I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel

 

Can we imagine what it feels like to have a pressing need or a significant request met with silence? Just think about it for a moment. For me, the question and related unpleasant memories bring the plight of the Canaanite woman home. (Matthew 15:21-28). This Gospel has always made me uncomfortable. In years passed whenever it rolled around as our assigned reading, I wrote around the story, not wanting to address it, not fully understanding it as it was so contrary to Jesus’ nature and earlier events in Matthew’s Gospel. Even Mark in his corresponding account of the story (Mark 7:24-30), chickened out and did not include Jesus’ somewhat callous response in Matthew: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”

Admittedly, women’s words are too often met with silence or are interrupted or disrespected, by men and sometimes by other women. Those times in my life when I asked for information or help and received nothing but silence, were hurtful. No one immediately responds to the Canaanite woman or gives the impression that they will respond. The disciples urge Jesus to send her away because, it appears, they are annoyed by her continued shouting, and her refusal to take silence for an answer. Too often we either cannot or refuse to empathize with people whose experience is different from ours. If we are not at the receiving end of oppression or injustice we find it easy to dismiss it as unwelcomed noise. If our common humanity and our relatedness does not move us, what will? The Canaanite woman’s blood ran through Jesus’ veins and for that matter, ours…but it didn’t seem to move Jesus!

So many women or disenfranchised people in history like the Canaanite woman have persisted as lone minority voices among a majority of authoritative and powerful men. She persisted! She didn’t go away; she would not be dismissed. Her plea for help was met with the language of societal indifference: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

In the end, Matthew’s Jesus responds by commending the woman for her faith. (In Mark’s version, Jesus commends the woman with no mention of faith.) Matthew calls what this woman does an act of faith. Yet, Jesus does not perform an exorcism; he simply says, “Let it be done for you as you wish.” He does not say let it be done as you believed but as you will. The woman’s strong will manifested by her persistence, identified as faith, led to her daughter’s healing.

While Jesus doesn’t tell us, we are told that the woman’s daughter was healed instantly. Perhaps faith engenders persistence or maybe persistence feeds faith. Either way, persistence and faith make a powerful pair. While we can never  underestimate the power of a persistent woman and determined mother and the God in whom she believes, we still wonder why Jesus hesitated and initially responded as he did? For me, the answer lies in the fact that Jesus was as fully human as he was divine. I wonder if this was meant to be a teachable moment for him and that this woman at this precise moment in time, was the vessel for this powerful education? 

While I feel a little better, I still have difficulty with this Gospel. You see, it’s so easy to relate to the loving, compassionate, Jesus who is “above it all,” but when I encounter Jesus who in this case, behaves as I might have, it makes me uncomfortable. Maybe that’s the lesson for us; we’re are trying; we’re still learning. We are only human.

Remember man, presume not God to scan, the proper study of mankind in man. Alexander Pope