In today’s Gospel we heard a Pagan woman listening to Jesus and we saw how she made her presence felt. She comes across as one of the most attractive characters in the pages of the Gospel: a mother who is tormented by the torment of her daughter, a woman who takes to the streets to make her plea to Jesus, who refuses to take his silence for the last word, who organizes a one-woman protest in the path of these  runaway men. She is the only person in the Gospels who has the wit to outwit Jesus. And in the end, she gets what she wants.

Jesus withdraws from Jewish territory and crosses into the region of Tyre and Sidon, present day southern Lebanon. He is escaping from his opponents who are exasperated at the way he allows his disciples to break with the tradition of the Jewish elders, ignoring the laws about clean and unclean. If Jesus is trying to escape from this problem, he is heading for a large disappointment: he comes face to face with the same question in larger form. A Pagan woman comes to him, hoping that he will have mercy on her and heal her daughter. Matthew calls her a Canaanite - the name given to the older inhabitants of Israel who were dispossessed by the Hebrews. This woman symbolizes all those who are regarded as unclean by Jesus’ own people. Will Jesus fraternize with her or not?

The silence of Jesus suggests the refusal to minister to this woman’s needs. This is how the disciples interpret it, and they plead with Jesus to do them a favor by getting rid of this mobile nuisance who is  screaming after them. Jesus explains his exclusive mission: he is sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. This woman, therefore, is not his problem. She is outside the territory of his pastoral concern.

The woman, however, has no intention of bowing to this theological niceties which leave her out in the cold and abandoned her daughter to the life of torment. She stops Jesus in his tracks by kneeling at his feet. “Lord,” she says, “help me.” Jesus responds by telling a harsh parable, one which voices his own people’s traditional attitude to the likes of this woman: “it is not right to take the children's food and  throw it to the dogs.” Only Jews have a right to be treated as “children” of God; the Gentiles, like this woman, are “dogs”.

The woman is not diverted by this offensive rebuff; rather than getting into a scrap about Jewish-pagan relations, she hangs on to the reason why she is there. She tells Jesus that even the dogs can eat the scraps that fall from the master’s table. The scraps from the table become dog food. And this woman kneeling at the feet of Jesus lets it be known that she will be satisfied with dog food. In a response she has outwitted Jesus in a way that none of his learned opponents ever managed, and he has the grace to give in. The woman gets what she came for; her daughter is healed. 

Only twice in the Gospels does Jesus leave Jewish territory. Although his attitude to the Gentle woman seems out of keeping with the way he normally relates in the Gospel stories, it probably does reflect strict Jewish Christian thinking in the early church. All the first Christians were Jews, many of whom still regarded Gentiles as unclean. In the Acts of the Apostles we learn that even Peter had to be converted to a new attitude. As he admits this first gentle comments converts:

You know it is forbidden for Jews to mix with people of another race and to visit them, but God has made it clear to me that I must not call anyone profane or unclean (Acts 10:28)

At first, the Christian community at Jerusalem had no mission to the Gentiles. Nobody went to to the “dogs”, as they were called. But Paul comes on the scene as the apostle who rejoices in the fact that his vocation is to go to the dogs. He himself was a strict Pharisee, and he too has had to be converted from his attitude to non Jews. He leads by his example when he spearheads the early church’s mission to the Gentiles. Paul sets the example for the whole Christian Church. If we believe that Christ died for everyone, then no one is a dog. No one should be excluded from the old embrace and reach of God’s love.

And that is why the Canaanite woman in the Gospel is so important for all of us. She is the teacher of the servants of God. Through her demand for attention and dignity, the voice of God questions us all.

God is good, all the time! 

Fr. Williams Abba

“The only thing that counts is faith working through love” – Galatians 5:6