We are Faced with a Difficult Gospel Reading ~ August 16, 2026
Proper 15a, 2026 Ginger Solaqua
May God’s word alone be spoken; may God’s word alone be heard. Amen.
We are faced with a difficult Gospel reading this morning, a Gospel in which Jesus’ words and actions might shock us or even disappoint us.
It’s worthwhile to take a moment to imagine this story from the perspective of the Canaanite woman at its center, to imagine what her life was like.
The first thing that we learn about her was that she was a Canaanite. The Canaanites were the ancient enemies of the Jews, of Jesus’ people. For the Canaanites, this enmity began when Abraham arrived in their homeland and told them that God had promised it to him and his descendants. This was news to the Canaanites, who, of course, already lived there. The Jews saw the Canaanites as pagans, idolaters who refused to recognize the one true God. The Canaanites saw the Jews as rigid and ungenerous.
The second thing we learn about this woman is that her daughter is “tormented by a demon.” We can take that at face value – certainly things happen on a spiritual level that are beyond our ken. We might also consider that in a time before modern medicine, this language was applied to symptoms that sound to us like epilepsy, autism, mental illness. We don’t have to know what exactly was happening to know that the daughter was suffering her mother couldn’t fix it.
This suffering was probably accompanied by social ostracism for both mother and daughter. In this part of the ancient world, in both Jewish and Gentile culture, the illness or disability of a child was considered the fault of the parents, particularly the mother.
By the time she gets to Jesus, this mother is desperate. She is screaming in the street, trying everything to be noticed by an obscure itinerant healer from a faith not her own, a nation not her own. She is embarrassing herself. And we feel, under her desperation, her love for this suffering child.
That is where we find the Canaanite woman. And how does Jesus respond to her cry from the heart, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David!”?
He doesn’t respond. He doesn’t even acknowledge that she is there.
But she persists.
And Jesus finally speaks: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, Jesus understands himself to be the Savior of Israel alone, of the Jews alone. This is who he is called to teach and heal, and not anyone else.
But she doesn’t give up. This woman throws himself at Jesus feet and says “Lord, help me.”
Jesus’ response chills our hearts: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” He says that his ministry is meant for the children of God, the Jews. Gentiles, non Jews, including Canaanites, are dogs who are not worthy of it.
I don’t know about you, but this is not what I expect from Jesus, who is supposed to be love personified. Jesus doesn’t even acknowledge this woman’s pain and need. He calls her unworthy of the gifts of the kingdom and tries to send her away.
I find this hard to hear. Dare I say it – I am disappointed in Jesus.
And if I am disappointed, can you imagine how very very disappointed she was?
When I feel that wave of shock and disappointment at Jesus’ words to the Canaanite woman, I try to ask myself, how is this disappointment inviting me to a deeper truth? What is God showing me through this disappointment?
Two answers come to mind for me – and I’d love to hear at coffee hour what comes up for you.
First, through being disappointed with Jesus, I am drawn to a deeper contemplation of the Incarnation, the Christian belief that in Jesus, God became fully human and fully divine.
This story leads me to wonder if part of the gift God gave us in the Incarnation was a willingness to take on all the limits of being a human.
We know that the limitless God took on limits of having a body that could be injured, even killed. A heart that could be hurt by friend and foe. But perhaps there is more - To be human is to be born in a particular time and place and to have your perspective necessarily narrowed by your context, by your experiences. I shared with our Bible Study that 18 months or so ago, my husband Anthony started having to go to Dallas a lot for work. He asked what was fun to do in Dallas and I said absolutely nothing. Dallas is boring and shallow and the food is terrible. Now I have been to Dallas exactly one time in my whole life for a high school soccer tournament. I know nothing about Dallas. But I grew up five hours away in Houston and Houstonians tend to have a stereotypes about the other big city in Texas.
What if part of the gift of the Incarnation was God’s willingness to really become a man born in Nazareth in the first century, a man who was taught that Canaanites were idolaters until he learned otherwise.
And what if God offers us in this story a model of what it looks like to face our biases and preconceived notions with honesty and to move beyond them when we are invited to do so?
What a gift, what grace for us to have a chance to see for Jesus himself to face these blind spots that we all struggle with and show us what it looks like to face the embarrassment of being wrong honestly. What a gift to see Jesus learn something new and change in light of it. This is a model for how all of us can face what happens when we encounter our own prejudices and blind spots.
The second truth that I feel invited to consider as I read this text is that perhaps the depth and intimacy of relationship to which Jesus calls each of us.
Jesus appears to be changed by his conversation with the Canaanite woman. After his initial dismissive response, they keep talking. And in response to their conversation, Jesus does exactly what he initially refused to do. He heals her daughter. He shares the gifts of the kingdom, meant only for Israel, with a pagan Canaanite. And from this point on, over the course of his ministry, we see Jesus expand the circle of people for whom the Gospel is intended wider and wider until in his last words to the disciples, the circle encompasses the whole world. Go therefore and make disciples…The Canaanite woman changes Jesus through their conversation. That is a shocking idea.
This story pushes me to face the mystery that the God in Jesus, for some reason, choses to engage with human beings through relationship. And not a relationship between a king and a terrified subject who dares not approach the throne. But a relationship of love and trust in which each party can be influenced, changed by the other.
This is a profound mystery. The choice to be in relationship with us in this way is an act of grace beyond my comprehension, but there it is. Jesus wants to be in relationship with us, to have his mission formed by who we are, what we desire, what we have to offer. Jesus allows himself to be changed by the Canaanite woman. He changes the focus of his ministry in light of their conversation . We are engaging with a God who chooses to meet us in prayer, in conversation, as co-creators of a new reality. It's mysterious, but somehow it is true.
When we read this text, we might fear that Jesus is somehow less loving, less merciful than we might have hoped. But if we go deeper, we see a God who enters into human life with deep compassion and awareness of the fullness of what it means to be human; a God who shows us what it is to be vulnerable and limited and to live faithfully. In this text we see a God who wants a relationship with us of such depth and intimacy that it can hold disagreement and makes room for transformation. That is a God that we can worship, that we can serve, that we can love. Amen.
