Matthew 15:21-28
When you hear the gospel today, it doesn’t sound very much like the Jesus we think we know. Here is a desperate woman who calls out for his help, and he ignores her. She keeps calling out and the disciples tell him to send her away. Finally, she gets his attention, and he rebuffs her. “I was sent only to the lost sweep of the house of Israel,” he tells her. But even that doesn’t stop her. So he insults her. “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” Of course we know how this ends, because I’ve just read the gospel to you and it’s very familiar; the woman seems to make a little joke and Jesus is so pleased that he compliments her on her faith and heals the daughter.
So there are two people to learn from in this story. One is the Canaanite woman. Jesus, according to Matthew’s story, has crossed the border from Israel into the land of Tyre and Sidon. This was pagan territory. This was where the remnants of the people that had been defeated by the Jews lived. Caananites had once had a kingdom in what was now Israel. A Canaanite would have to be very desperate or even foolish to expect anything from a Jew, even if she had the nerve to ask for something. But she didn’t give up. I recently met a man in a nursing home who had been raised a Catholic, married in the Church, raised his children Catholic, and continued to be active in his parish until his wife died. He told me that this was the moment when he lost his faith, because God didn’t answer their prayers. A few doors down from that man was a lady who had lost her husband of just a few months before being admitted to the hospital for fractures sustained in a fall. They had also prayed for a miracle, but even though she was sad and missed him, she was convinced that he was in heaven and waiting for her, and his death had only increased her faith that God had everything under control.
We could perhaps say that Jesus’ treatment of the Canaanite woman was to demonstrate to those around him the depth of her faith, or perhaps strengthen her faith. Saint Augustine, after all, said that God sometimes withholds what we ask for so that our faith will increase. Or perhaps it was to show that we should persist in prayer, never giving up on God, as the man I mentioned seemed to have. Because finding the hand of God in our lives is perhaps the object of prayer. The Canaanite woman did get what she requested. The lady I mentioned seemed to have received the assurance that all was well with her departed husband. God answers prayers, you just have to look for the answer.
The other person to learn something from is our savior, Jesus. As we heard in the first reading, the idea that salvation would come to the Jews first, and then to other nations, was not original with Jesus. Isaiah foretold it and so did other prophets. Jesus himself explicitly says “salvation is from the Jews” when he is speaking to the woman at the well in the gospel of John. So it is not surprising that Jesus and his apostles react to this woman as they initially did. Some people read into this story that it’s there to tell us that Jesus’ message is for everyone. But Jesus didn’t change his plan -- he continued to minister to the Jews as he had been doing before this event. And the earliest Christians mostly Jewish people, clearly saw their role in salvation history -- to receive the message and bring it to the world. So I see this as a moment in which Jesus re-examines his own beliefs.
Jesus is, after all, human, and even though he is also God, we are told in the gospel of Luke that he grew in wisdom and stature. Of course God knows everything, but God can’t be a human being if he can’t learn. How do I explain this? I don’t. But I do think this story is here partly to tell us that we should be open to changing our deeply held beliefs if the evidence is there. Jesus probably hasn't given much thought to whether Canaanite pagans had faith; they worshiped different Gods and didn’t follow Jewish dietary and purity rules, which of course had been given to the Jews by God through Moses. Why would they have faith? But confronted by the evidence, Jesus commends the woman for her faith and works a miracle for her.
Don’t give up on prayer, even if it seems that God is not answering prayer. He always does. Look for evidence.
If you are in a situation where your prejudices are challenged, don’t be afraid to open yourselves up to change. Jesus did.
If you have someone who has fallen away from the faith, or never seemed to have faith in the first place, remember that Jesus is showing us that God is not bound by our rules. Jesus came for the lost sheep of Israel, but steps out of his mission in answer to someone’s prayer.
