Matthew 15

²¹ And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²² And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” ²³ But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” ²⁴ He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” ²⁵ But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” ²⁶ And he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” ²⁷ She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ²⁸ Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

I still remember my amazement at a story I first heard in history class in high school. It is the story of what is known as “The Humiliation of Canossa,” which is summarized here:

The Humiliation of Canossa…sometimes called the Walk to Canossa…or the Road to Canossa, was the ritual submission of the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV to Pope Gregory VII at Canossa Castle in 1077 during the Investiture controversy. It involved the Emperor journeying to Canossa, where the Pope had been staying as the guest of Margravine Matilda of Tuscany, to seek absolution and the revocation of his excommunication.

According to contemporary sources, he was forced to supplicate himself on his knees waiting for three days and three nights before the entrance gate of the castle, while a blizzard raged. Indeed, the episode has been described as “one of the most dramatic moments of the Middle Ages”. It has also spurred much debate among medieval chroniclers as well as modern historians, who argue about whether the walk was a “brilliant masterstroke” or a humiliation.[1]

It is an amazing story because it demonstrates how the power of the church, and, specifically, the power of the pope, had grown beyond all imagining in the 11^th century. Just think of it: the Holy Roman Emperor had to wait three days and nights…on his knees…in the snow…before the pope would see him about lifting his excommunication. To a Catholic, of course, excommunication is a matter of eternal life or death. To be excommunicated is to be damned, in the Catholic mind. And so we can understand, given that mindset, why the Emperor was willing to be so humiliated.

As I have gotten older I have come to see the story in a different light. I now marvel at the delay in granting forgiveness. Granted, I outright disagree with the idea that excommunication from the church damns a person, but given that this was assumed it is amazing that the pope was willing to make the Emperor wait for three days before granting forgiveness. Yes, I realize this whole scene was likely more about politics than theology when it came right down to it, but it is a chilling picture: making a person wait on their knees for three days and nights before giving forgiveness.

We may thank God that Jesus does no such thing. He is quick to receive the repentant and contrite heart. His arms are open to us! This is the heart of grace!

And yet, there is one story, the story of our text, in which Jesus also seems on the surface to make a person wait awkwardly before He responds favorably to the cry of faith. But this begs the question: Why? What was Jesus doing here with the Gentile woman asking for a miracle? Let us consider this amazing passage.

A daring display of faith.

Our passage begins with a daring display of faith! It was daring because of who this woman was and how the cultural deck was stacked against her.

²¹ And Jesus went away from there and withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²² And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying, “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.”

This woman had a number of obstacles. The first was her home. She is in “the district of Tyre and Sidon,” two places that, while perhaps not as wicked sounding as the names Sodom and Gomorrah, were close enough! The ESV Study Bible notes that “Tyre and Sidon were Gentile cities in Phoenicia (see Mark 7:24) and were often the object of condemnation by O.T. prophets for their Baal worship and arrogant materialism.”[2] We find one such example in Isaiah 23.

¹ Wail, O ships of Tarshish, for Tyre is laid waste, without house or harbor! From the land of Cyprus it is revealed to them. ² Be still, O inhabitants of the coast; the merchants of Sidon, who cross the sea, have filled you. ³ And on many waters your revenue was the grain of Shihor, the harvest of the Nile; you were the merchant of the nations. ⁴ Be ashamed, O Sidon, for the sea has spoken, the stronghold of the sea, saying: “I have neither labored nor given birth, I have neither reared young men nor brought up young women.” ⁵ When the report comes to Egypt, they will be in anguish over the report about Tyre.

We find another in Ezekiel 28.

²⁰ The word of the Lord came to me: ²¹ “Son of man, set your face toward Sidon, and prophesy against her ²² and say, Thus says the Lord God: “Behold, I am against you, O Sidon, and I will manifest my glory in your midst. And they shall know that I am the Lord when I execute judgments in her and manifest my holiness in her; ²³ for I will send pestilence into her, and blood into her streets; and the slain shall fall in her midst, by the sword that is against her on every side. Then they will know that I am the Lord.

To put it mildly, these were not places with great reputations!

What is more, she is called in verse 22 “a Canaanite woman.” Another unfortunate word! The Canaanites were the inhabitants of the land of promise with whom Israel had no end of trouble. She was, in other words, very much an outsider: a Gentile woman of dubious lineage from an undesirable place.

And she was a woman. For her to approach Jesus at all was eyebrow-raising. For her to ask for help was even more surprising, again, from a cultural perspective.

Even so, she comes. She is distraught. She is “crying,” we are told. She is in distress. She needs help! “Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.” Her cry reflects at the very least her awareness that this Jesus seems to have power, or so she has heard. She uses titles of respect: “O Lord, Son of David.”

They say that necessity is the mother of invention. This woman musters courage and leaps over the numerous barriers placed before her to get to Jesus for the sake of her daughter. She is a concerned mother. She does what concerned mothers do! Her faith is daring! Her faith is bold! How much did she understand? We cannot say for sure, but she understood enough to come and cry for help!

A curious response from the Savior

Jesus’ response to the woman is as curious as her plea for help was bold.

²³ But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and begged him, saying, “Send her away, for she is crying out after us.” ²⁴ He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” ²⁵ But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” ²⁶ And he answered, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

This is a fascinating and, in some ways, troubling passage. First, the response of the disciples seems clear enough. They are acting in a way that would have been expected of Jewish men being followed by a pleading Gentile woman. But Jesus’ response is not expected. He proclaims that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

I do not personally find this part troubling. It seems well established in scripture that God’s saving intent for the world always had Israel as its first step. But Israel being the first step did not mean there were not steps to follow. Israel was to receive the law and prophets, but, ultimately, through them, the world was to come to know the Lord God. The book of Jonah, for instance, makes this clear, as do numerous other passages. So, yes, Jesus does say that He was sent “only” to Israel, but His actions in numerous other places—His offer of grace and mercy to Gentiles elsewhere—must nuance and qualify this. Regardless, the divine order that Jesus was speaking of is established in the economy of God, as Paul would later express it in Romans 2:

⁹ There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, ¹⁰ but glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. ¹¹ For God shows no partiality.

But what of Jesus’ troubling association of the woman with a dog in His saying, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs”? It seems to me that there are two errors we can commit here if we are not careful. On the one hand, we can try to downplay the offensiveness of it. It is possible that The Holman Christian Standard Bible does this to an extent in its note on this text:

Comparison of the Canaanite woman to a dog sounds like a racial slur to modern readers, but the word dogs (Gk kunarion) was a diminutive used as a term of endearment. It typically referred to house dogs that slept in the master’s lap.[3]

To be frank, one wonders if a woman would like being called a domesticated dog more than being called a feral one. The fact is that the Jews saw these northern Gentiles as dogs, and Jesus, even if ironically or with a higher purpose in mind, employs a term that likely would have made the woman flinch. So explaining this down or away is one error we can fall into if we are not careful.

On the other hand, we find many on the left who come dangerously close to suggesting that Jesus had a cultural blind spot that He indulged in here and needed correction from this woman. Consider the words of one such writer who said of Jesus that He “was a first century Palestinian Jewish man who was religiously observant and a product of his culture, including its biases.” She continues:

Finally Jesus speaks. I would help you but… He doesn’t say that part aloud but I can hear it behind the gospel text. He says, It isn’t fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. She and her daughter are dogs in his proverb and in his mouth. Ancient Israelites and Jews in the first century and rabbinic period despised dogs. They were unclean scavengers that ate dead flesh. An orthodox rabbi once told me he’d even never heard of an orthodox rabbi who owned a dog. Jesus has for all intents and purposes called this woman a b—- and she leans in to his proverb to turn it back on him. She said, Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their lord’s table. She uses the same word, lord, throughout I believe challenging him to show what kind of “lord” he will be. Loving God or slavemaster?

In that moment, something happened to and in Jesus. He starts looking and sounding like the Jesus we know and love. He praises her faith—faith in him as Lord? Faith that as a man who had his own mother he would do the right thing? Faith that whatever it was she had heard about the man called the Son of David was true? Faith that there was more to him than the first impression suggested?—He healed her daughter in that very moment.

She left that place with her daughter (whom we never see and don’t know was even present) restored to wholeness, and Jesus left that place walking towards a whole new understanding of his ministry. The closing words of this gospel, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…” teach us that Jesus has made room at the table for everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, because, I believe, of this woman.[4]

You will be interested to know that this writer entitled her article, “The Woman Who Changed Jesus.” I want to be fair to her. In the comments to her article she writes, “I did not impute sin to Jesus. Bias is not inherently sinful. It is inherently human.” Even so, it is surely not a stretch to suggest that the idea that, here, Jesus expressed the biases common to His culture by calling a woman in need “a bitch” as a matter of cultural and relational deficiency (as biases certainly are) and that the woman’s response led to him having “a whole new understanding of his ministry” certainly communicates that He received correction for behavior that many indeed would consider sinful, even if the author did not. Last Fall I noted a popular Twitter personality speaking of this text and saying outright that Jesus called the woman “a b—-” and had to be corrected by her.

Let me propose that we do not have to understand all that is happening here to rule out one possibility: that Jesus sinned or indulged in crude, sinful behavior. Here, a good baseline would be Hebrews 4.

¹⁵ For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin.

Jesus, whatever He was up to here, did not sin.

I rather think that if we were able to have heard this in real time and seen Jesus’ face and heard His tone and that of the woman, we would understand. Was He challenging her? Was he repeating the popular image ironically as if to say, “Do you not know how you are seen by the world”? Perhaps. Regardless, as we will see, Jesus does not reject this woman.

Mercy.

This woman has pluck. I like her! Her response is brilliant:

²⁷ She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” ²⁸ Then Jesus answered her, “O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

She does not turn away defeated or offended. Rather, she renews her call in a beautiful way. She picks up Jesus’ imagery and responds that “even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”

In doing this the woman demonstrates the depth and intensity of her faith and of her need. And Jesus responds beautifully to her: “O woman, great is your faith!” Indeed it is! And He heals her daughter.

We must take note of this: Jesus, the Savior, does not reject this woman, does not abandon her and her daughter in her need. Jesus hears her and heals her daughter. Notice that the disciples, enslaved indeed to the biases of the day, recede from the picture. Only Jesus and this woman are left.

Jesus the Savior and this Gentile Canaanite woman.

Jesus the King and this woman in need.

The Lord of life and a woman with a cry of faith.

And Jesus hears. And Jesus heals.

Yes, He does so in a most curious way, and it is ok to wrestle with the particulars of it. Even so, do not miss the conclusion: a beautiful display of love and compassion and mercy and kindness.

I am this Canaanite woman. So are you. We are all this Canaanite woman.

And Jesus is here.

And Jesus still saves.

 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Canossa

[2] Crossway Bibles. ESV Study Bible (Kindle Locations 118006-118008). Good News Publishers/Crossway Books. Kindle Edition.

[3] Holman Bible Editorial Staff, Holman Bible Editorial Staff. HCSB Study Bible (Kindle Locations 134271-134275). B&H Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

[4] http://www.wilgafney.com/2017/08/20/the-woman-who-changed-jesus/