Sally A. Brown, Professor Emerita of Preaching and Worship
In today’s text, Mt 15:21-28, Jesus and his disciples are traveling in the region of Tyre and Sidon, a locale populated by both Jewish and Canaanite villages. Suddenly, they are accosted by a persistent Canaanite woman making a public spectacle of herself for the best of reasons: she is a distraught and desperate mother whose daughter is held in the grip of demon possession. She is willing to break every social rule to get what her daughter needs. As a Canaanite, she ought not to be addressing Jewish travelers. As a woman, she brings shame on herself by addressing men in public. Beside all that, she is loud and will not take “no” for an answer. Yet, she is precisely right about three things: first, she is right about Jesus’ messianic identity (“Son of David!”); second, she is right that central to his mission is extraordinary mercy; and third, she rightly believes that that mercy ought not to be impeded by social norms and boundaries. Perhaps she has heard about the day Jesus encountered another Gentile, a Roman centurion, and responded readily to his plea for healing for his paralyzed house servant. In that case, Jesus acted readily, commending the man’s extraordinary faith (Mt 8:5-13).
Yet Jesus’ first response to this desperate Canaanite mother is stone-cold silence (“he did not answer her at all,” v 23a). Only when his disciples plead that he send her away does Jesus engage her, and his words are meant to drive her off: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel (i.e. “you don’t qualify”), v 24. She isn’t deterred. Now, she kneels at his feet, pleading, “Lord, help me!” or, literally, “mercy me!” (Peter, sinking in the storm, used precisely this phrase in Mt 14:30.) Jesus’ sharp retort includes a common epithet for Canaanites, “little dogs;” it is “unfair,” he says, to give the children’s food to “little dogs” (like her). She parries! “Even the dogs eat the crumbs!” (v 27). Suddenly, as if in a flash of insight, Jesus lauds her “great faith” (as he did the centurion’s) and heals her daughter.
Preachers have gone to great lengths to soften Jesus’ harsh treatment of this woman. Some claim Jesus is only “testing” her. Others imagine a light, almost humorous tone when he implicitly calls her a dog; the scene, they say, is a contest of well-matched wits. But this reading is difficult to harmonize with the desperation of this Canaanite mother. What hospital worker would try to joke with a father desperately rushing his profusely bleeding little boy through the doors of the emergency room??
The “plain sense” of the text is that Jesus, “fully human, fully divine,” learns in this encounter: he learns that the radical mercy of God entrusted to him shall shatter social and religious boundaries he has thought inviolable. Unless we are willing to imagine a two-year-old Jesus possessing divine omniscience, we have to concede that Jesus learned, as all humans do, all his life. There are some insights we gain only through experience that explodes our taken-for-granted assumptions. The life-changing mercy and justice of God break through into what we assumed was forbidden territory, and we must concede, with the hymn-writer, that “there’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea.”* So it is with Jesus: recognizing, in a flash of insight, this Canaanite mother’s faith, Jesus “mercies” both mother and daughter. A door has swung open; it shall not be closed. In Mt’s final scene, Jesus shall send his messengers to “make disciples of all nations” (Mt 28:19). All.
*Hymn text, “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy”, by Frederick William Faber, 1862.
Insights into Biblical Greek Grammar and Syntax 