Away from the safety of home, not to mention the purity laws that keep life clean and godly, he is vulnerable to trouble. Enter, as if on cue, “a Canaanite woman from that vicinity.” As a Canaanite she is the archetypal other, more beyond-the-pale even than the Samaritans we see Jesus deal with ... in the other Gospels. As a Canaanite and a woman, moreover, she is meant to be kept at least two arms’ distance from this pious Jewish man.To add irritation to potential injury, the woman is a screamer.4
The word Matthew uses to describe her voice is “like the sound of a raven.”5
Is it any wonder that the disciples wanted to send her away? There is nothing like a screeching outsider from a despised people to make for a very bad day.
We will miss the truly radical nature of this encounter if we forget to notice where it takes place. Tyre and Sidon were in Lebanon - the very place where the conflicts continue to this very day. The bad blood between these two people goes all the way back to Jesus’ day and extends to our own. The woman and Jesus were adversaries.
So the disciples want to send her away empty handed.
While I have never been anything more than a dog-parent, I can only imagine how much more the feeling of anguish and helplessness parents get when their child is in trouble. Parents have to be at wits end when they have tried everything and nothing has worked. That is where this screaming woman is when she, desperate for help, drops to her knees in front of Jesus and begs him for his assistance. And what does our sweet, gentle, Jesus say in response?
“It is not right, you know,” Jesus replied, “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”6
Mike drop. Ouch.
“It is not good to take the children’s food and throw it to the little dogs.”
Bad day or no bad day Jesus is leaving us in shock!
We’ve heard what he said, and this is not the Jesus we know or even want to know. This is Jesus who is almost unrecognizable making us profoundly uncomfortable.
Nobody we know, or even know, would ever call another human being a dog.
Nobody we know, or even know, would ignore the pleas of a parent on behalf of a child.
Nobody we know, or even know, would exclude a whole people because of their country of origin.
Nobody we know, or even know, would act like that.
Those words are unacceptable out of anyone’s mouth and coming from the lips of Jesus they come like a slap on the side of the head. These words leave our ears ringing.
No small amount of brain power and ink has been spent trying to explain them away.
Some have suggested that it was simple exhaustion on Jesus part that made him so surly.
Others have suggested that when Jesus called her child a dog, he really meant a puppy. You know, a cute, little, adorable puppy who wakes you up seventeen times during the night to be let outside only to sniff around the yard for forty minutes trying to find just the right spot. Oh yes, puppy makes everything better.
One commentator even suggested that while he said this, he winked at her letting her know that he was joking. Right! Just having a few laughs with a woman with a very sick child. Not buying that one.
I stand second to none in my love for puppies and dogs but to refer to another person as a dog, unless they play for the baseball team in Rosemont, is to dehumanize them.
So, what are we to do with this passage? What are we to do with Jesus talking like this?
With no other scholars I can find backing me up here is what I think. If Jesus and the Canaanite woman ever offered a critique of our society this would be it.
Remember who Jesus was. He was a rabbi, a respected man in the community, whom people looked up to now calling another person a low-life.
And think about her! Who is she? She is not only a woman who by law was forbidden to talk to a man in public who was not her husband. Not only a woman but a woman from a country that many considered inferior full of “rapists, drug dealers and other bad hombres” for whom barriers needed to be constructed to keep them out.
Around these two stands a crowd. While some in that crowd may have been surprised at Jesus calling the woman and her child dogs perhaps others were nodding their heads in agreement.
“You tell her Jesus!” they might have been smiling and saying to themselves. “This woman has no business bothering you! You give her what for!” As we look closer to agreeing faces and nodding heads, we see the worse in us and in our society.
And it is the woman who calls all of us to account when she shoots back at Jesus angrily: “Yes, Lord, I know, but even the dogs live on the scraps that fall from their master’s table!”7
She has Jesus, and all the rest of us, in a very tough spot because we have to answer a very difficult question: “Is the Gospel for everybody or is it only for a select few?”
In this strong, tough woman Jesus has met his match. He had sparred with some of the brightest and best minds of his day and now is bested by someone who, in a single sentence has reminded him and us all that if the Gospel isn’t meant for everybody than is it really isn’t for anybody?
His very own words, “it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles” have come back to convict him and us. She has him. She has us. She has bested him. She has bested us.
Jesus’ Gospel had better be for everybody otherwise it isn’t for anybody.
The message of the Gospel had better be that Jesus does not just love, you and me, here in our Sunday best.
Jesus’ Gospel is for those people out there in the world who are drinking coffee at home or at Starbucks.
Jesus’ Gospel is for those people who have gone for a jog or to the gym this morning.
Jesus’ Gospel is for those people who are sleeping in or torturing themselves by watching one of those Sunday morning news programs with their “Sabbath gasbags.”
Jesus’ Gospel is for those people who have decided that roasting on North Avenue Beach watching the Air and Water show is a far more worthwhile way to spend their Sunday than roasting here at church.
Jesus Gospel is for everybody and everybody equally. There is not a sumptuous feast of Christ’s love for some and table scraps for others. We don’t have to sit up and beg for his love. We don’t even have to screech at the top of our lungs in order to receive it.
Jesus gospel is for everyone fully, completely, unreservedly.
All of the secular literature that I read this week about turning bad days into good days agree that the one thing we can do to change things is to do something nice for another person.
We often think only that Jesus did something nice for this woman by healing her daughter. But I’ll leave you with this radical thought. She did something nice for him, too.
Shannon Kershner, who I was proud to have for a time as my pastor, said once that she believed “this encounter helped Jesus understand even more deeply that until the lives of the least of the people matter, no life actually does.”8
That was the unnamed woman’s gift to Jesus and my guess is they both went away with their bad day turned into a very good day. The woman, with her daughter healed and Jesus, in absolute admiration for the one who snapped him back to his message and mission finally smiling at her and saying, “‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’”9
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