If you’ve ever had a baby screaming constantly in pain that has no words to tell you what’s wrong, or if you’ve ever cared for a child with a serious long-term health condition, then you might sympathise with the Canaanite woman with the demonised daughter. Jesus’ disciples are cruel and unsympathetic to the mother:
‘Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.’ (Verse 23)
And then, before we make any progress in understanding this story, we must look at those troubling words Jesus says to this poor, distressed mother:
‘It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’ (verse 26)
There are some pretty unthinking progressive Christians who look at these words and confidently tell us that Jesus, by being a Jew of his day, was a racist, and he had to learn God’s truth from this Canaanite woman.
I know the words sound shocking, but this is nonsense. It shows they have not thought about the rest of Matthew’s Gospel. In the nativity stories, it is the Gentile Magi whose faith is commended, not the Jewish leaders. Jesus praises the faith of a Roman centurion in contrast to that of others. At the end of the Gospel, Jesus’ mission – which, yes, began with Israel – is extended to the ends of the earth.
There has to be a different explanation. We’ll come to that later, but I’m flagging up here at the beginning of the sermon that we shouldn’t accept simplistic, silly answers that don’t read the story in its wider context.
Firstly, she is persistent:
Notice what the disciples say about the woman: ‘she keeps crying out after us’. It’s not a one-off. It’s continuous. The need she has for her daughter is such that she will not shut up. She will not take ‘go away’ for an answer. She will not give this up as a lost cause when she seems to be getting nowhere. She keeps crying out.
You see it in other ways, when she gets into conversation with Jesus. She doesn’t take what Jesus says lying down. She comes back at him. You could say she argues with him. Audacious doesn’t quite describe it. It’s faintly shocking that she doesn’t retreat the moment Jesus pushes back.
Like many a loving parent, she will do anything for the sake of her child. And this story effectively tells us that it’s fine to display a similar attitude towards God when we pray about deep needs, be they ours or of others.
Often, the problem is that we have been brought up to be reverent towards God, and that’s good and proper. God is holy. Reverence is a right response to him. But we take it so far that we end up being unable to speak with passion to God when things really matter, when they desperately matter.
But this woman was not the only character in Holy Scripture to speak audaciously to God about a significant need. Abraham prayed and prayed for the people of Sodom, that they be saved from divine judgment. He beat God down time and time again about the number of righteous people in the city.
Read the works of the psalmists and notice just how many of the biblical psalms are ones that lament injustice and pain. God’s people cry out to him about all that is wrong in the world and in their lives. Do they stop? No. Do they get all their theological ducks neatly in a row? No. They cry out again and again in pain to Almighty God.
Then there is the parable of Jesus recorded in Luke’s Gospel about the persistent widow and the unjust judge. Time and again, she came before that judge in the most forthright of manner, until she got the justice she needed.
Let us be in no doubt that passionate, persistent prayer is fine with Jesus. In fact, it’s more than fine. Sometimes, it is the only appropriate thing to do.
I have heard it put this way. Think of a baby who is in distress but naturally cannot articulate its pain to a parent. So, it beats its fists against the parent’s chest, as the parent holds it. Our persistent and passionate prayer can be like that. It is perfectly fine for us to beat our fists against the chest of God. That doesn’t change the fact that he still holds us in his arms, for he is our loving Father.
Secondly, she is perceptive:
The Canaanite woman hears beyond those troubling words of Jesus about not taking the children’s food and giving it to the dogs (verse 26). She recognises what Jesus has already told his disciples, that his mission is to the lost sheep of Israel (verse 24). This would have been commonplace knowledge: that the Jewish Messiah was for the Jews. And who is she?
She is a descendant of the ancient Canaanites, the bitter biblical enemies of Israel whose paganism had often led Israel into idolatry.[1]
So you would think she knows her place. Israel’s Messiah is only here to bless Israel.
But she seems to know more. Perhaps it’s the close proximity and the mixing of Jews with people they didn’t want to meet, but she knows that isn’t the last word about the Messiah of Israel. Yes, he will come to the Jews. But what is the vocation of Israel? Why did God choose these people?
It wasn’t so they could simply have their own private bless-up. It was so they could bless the world. It goes all the way back to God’s call of Abram in Genesis 12. God chooses a people for himself, but the Chosen People’s calling is to bless the world.
So, yes, Jesus as Messiah comes to the lost sheep of Israel. But it can’t stop there. Why should she and her daughter also not be blessed by the God of Israel?
And as I said in the introduction, signs of this are spread all through Matthew’s Gospel, from the Magi to the faithful centurion to the Great Commission.
The blessings we receive as the Church are not for our sole benefit. We are blessed so that we may become a blessing to others. I often pray that way when I close a meeting, that we will be sent with God’s blessing so that we may bless others.
This should challenge the ungodly notion we sometimes adopt where we think that some people deserve God’s blessings and others don’t. We have certain people down as ‘Canaanites’ today, but could they be people whom God wants to bless? Does God want to bless benefits scroungers? Yes! Does God want to bless people who come to this country on small boats? Yes! Does God want to bless the politicians I despise? Yes!
Blessing is never about who deserves it. None of us deserves blessing. We are all sinners in need of grace – even the most godly or the most respected people in the church. Blessing is always about grace, ‘outrageous grace’ even, as the singer Godfrey Birtill calls it.
Which ‘undeserving’ people are we going to pray for this week, that God will bless them?
Or perhaps it’s the other way round, and we ourselves feel unworthy. We have a pervading sense of shame, whether we have done anything shameful or not. Then for us this is Good News: God delights in the thought of blessing people like us.
Thirdly and finally, she is faithful:
Look at the way Jesus commends her in the final verse of the reading:
Then Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.’ And her daughter was healed at that moment. (Verse 28)
She is a woman of faith in the qualities we have already noted: her persistence and her perceptiveness. Towards the end here, she doesn’t even reject Jesus’ challenging riddle about the children’s food and the dogs: she takes the riddle and extends it:
‘Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.’ (Verse 27)
She certainly belongs with the other Gentile heroes of faith in Matthew’s Gospel that I have already mentioned. The Magi may have arrived at the house where the young Jesus was by the dubious method of astrology, but when they left, they followed the clear directions of God in a dream. That was faith in action. The Roman centurion with the paralysed servant learned faith from his experience of being a man under authority, and Jesus said he had never met anyone in Israel with such great faith.
Which of us wouldn’t want Jesus to say to us, ‘you have great faith’? Which of us wouldn’t want to hear Jesus say, ‘Your request is granted’? Surely that’s exactly what we long to hear from him. It’s like wanting to hear him say to us at the Last Judgment, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’
The Canaanite woman’s faith had been learned in adversity, desperate as she was for her daughter to be healed. How often faith grows in such circumstances. Look at those churches that have grown despite persecution. We might prefer the thought that our faith grow while we are sitting comfortably. But comfort rarely requires great faith. (And that might be one reason for the decline of faith in the West, where we ask more questions about God and suffering than those who live with daily adversity.)
Her faith had also been formed, ironically, in exclusion – as one who was not part of the Chosen People. She was an outsider. She didn’t belong. Yet God used that to form the ‘great faith’ which Jesus commended.
I wonder sometimes whether those of us who wish we had more faith and who even ask for more faith really know what we’re asking for. What are we letting ourselves in for? Because the testing ground for great faith includes the terrains of hardship, difficulty, danger, and misfortune. You can see it in the Scriptures. You can see it in the lives of the saints down the centuries.
We may sense God leading us down a particular path for our lives, one that initially excites us. But then we discover it requires of us greater fortitude to endure than we ever anticipated. It asks of us greater forgiveness of others, including those who are in the company of the faithful, yet have a particular propensity for cruelty. But faith walks the way of the Cross.
Which of us will walk this road? Which of us will be commended by Jesus for having ‘great faith’ in him?
[1] Craig S Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, p414.
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