The Extraordinary Faith of the Canaanite Woman, Matthew 15:21-28 (Trinity 11 Ordinary 20 Year A)

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:

The Place of Persistence by Sheila Sund from Salem, United States, CC BY 2.0. Found at Wikimedia Commons.

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:

Allen’s Hummingbird by Becky Matsubara on Flickr. CC 4.0.

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.

August 16, 2026 0

Following Your Calling (Mark 7:24-37) Ordinary 23 Year B

Mark 7:24-37

There is a meme on the Internet with these words: ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read on the Internet.’

It then claims that the quotation is from Abraham Lincoln – think about it!

One area where we should be very careful not to believe everything we read on the Internet is when all and sundry offer commentary on difficult Bible passages. And boy do we have a difficult passage this week. What does Jesus think he’s doing, speaking to the Syro-Phoenician woman like that?

²⁷‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.’

Well, the stupid and arrogant brigade are only too quick to tell you. They say that Jesus was a racist and that even he had to learn how to treat people of other races well from the woman.

Of course, what they’re really saying is, you should all be as enlightened as us!

When you get a difficult passage like this and when you come across Jesus saying strange and apparently disturbing things, the first thing you need to do is study the text very carefully. Jumping to conclusions just based on how it reads in English without checking with specialist biblical scholars is dangerous. So is reading it as if it’s a contemporary incident in our culture.

For one thing, racism as we know it didn’t exist in Jesus’ society. There were forms of prejudice, yes, but not in the way that we shamefully discriminate against another race or a person of different skin colour. Therefore, to assume that Jesus was being racist is a fundamental mistake.

In any case, this comes in a series of chapters in Mark where Jesus is criss-crossing Lake Galilee between Jewish and Gentile populations. He has healed a Gentile like the Gerasene demoniac. In the previous episode which we considered last week, he has brought down the barrier of the Jewish food laws. To make Jesus a racist against the Gentiles beggars belief.

For another, we need to look at translation issues. If we think Jesus is referring to the woman as some kind of feral dog, we are wrong. The word is not that for a wild dog but for a pet dog, a lap dog, a house dog. This story (in its form here in Mark and also in Matthew) is the only time that word is used. Everywhere else the word for dog is a street dog – but not here.[1]

What does this mean? Jesus is painting a rather more endearing picture of a family where the children give scraps to the beloved family dog. It’s rather more affectionate than that painted by those who jump in screaming, ‘Racism!’

Now granted, it’s still provocative in a way because it’s not what you expect Jesus to say in response to a request for healing, but that’s because what Jesus is doing here is speaking in the form of a riddle. It’s designed to elicit a response from the woman, and that’s exactly what he gets:

²⁸‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’

And by the way – did you notice how she said ‘the dogs under the table’? She had definitely understood Jesus to mean family pets, not wild dogs.

Jesus is saying something like this. My first calling is to take the kingdom of God to Israel, the People of God. I’m not concentrating on the Gentile mission, which comes after that.

Nevertheless, given the woman’s faith, he heals her daughter by expelling the demon. Even Jesus with his focussed calling on bringing the message of the kingdom to Israel recognises that faith exists outside Israel’s boundaries and on occasions like this he can flex his calling to bring the love of God to this woman and her family.

And having got to that point, I think we can now make a couple of applications from the story to our own lives.

Firstly, are you living out your calling?

Jesus was clear: his priority was to go to ‘the lost sheep of Israel.’ That was his focus. The good news of God’s kingdom had to come first to those whom God had made into his people over many centuries. They were the priority in his calling. For he was the Son of God, which means not only that he was divine, but also that he was the True Israel. He was fulfilling the destiny of Israel. So he had to come to them first.

This determined what he did and where he went. He knew this was his Father’s will for him.

Every Christian has a calling. It isn’t always to a ‘religious job’, such as being a minister. It can be to a certain profession or industry. It can be a calling in family life. It can be something we’re called to do in the church or the community. It can be about the use of a particular gift or talent.

If you don’t know what yours is, then pray about it. In the meantime, dedicate the gifts and resources you know you have to the service of God, and consider the maxim offered by the spiritual writer Frederick Buechner when he said that vocation was ‘where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.’

Once you do have a sense of calling, then the example of Jesus means that it becomes a significant factor in determining what you do and what you leave aside. It helps you when people ask if you will take on a responsibility, because you can consider whether their request matches your calling. If it does, then fine. If not, then the answer is probably ‘no.’

Actually, I suspect that many of us need to say ‘no’ a lot more in order to be able to fulfil our callings. We get more hooked into a human weakness of wanting to please people and remain popular with them than we do following the call of God on our lives.

A few years ago, a very popular book for businesspeople and leaders in society was a title called ‘Essentialism’ by Greg McKeown. Basically, it’s a book that teaches you to say ‘no’ to everything outside your calling. McKeown says that if you have doubts about whether something is consistent with your calling, then you should say ‘no’ to it. I wonder whether many of us in the church should listen to him.

Secondly, though, are you flexible about your calling?

I say that, because I think that’s what Jesus showed in this story. Yes, his calling was to the people of Israel, but here he was in a place where there was less likelihood of him being able to do that. Tyre was a Gentile town.

So although he’s trying to stay low profile and undercover, when the woman discovers his presence and brings her heart-rending request he certainly has the opportunity to meet her need with his divine compassion without adversely affecting his calling.

Therefore, although following our calling is usually pretty decisive, we need to listen to God for those occasions when we need to be flexible rather than rigid.

Jesus homed in on that here as he told his riddle and the woman showed evident faith in her response. When he sees that faith, he acts.

In other words, he knows that God is at work here. The Spirit of God has surely been working in the woman’s life, preparing her for what will lead to Jesus’ life-saving intervention.

That, then, gives us an idea about when to be flexible about our calling. It’s not simply that we have some down time and a gap in our diary so we can fit in one of the people who is regularly badgering us. Instead, it’s about discerning the work of the Spirit who is doing kingdom things and making kingdom opportunities available.

One good way of discerning whether we’re being called to flex our calling is by consulting trusted friends. If you start to get enquiries and requests from people for your time and what they want are things that go beyond your regular calling as you understand it, then it can be wise to take the details of those approaches to your spouse, or to some wise friends. Let them help you discern an answer to these questions: does this request constitute a reasonable flexing of your calling or will it distract you from your calling?

In conclusion, then, when we dig into this story and get beyond the superficial ways of treating it, what we discover here is that the example of Jesus is very practical for us living out our calling, whether he’s called us to serve him in the church or in the world.

He wants us to follow our calling with a passion, but also to listen carefully for those occasional diversions from the route when something else is required of us.

As we do this, the kingdom of God will advance.

And that’s what we want. Isn’t it?

[1] On this and the general thrust of this sermon, see Ian Paul, Did the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7 teach Jesus not to be racist?

September 5, 2021 0

When ‘Church Unity’ Trumps The Gospel

Reported in many places, but particularly well in USA Today: Kentucky church barrs interracial couples as members.

Apparently

The recommendation “is not intended to judge the salvation of anyone, but is intended to promote greater unity among the church body and the community we serve,” according to the copy supplied by Harville to the Herald-Leader.

Yeah, right.

Not that we should be too smug. Churches are particularly good at elevating all sorts of things above the gospel as a false display of unity. This example is particularly vile, though.

December 1, 2011 3

Sermon: Imitating Missional Jesus

Quite a difference this week. Last Sunday I was invited to preach in a Baptist church and was given half an hour for the sermon. You may have noticed the sermon was longer than usual. Tomorrow it’s an Anglican church where a friend is the priest in charge, and my limit is fifteen minutes.

Luke 4:14-21

When my sister left home for college, she went to study in York. It wasn’t very long before her North London accent gained a North Yorkshire twang. We seem to have a knack for picking up other people’s accents in our family.

Then one summer she went on placement to Ipswich. One Saturday afternoon I took a phone call. There was a strange-sounding young woman on the other line. It took me a minute or two to realise this was my sister. London plus Yorkshire plus East Anglia made for a confusing accent, further magnified by the telephone line. Perhaps my sister above all exemplifies this family trait of picking up accents.

As Christians, we are called to pick up an accent, too – the accent of Jesus. Not that I mean we should speak in a first century Palestinian dialect – as if we could know what that sounded like anyway. But rather, our calling as disciples is to pick up the accent of his life. The New Testament says we are to imitate him.

So I want to take today’s Gospel reading and ask about the ways in which we might imitate Jesus.

Firstly, Jesus is filled with the Spirit. He has come out of the wilderness temptations and the first thing we hear is that ‘filled with the power of the Spirit, [he] returned to Galilee’ and that created a stir (verse 14). When he enters the Nazareth synagogue, he is handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and begins reading from what we call chapter 61, with the words, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me’ (verse 18).

And if you’ve been reading Luke not in little chunks like we do on Sundays, but from cover to cover, you’ll get this message even more clearly. Jesus has been conceived by the Holy Spirit, and at his baptism he has been anointed by the Holy Spirit. You just can’t get away from Luke telling us an important point: whatever Jesus’ special divine status, he conducts his entire ministry dependent upon the power of the Holy Spirit.

And if he does, how much more do we need to do the same. If the Son of God needed to live this way on earth, what price us?

But what does this mean for us? After all, the Spirit of God dwells within each of us from the time our faith in Christ begins. We cannot allow that fact to lull us into complacency. Too many churches and Christians work on auto-pilot. So much of what we do and how we behave is little different from any other organisations or individuals.

So certainly we should all make it a matter of prayer that God would fill us with his Spirit, again and again. None of us can trade on past glories. As has often been said, the church is always just one generation from extinction.

Yet also we cannot sit around simply waiting for a powerful spiritual experience before doing anything for the kingdom of God. What strikes me about Jesus and the Spirit in this passage (and generally in Luke) is that, having received the Holy Spirit, Jesus gets on with what the Father wants him to do. There is no bargaining. He knows he has received the Spirit, and he sets to work. Perhaps some of us know perfectly well what God has called us to do, but we keep employing delaying tactics. Yet if we have received the Spirit when we found Christ, why are we doing that? Truly Spirit-filled people make a difference for the kingdom.

Secondly, Jesus has a message of freedom. It seems to me that ‘freedom’ is a major theme of the verses Jesus reads from Isaiah. The obvious examples are ‘release to the captives’ and ‘to let the oppressed go free’, but ‘good news to the poor’ and ‘recovery of sight to the blind’ are kinds of freedom, too. (Verse 18)

We know that Jesus put this manifesto into action. He dignified the poor by proclaiming the good news to those beyond the pale. He set the captives and oppressed free when he commanded demons to go. He healed the blind and the sick. His was a wide-ranging message of freedom that was proclaimed in word and deed. He evangelised. He healed and delivered. And while he wasn’t directly political, the implications for social justice are present in his ministry.

Our imitation of Christ, then, is to be bearers of a message of freedom. It comes in the gospel theme of forgiveness. The Greek word translated ‘forgive’ in the New Testament means ‘set free’, and that is what forgiveness is. When we forgive somebody, we set them free from the obligations they are under to us. They are no longer bound to us. Not only that, when we forgive, we set ourselves free. For the alternative is bitterness, and that binds us tightly.

We bring freedom to others when our hearts are moved with the compassion of Christ for their plight. For some, that may involve the ‘miraculous’. For others, it may mean trailblazing a way forward in care for those in need. Why do we have hospitals today? Because Christians of earlier generations invented the infirmary. Why does Karen, your priest, conduct funerals for all and sundry in the parish? It isn’t simply because the Church of England is the Established Church in this country. It’s also because in the earliest days of Christianity, disciples of Jesus took pity on those who could not give their loved ones a proper burial.

Or what about this? The other day, our six-year-old daughter discovered that some of her friends wouldn’t play with another girl, because she was black. Our daughter set out to be the black girl’s friend. Even at six, she knows racism is wrong in the sight of God. Now if a six-year-old can do something in Christ’s name for justice, what about us? Ours is the precious message of freedom, as we imitate Christ and anticipate God’s new creation by showing glimpses of God’s kingdom.

Thirdly and finally, Jesus brings the fulfilment of God’s promises. In just over six months’ time, we shall be leaving Chelmsford for a new appointment. The profile of the appointment is very close to what I feel I can offer as a minister. My wife can see where she can get involved on behalf of the church in the community. The schools look quite promising. The manse (which being translated to Anglicans is ‘vicarage’) is more suitable than the one we live in here.

So there’s a level of excitement I feel – but we have to wait until early August when we move!

The Jewish people had been waiting, not for six months, but for centuries, for the promised Deliverer, the Messiah. Now Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (verse 21). You don’t have to wait any longer, he says.

We imitate Jesus by bringing a message of fulfilment, too. All around our communities and across the world are people waiting for something or someone that will give them hope. They may be damaged by the hurtful actions of loved ones. They – or someone they love – may be bound by dreadful illness or bereavement. They may be victims of injustice. There may just be an aching emptiness in their hearts, because they have believed our society and bought one possession after another in pursuit of happiness, only to find they might as well be chasing the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow.

And we have the privilege to say to such people, you don’t have to wait any longer. Your emptiness, your pain or your brokenness can be healed, because there is a God who loves you. He loves you enough to give up his only Son for you.

Now that is exactly why we hear calls to be a ‘Mission Shaped Church’ – because unless the church is about mission, she is not truly the church. It is why our two denominations – and now also joined by the United Reformed Church – co-operate on the Fresh Expressions project to reach out to people within their own cultures. It’s why although not every Christian is an evangelist, every Christian is a witness. Each one of us can speak about our experience of Christ.

Because that’s what happens when – like Jesus – we are filled with the Spirit and have a message of freedom. The time is now.

January 23, 2010 0

The Enduring Power Of Martin Luther King

Today, I took two assemblies in a school- one for the infants (ages 4-7) and one for the juniors (7-11). I was beginning a new theme for this term: heroes. Those of us on the assembly team from local churches had decided to eschew the word ‘saints’ in favour of something more understandable.

Not remembering that next Monday is the American public holiday in his honour I chose to speak about Martin Luther King. In preparation, I found this clip of the entire ‘I have a dream’ speech on YouTube:

I downloaded this, using the free utility YouTube Downloader. As you’ll see, it’s seventeen minutes long, so then I edited it in Windows Live Movie Maker to begin at the ‘I have a dream’ passage (at 12:29, if you’re interested).

After an introduction talking about issues of fairness based on real-life examples (Rosa Parks and tbe bus seat, water fountains, different schools, slavery in the case of the juniors and so on), I showed about one and a half minutes to the infants – up to the point where King says he wants hi four little children judged not on the colour of their skin but their character. With the juniors, I played a few seconds more – to the point where he envisions black and white children playing together and treating one another as sisters and brothers.

And that was when the Interesting Thing happened: when I paused the video for the juniors, several of them broke out in spontaneous applause. How wonderful it was to see the style and substance of King’s oratory make a connection with children in a different country, forty-seven years later.

So don’t tell me preaching is dead. We can legitimately talk about style, presentation and all the rest. But when we have a message to share and can do so with passion, surely the Holy Spirit still uses it to connect. Sure, King’s crusade was about a theme that would command common assent generally today, and when I went through the examples of ‘unfairness’ the juniors roared back their disapproval of what happened. But there is something here.

And it’s also about King’s story generally. Why did I choose King? Partly for this reason. Our chidren have been introduced to one or two famous figures at school via books recently. One was Florence Nightingale. Another was Mary Seacole. As a result, we have borrowed other books in the series from the library and read them with our two. One night I read a simple biography of King to Mark for his bedtime story. Granted, it omitted things like King’s alleged infidelities, but the impact on Mark was fascinating. The next day he told us he had changed his mind about what he wanted to do with his life. Previously he has wanted to be an English teacher or an author.

“Now I want to be a minister,” he said, “And tell people not to hate each other.”

He is only five. But I was only eight when King was murdered. There is real power here.

January 14, 2010 0

Tag: racism