the woman refers to Jesus as Lord three times. The first time, she not only calls him Lord, but invokes his heritage and prophetic legitimacy, addressing him as “Lord, Son of David…” (15:22) We’ll never know how she knows to use that title, but by doing so, she acknowledges that Jesus is not some local magician or run-of-the-mill miracle worker, but the Messiah, the long-expected one of the Jewish faith.
“But he did not answer her at all.” (15:23) Nowhere else in the gospels do we see him treat anyone so harshly and with such arrogance. Jesus is silent, even as she acknowledges his status and Israel’s. Most alarmingly, he’s silent in the face what is certainly a desperate plea. This is the only time in the gospels that Jesus fails to respond to a request for help. She keeps shouting – shouting! an extraordinary thing from such a lowly outsider! – until the disciples, no doubt horrified by her rudeness and unseemly insistence, ask Jesus to send her away.
And now Jesus breaks his silence. “He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’” (15:24) It’s not clear whom he’s addressing when he answers. Matthew seems almost purposefully unclear here. Is Jesus addressing the woman or his disciples? Some commentators, perhaps trying to make his answer a little less arrogant and exclusive, speculate that he’s addressing the woman and thereby at least acknowledging her presence. It seems to me more likely that Jesus is responding to his disciples’ urging him to send her away rather than addressing her. Or maybe he’s thinking aloud, trying to define the scope of his mission and messiahship in the face of the woman’s dramatic entreaty.
Finally, when the woman continues to plead for help, Jesus does respond to her, but his response is uncharacteristically cruel and mean. “He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’” (15:26) He’s calling her a dog, an enormously insulting way to address anyone, including one so wretched and lowly as this distraught woman.
And here, my friends, is one of the best retorts in the history of spoken language. “She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’” (15:27)
I warned you that this is a tough read! Over the years, preachers, teachers, and scholars have tried to clean up this story in many ways.
One such attempt has it that Jesus was testing the woman. When she finally passed the test, “Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.” (15:28)
What do we learn from this theory and these words? The child is healed, after all, thanks to her mother’s persistence, which Jesus calls her faith. But what a cruel test of faith this would be! Understanding that last verse as a test of faith causes a multitude of pain. How many people in the midst of grief and fear carry this passage in their hearts and imagine that Jesus is telling them that if they had just had more faith, their loved one would not be ill or would not have died? And if that’s the case, then our faith must be lacking. What an impossible, entirely misguided, burden of responsibility we take upon ourselves. What tragic self-torture, to think that Jesus would test us so cruelly. This goes against everything we know about Jesus.
All of us suffer from failures of faith. I know that my faith barometer waxes and wanes at various points in my life, even at various points during my week. Yet I never worry that Christ will judge me or ignore me for a lapse of faith. I believe in God’s grace, freely given, and unearned. The Canaanite woman had nothing available to her except for her untutored, intuitive faith, and that faith was focused on the one who could heal her daughter. But I hope that none of us will fall into the trap of thinking the depth of our faith controls our destiny.
This reading begs other questions as well. Some try to explain its cruelty by blaming the translation. The Greek word that has been translated “dogs” is in the diminutive and really means little dogs, sweet little puppies. But really, does that explain Jesus’s apparent mercilessness? Does calling the woman a puppy instead of a dog help you to understand his actions any better? I don’t think so either.
Still others speculate that it was because the woman submitted to Jesus and knelt before him that Jesus finally gave in and healed her daughter. But Jesus never asks for her submission. His realm is not one of tyranny even though his initial silence is terrible and outmatched only by his callow name-calling. Nowhere else does Jesus demand submission. What Jesus demands of us is just this: to love one another and witness to God’s love for the world.
We’ll do almost anything to make Jesus be who we want him to be, especially in a story as off-putting as this one. But remember, this is a gospel, written for a purpose: to share the words and witness of Jesus and to inspire newly-emerging Christians to mission in his name.
Matthew’s gospel ends with the compelling Great Commission, the charge to Christ’s followers to take their witness to the greater world. The Great Commission is a radical new vision of Jesus’s and the church’s mission and of Jesus himself. Our reading for today is part of the groundwork that Matthew is laying as he prepares his readers (and us) for the Great Commission.
Matthew shows us Jesus in an alien land responding to a plea from an outsider. And he shows us that Jesus recognizes truth when he hears it, including from this stateless Gentile woman. Jesus sees something radically new in this outsider: someone ready to be part of a flock much bigger than the one he had understood as his mission to the house of Israel. The Canaanite woman’s persistence not only makes her daughter whole; it also shows Jesus the larger world he has come to heal and make whole.
Christians throughout the ages have proclaimed that “Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever.” (Hebrews 13:8) The unspoken understanding in that statement is that Jesus’s divinity is proven by his eternal sameness, his consistency, his constancy. He is beyond the shadow of changeability. But here we see the gospel writer telling us that in fact, Jesus can change. From initially not even deigning to respond to the Canaanite woman’s earnest, desperate pleas for help, he turns on a dime and almost casually performs a healing miracle. Matthew presents us with a Jesus whose understanding of his mission is clearly evolving beyond the people of Israel to the wider world, just as the infant church that is beginning in Matthew’s time is evolving and broadening beyond the boundaries of Israel to the wider world.
Only ten days ago, we heard Jesus call Peter a man of little faith – Peter, who had been chosen by Jesus to be one of his initial followers. Today, we read about a person who is the polar opposite of Peter – a woman, a Gentile, an outsider, a foreigner – who is recognized by Jesus for her great faith. Matthew is showing us an evolving Jesus and also telling us and the emerging Christian church that faith, whether little or great, cannot be limited to any single group of people, or to any class or gender, nationality or ethnicity, or economic status. It is through the grace of God and the love of Christ that we come to faith.
Jesus’s divine nature was only slowly beginning to be understood or articulated in the gospels and was thus only occasionally revealed. What we see in chapter 15 of Matthew is something new: Jesus, fully human and fully divine. And we see that God can change in God’s understanding of and for whom God is God, and hence to whom the mission of Jesus is directed. God’s covenant is now expanding beyond a single people to include even the stateless outcast.
As Jesus changed with new situations, so, too, must we be ready to change. We must be willing to learn how to change as our faith grows and matures and as our understanding of our place in the world and God’s plan is revealed. As we broaden our responses to our faith, we enable God’s love to be expressed and lived out in these exceptionally challenging times. By allowing ourselves to be flexible and by trusting in the power of our faith, we can become vehicles of transformation for ourselves and the world. I pray that, with increasingly deeper experience of God’s love, we, like Jesus, will have the courage to change in response to the radical demands that we’re presented with in these anxious times.
This prayer from the Book of Common Prayer seems particularly apt for this challenging but ultimately inspiring reading:
Almighty God, you sent your Holy Spirit to be the life and light of your church. Open our hearts to the riches of your grace, that we may bring forth the fruit of the Spirit in love, joy, and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.