Jesus left Gennesaret and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, "Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon."
Jesus is a celebrity, a man who attracts crowds of fans, followers, and curiosity seekers wherever He goes. He travels with a small entourage of disciples who, though He is never swayed by them, advise Him and, as best they can, look out for His wellbeing. Most people speaking to Him would be deferential. Even the Pharisees, who enjoy goading Him with their questions, do so in what was considered polite and acceptable fashion. But not the woman in today’s Gospel. She breaks free of the crowd and starts shouting at Jesus. Women did not speak to men. Gentiles did not address Jews. She has broken the rules. She has crossed the boundary of decent behavior.
In our modern society, we too have rules, we too define “decent behavior”, but we also have exceptions to these rules. We do not stand in judgment as we watch individuals or even families break down in the face of unbelievable disaster, the fire on Maui, the death of innocent people in Ukraine, murder or death by accident in neighborhoods closer to home. We watch people cry out in their pain, and weep in their sorrow, and often we weep with them.
The Caananite woman has a very sick daughter. What loving mother can bear to see her child in any kind of pain? And this mother is desperate. She is desperate enough to break many of the cultural rules of her day. She shouted not only at a man, but at someone special. This was not done. But she not only shouted - when He ignored her, she threw herself at His feet. But she not only did that – she argued with Jesus.
Through her actions, she put herself in danger of severe consequences. Violence against women was a given in those days. She might well have been terrified, knowing what the consequences might be, but her desperation overcame her fear. Her concern for her daughter made her emotional! Ok! We modern listeners understand, and it’s easy for us to say, “Yes, yes, good for her!” But what might we have wanted to say to her if we’d been there? Stop and think about it. Would we have been compassionate, or judgmental? And, much to our surprise, we find that Jesus isn’t at His “kind and helpful Jesus” best. He’d just been teaching about how people relate to others. He was very cleverly goading those Pharisees who commanded the people to keep every law fastidiously while they themselves were – as Jesus put it later in Matthew – “whitened sepulchers.”
Some Pharisees were less than good examples to their people, leading fairly self-centered lives, while demanding other people live very controlled lives. So, Jesus is saying, it’s much more important to consider how you use words, how you speak to others, how you praise God, than to think only about what you put into your mouth. What comes out of the mouth, our very words, is what builds up or tears down. And then God bless Peter! He says, “Explain this parable to us,” or as we might put it, “What do you mean?”. Jesus reminds him that what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart. To the Jew, the heart is life. What we say can be life-giving or destructive. This isn’t news to us, nor should it have been to Peter. So, Jesus is perhaps frustrated as His closest followers don’t seem to understand Him. The Pharisees who were trying to trip Him up were deliberately not getting it, but His friends? They should have understood. How frustrating. And so, we’d expect that when He got the chance to demonstrate what He was saying, to put His words into action, Jesus would immediately be helpful to this woman. We’re surprised when He first ignores her, and then seems not only to ignore His own teaching, but is rude to her. “I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel.” What? Isn’t the second great commandment to love your neighbor as yourself? Jesus said this Himself. Several things are going on in today’s Gospel story. We realize, interestingly, that Jesus doesn’t seem bothered that the woman is shouting. It’s the disciples who are uncomfortable with that. They don’t want to be bothered by an emotional woman breaking the rules, demanding help. Jesus makes no comment about that at all. We certainly can’t presume ever to know what was going on in Jesus’ head at that moment in that time, but perhaps this is an example to us that to Jesus her emotion and desperation were perfectly understandable and proper.
What Jesus seems to point to is His own mission. And, if you recall, He’s done this kind of thing before. Remember the wedding feast at Cana? His mother wants Him to help out the wedding couple. “They have no wine,” she says. “What’s that to me, it’s not my time,” Jesus replies. Not quite the way we might expect Him to answer His mother. But then He responds by expanding His ministry perhaps a little earlier than planned. In today’s Gospel, He is first mindful of His mission to the Jews, the first of God’s chosen people. This woman is pushing the boundaries. She’s a Caananite, not of the family, not a Jew. Like Jesus’ mother, this woman knows He can help her. Jesus very well may have been impressed with her persistence, and He pushes just a bit. “It’s not fair to throw the children’s food to the dogs.” How typical of that time. The Caananites were considered less than respectable by the Jews.
But this Caananite woman is not only desperate, she’s fearless. “Even the dogs get the crumbs on the floor.” A Pharisee might have slapped her down for that remark, but Jesus seems finally to get past His own frustration, and see her as a woman of faith. Once again, as He did at that wedding long ago, He expands His mission and breaks down a barrier to accept and include a non-Jew.
This is a big step for Him, an awakening. Matthew is showing us how Jesus’ mission and ministry is growing, tearing down centuries old boundaries, and opening up the culturally identified family of God to all God’s people. In today’s Gospel Jesus realizes His ministry is to extend beyond the Jewish community, that He has come to bring all people back to God. And we see that He is not put off by the screaming, gentile woman, but that in the end He is moved by her faith and by His own compassion.
So what can we learn about ourselves from today’s Gospel? The obvious lesson is to ask ourselves, whom do we accept as our neighbor? Do we still harbor in our hearts signs of racism, sexism, homophobia? There’s a long list of possibilities, pitfalls to which we might succumb. Whom do we think of as “less than dogs”? Living in our current culture of fear is hard. We’re bombarded with images and words coming out of some of our own leaders’ mouths that put the fear of the “other” into our hearts. Today we have a lot to think about when we consider this, because none of us is perfect, and there is always someone from whom, for whatever reason, we tend to turn away.
Another thing we might learn from today’s Gospel is very simple. Emotions are a gift to us from God. Tears, we have been told, are a gift of the Holy Spirit. We might consider how we react when we’re faced with either our own or others’ expressions of emotion. Do our own cultural boundaries cause us to keep it all in. Do we perhaps expect others to do the same? Can we imagine ourselves ever allowing someone to share a real depth of emotion with us, or are we too quick to shut them down?
In today’s Gospel two very human people, people under great stress, acted out of love – a mother for her child, and a man who was and is God and who thought He understood His ministry, only to realize there was more to it than even He had at first believed. The motivating factor in each case had nothing to do with the “rules” as handed down by society, and everything to do with compassion, with love. In the end, God doesn’t care about our worldly rules, or “how it was before”, or, perhaps more telling, how we think it should be now, because God sees only our devotion, our compassion, our love.
Jesus recognizes the faith and love in the gentile mother who dares breaks the rules and beg Him for help, so against the social norms of His day and even against the advice of his closest companions, He responds to her need. Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.
Let us open our hearts that we too may respond to the needs of others and be channels of God’s grace.
Let us pray:
God of faith, deepen our faith so we may bear witness to Christ in the world; God of hope, strengthen our hope so we may be signposts to your transforming Presence; God of love, kindle our love so that, in a fragile and divided world, in these difficult and troubled times, we may overcome our judgmental human nature and instead be signs of the faith, hope, and love which we share in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen.