This reflection on Matthew 15:21-28 was inspired by feminist readings of the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Canaanite woman. Unfortunately, I can’t find the exact reference I used.
I think that most of us are used to talking about Jesus as fully God and fully human, but in practice I think we are much more comfortable focussing on his divinity than his humanity. Our passage today reveals something about the limitations Jesus lived with because he was a human being, while the star of the story is unquestionably the Canaanite woman. She is such an extraordinary character that, I think, she deserves to be up there on the list of the most influential women in the Bible; yet when I did a Google search for Biblical heroines, I didn’t find her name on the list of ‘20 Amazing Women in the Bible to Learn From and Admire’, or the ‘19 Powerful Women in the Bible to Inspire You’ or even ‘Heroines and Harlots: 20 Biblical Women Who Impacted Their World’. I did, finally, find her mentioned in a modest website in a quiet corner of the internet named ‘9 Anonymous Heroines of the Bible’. So, what is it about her that I have been so impressed with? Let’s take a look at the story to find out. Jesus had travelled to the gentile region of Tyre and Sidon, he had escaped into foreign territory to try and get some rest from the demands of the crowds and the threats of the religious establishment and, perhaps, to prepare the disciples for what lay ahead. But there was to be no rest for Jesus. The Canaanite woman had a daughter in a desperate situation, diagnosed with the techniques of the day as being possessed by a demon. We don’t know what the symptoms were, but these days we might have understood her as having epilepsy or a mental health problem. My own experience of having a child with serious depression leaves me with great compassion for this woman, we were lucky to have access to a brilliant psychotherapist and anti-depressants that turned the situation around, but I still felt a lot of fear at times, and anxiety and helplessness. The Canaanite woman had no help and, in addition, her daughter would have been stigmatized because people believed she was possessed. It is no wonder, then, that when a miracle-working itinerant preacher was rumoured to be on his way into town that she went out in search of him. She would do whatever it took to get her daughter the help she needed. But she faced a number of obstacles in getting access to Jesus. She was a gentile, which was bad enough, but she was also a Canaanite. This was more problematic, as the Canaanites were the ancient inhabitants of the Promised Land, the archetypal enemies who had been stripped of access to the land when the Hebrews moved in from the desert. This detail points to the fact that this woman was similarly denied access to Israel’s resources, this time in the form of their messiah. In addition, she was a woman in a time when women were typically dominated by men, and it must have been intimidating for her to be faced with the 12 hostile men surrounding Jesus. But her love for her daughter and her sense of desperation led her to the point that she was willing to shout at a stranger in the street. As we will see, she uses every resource available to her to get access to Jesus’ power. To start off with, she leads with her voice, begging for mercy in her painful situation with a cry from the heart. Jesus didn’t respond at all, which is extremely troubling. But the woman wasn’t put off by this, she wasn’t going to take no for an answer and so she kept yelling at him. I am quite sure that the disciples told her to go away, but since Jesus himself hadn’t told her to leave, she still had hope. She continued to call out to Jesus until the disciples couldn’t take it any longer and urged him to get rid of her, but his mind seemed to be elsewhere. At first, I wondered whether he was just too exhausted or distracted to respond? But then it occurred to me that perhaps he didn’t know what to say? Perhaps he was thinking out loud as he said his next words: ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ The minute he started to engage with her question, she used her next resource – her body. She physically moved herself in front of Jesus preventing him from walking forward. Many commentators point out that she was kneeling in front of him in a position of submission and worship, and although this may be true, I see it as a position of strength. It is quite an assertive and potentially risky thing for a lone woman to block the path of 13 men – but her gamble pays off. She asks again for Jesus’ help. She’s audacious and persistent. She’s fearless, or at least her love for her daughter overcomes any fear about what might happen to her own body. Jesus’ response was not very encouraging, to say the least: ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs’. As was current practise at the time, he likened her and her people to dogs, and although he uses the word for a domesticated pet rather than a rabies-infested stray, it doesn’t get us away from the problem that even the most beloved pooch is in no way remotely equal to its human master. He’s saying that she and her people aren’t invited to the heavenly banquet. Again, I choose to interpret this as Jesus externally processing the challenge set before him. This insult would have floored most people, but she doesn’t waste time feeling insulted, our heroine remains undeterred and resorts to her final resource: her intellectual creativity. She responds with the clever riposte ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. It’s such a great image, I can just imagine the dogs under the table excitedly running after anything that falls to the ground and devouring it, while above the table, the meal is being picked at by fussy children who aren’t at all convinced by this new dish that they are being offered. With this masterstroke, she took Jesus on at his own game, this Jesus who was so good at repartee and verbal jousting was bested by a gentile woman. And it wasn’t just intellectual sparring, she managed to change his mind. This is the only instance we read of where Jesus was educated by someone, and that someone was a woman, a woman who should not properly have been speaking to him at all. I wonder how Jesus felt about this encounter. I hope he enjoyed it. How did it feel for him to lose the argument and realise that he had to change his mind? What is clear, is that he recognized truth when he heard it. Jesus healed her daughter and commended her for her faith, her great faith; she was noisy, disruptive, creative and persistent: faith isn’t always neat and tidy, it can mean yelling in the street and breaking the rules. Our Canaanite heroine is the focus of the story; Jesus was reluctantly dragged into it and his thinking was transformed in the process. She was God’s agent for change in Jesus when it came to his understanding of bringing the gospel to the Gentiles. The Canaanite woman’s persistence not only made her daughter whole; it also showed Jesus a broader perspective to his ministry. I don’t think we need to feel threatened by the idea what Jesus changed his mind. What was the point of the narrative of Jesus being tempted in the desert, if not to show us that he struggled with how he was going to live out his calling? Just as he developed physically and emotionally as he grew to maturity, he must also have grown spiritually, e.g., there must have been a point when he realised that his relationship to God the Father was different to everyone else’s. Most memorably in the garden of Gethsemane we see him struggling with the path that he knew God had called him to take. In this encounter, Jesus shows us that it is OK for our understanding of the faith to develop during our life. We cannot expect our beliefs to remain entirely static and we needn’t be afraid of that change. As we are confronted with new evidence and new experiences, we adapt our understanding and that’s healthy! God can hold us in that process. I suspect that our heroine has been a little sidelined because, at face value, this story doesn’t show Jesus in a great light, what with referring to a whole people group as dogs. The idea that Jesus could change his mind is also potentially disturbing, especially since this happened through a foreign woman who didn’t know how to behave in public! Since we haven’t really known what to do with that, we’ve looked for other explanations for what happened that day. I’ve heard people say that Jesus was testing his disciples to see how they would react, and others say that he was teaching the woman about persistence in prayer. But I think our heroine is such a pivotal figure that she should be right near the top of the list of ‘20 Amazing Women in the Bible to Learn From and Admire’, and of the ‘19 Powerful Women in the Bible to Inspire You’ and most importantly in ‘Heroines and Harlots: 20 Biblical Women Who Impacted Their World’. May God give us some of the courage and creativity of this passionate, determined woman.