When we meet Jesus in our gospel this morning, he has been having a rough time. His cousin John has recently been executed, the people of his hometown (Nazareth) have rejected him, and most recently he has been caught up in another fight with a group of Pharisees and scribes who come from Jerusalem to try to prosecute Jesus and his disciples for not washing their hands while refusing to engage with the substance of God’s commands. He is disappointed, frustrated at the ways God’s people seem unwilling to hear the heart of his teachings – and even his own disciples still don’t seem to be getting it!
Perhaps this is why Jesus relocates for awhile. Here’s what happens. Matthew tells us in v. 21 that Jesus leaves the heart of Judea and travels far to the northwest. Here, a Canaanite woman seeks Jesus out and begins shouting after him, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” Jesus doesn’t respond. He ignores her shouts and keeps walking. Eventually, the disciples get tired of her following and shouting after them and ask Jesus to send her away. Jesus tells them that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”, and does not send her away. The woman persists, she kneels before Jesus asking for help, and Jesus initially refuses, telling her that he cannot “take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs”. She throws his refusal back at him, saying “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table,” and Jesus relents, praising the greatness of her faith and healing her daughter.
Now, before I continue, let me pause for a moment. I want to acknowledge that this passage is, in my view at least, the most difficult passage in the gospels. Jesus’ response to this woman seems cruel. He equates her with a dog, which is a slur that Jews of the day used to refer to ‘unclean’ Gentiles. There are hundreds of years of commentaries on this passage that try to explain away the discomfort of this moment, and none of them seem satisfying to me. Who is this Jesus that speaks so harshly to a woman in need? I don’t know how to resolve this tension, and a part of our work as followers of Jesus is to keep wrestling with the Scriptures that make us uncomfortable, to grapple with them over and over searching for what God might have for us in these difficult spaces, not to wrap them up neatly in a bow.
So I’m not going to focus on trying to resolve this tension for us today. Instead, I’m going to focus on what sticks out to me as I wrestle with the details of this passage.
One of the first things I notice is that Jesus has traveled to one of the borderlands between Israel and the rest of the world, to the area of Tyre and Sidon. This is an interesting place for Jesus to travel. This region is not a part of Judea, this is Gentile country. Not only that, but this area has a very bad rap in the history of God’s people. Tyre & Sidon are Canaanite cities on the borders of Northwest Israel, the home of people who were Israel’s persistent, historical enemies. These cities were dominated by Ba’al worship, and in the Hebrew Scriptures they come to represent gateways for idolatry and corruption spreading into Israel through Canaanite intermarriage and influence. Jezebel, the one-time queen of Israel who becomes an archetype of corruption and idolatry in the prophets and in Revelation – Jezebel is Sidonian. This was not a place that devout Jews went for vacation.
And in this unlikely place, Jesus encounters an unlikely person, a “Canaanite woman”. This is an odd way for Matthew to describe this woman, because “Canaanites” as a distinct ethnic and political group don’t really exist at this point. This woman may be descended from the historical people that inhabited this region, but she’s no more a ‘Canaanite’ than I’m a ‘viking’ because my dad’s family is partially Danish. Matthew seems to be describing her this way to associate her with the historical enemies of God’s people, to highlight her ‘otherness’ from Jesus and how surprising it is that she calls him “Lord”. She also calls him by a very Jewish title, “Son of David,” seeming to include herself in the people of God for whom this title would be so resonant.
And Jesus, for the first and only time in Matthew’s gospel, does not respond. No teaching, no rebuke, no miracle - he just keeps walking. When the disciples ask him to send her away, he doesn’t do that either. He still won’t speak to her, instead answering the disciples and saying to them that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel”. Jesus has said this phrase before, when he sent the twelve disciples out in pairs to minister throughout Israel. Interestingly, Jesus reveals that just as he sent the disciples in that earlier passage, he himself has been sent. The Father has given Jesus a mission for this time of ministry, and that mission apparently has boundaries.
Though Matthew’s gospel contains hints that the mission of Jesus will have implications for the rest of the gentile world, it is not until after the resurrection in Matthew 28 that Jesus receives “authority” over all the earth and sends his disciples to spread the good news of God’s kingdom to the whole world. Even when Jesus heals the Roman centurion’s servant in Matthew 8, he does it in the midst of a crowd of Jews, and turns the healing into a lesson for them. For now, it seems, Jesus’ work is meant to be limited to the house of Israel.
The tone of Jesus’ silence reads a bit differently to me after I notice this. Rather than simply giving the woman a cold shoulder, I wonder if Jesus feels stuck. He is not supposed to minister to the Gentiles yet, but he also can’t make himself send her away. Even before they speak, this woman’s plea, her love for her daughter and her faith in him, seem to have a hold on Jesus that grates against the boundaries of his mission to Israel.
When they do speak, the woman seems to get the better of Jesus. Like Abraham or Moses, bartering with God, this Canaanite woman reaches across the boundaries between them, having the boldness to argue with the one she calls ‘Lord’ for the sake of someone she loves. She takes the hit of being called a ‘dog’ and flips that insult on its head to insist that she and her daughter also ought to receive God’s mercy. And she wins, not only receiving healing for her daughter, but also receiving Jesus’ praise for the greatness of her faith, in contrast to the ‘ye of little faith’ Peter received in last week’s gospel.
What was it about her faith that was so great it caused Jesus to break the boundaries of his mission and let God’s mercy flow to this woman and her daughter? She seems to know something central about God that so many of the Jews around Jesus have forgotten. God desires mercy. She knows God’s mercy, and she insists that the love and power of God could not be ultimately withheld from a suffering girl. She was willing to cross the boundaries of hostility that divided her ancestors from Jesus’ people, to endure Christ’s terrible silence, to risk embarrassment and ridicule to demand that Christ show her the mercy of God.
She knows what Abraham and Moses and the prophets knew, that God is willing to change his mind. That her persistence and tenacity and love for her suffering daughter mean something to God, that her pleas could cause God’s love to burst the boundaries that had been set for Jesus mission and bring forward a foretaste of that mercy that would flow to all peoples in the new age after Jesus’ resurrection… because mercy is at the very heart of God.
If, as Rev. Carole preached last week, Peter stepping out of the boat onto the waters is an image of how God’s compassion meets us in the turbulent realities of our mixture of faith and fear, then the Canaanite woman is an image of what our faith can become: Brave. Tenacious. Willing to risk disappointment and pain for the sake of someone in need. Willing to hold God to God’s promises and insist that he make good on them. Persisting even when our pleas are met with silence and our doubts grow loud in our ears. Trusting, knowing somehow that at the heart of all things is a God whose love is so great that he will hear us and meet us with mercy when we cry out to him.
May we all, with God’s help, come to have a faith like hers. Amen.
