Well, there’s some important background info here that can be easily missed. The first important thing to notice is the context and the location. Right before this story, Jesus was debating issues of religious purity with the scribes and Pharisees, those groups considered at the time to be exemplary Jews. But Jesus calls them “hypocrites” and says that their faith is only surface-level – not truly penetrating to the heart. Now he moves from there into the foreign regions of Tyre and Sidon, districts that were heavily populated with non-Jews, like the Canaanite woman who comes up to him. Why would Jesus move into a pagan territory? We will see in just a moment.
The second important thing to notice is the presence of the disciples. Jesus’s initial attitude to the woman is less about her and more about them. As we see, they are dismissive of her, and want Jesus to send her away. Jews of that time treated non-Jews with suspicion, as outsiders – as foreigners devoted to false gods and not members of Israel’s covenant with the true God. According to their understanding, the Messiah that they awaited was going to vindicate the Jewish nation and show all the non-Jews just how misguided they had been.
Holding these things in mind – the story’s setting, context, and the presence of the disciples – now we can approach the story again. The Canaanite woman, a foreigner and a non-Jew, asks Jesus to work a miracle for her daughter. He responds at first in the way those around him would expect the Messiah to act: by treating the non-Jewish person as beneath him. He declines to help her. She is not a member of the house of Israel, and thus is not worthy of his attention. But the woman is persistent and she keeps asking. Why? Because she has faith – here, in the Canaanite woman, this foreigner and non-Jew, there is a faith much deeper and more authentic than anything of the scribes and Pharisees.
Jesus, being Jesus, has known this all along. But by seemingly rebuffing her request at first, he has helped the woman herself to realize the depth of her own faith. She didn’t just get what she wanted at first request; she has come to a deeper, truer understanding of her own acknowledgment of him as “Lord” and “Son of David,” a term that meant her belief in him as Messiah. And Jesus has also shown to his disciples that such true faith can be found even outside the house of Israel. In other words, he has come as the Savior not just for the Jews but for all persons, and that in him all can become God’s sons and daughters. He’s pointing out to his disciples that true faith is not found in exterior religiosity, like the scribes and Pharisees think, but in the deep desires of the heart and in a persistent trust that those desires will be answered.
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| Christ and the Canaanite Woman (c. 1600) by Ludovico Carracci |
How does this story help us? Probably in many ways, but let’s focus on the two things to which I’ve drawn our attention today. First, it’s always helpful to understand Jesus better and understand better what he’s doing. As I said, this story is often misunderstood, as if Jesus were being racist or sexist or just a jerk. But those interpretations are fundamentally contrary to what we believe about him as Son of God, so we have to be on guard against them. Scripture often has multiple layers of meaning, and we need to resist facile interpretations, especially ones that would seem to be contrary of the spirit of Christianity. We need to interpret Scripture, in other words, but we don’t do so on our own. As Catholics, we have the benefit to see what our Church teaches and has taught for two millennia, guided by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.
The second benefit of this story is to help us see faith in action. Sometimes we can think that the life of faith is mostly about identity, like it’s enough to belong to the right group, to give some external indications of belief, and that’s sufficient for God. But today’s Gospel shows us the importance of not treating our faith like membership in a country club, or else we run the risk of being like the Pharisees and scribes, more concerned with exteriors than interiors, and so becoming hypocrites in the process. True faith often shows up in unexpected places, at unexpected times, and from unexpected people. Who could have imagined, for example, that in this story it’s not the scribes and Pharisees who are exemplars of true and deep faith, but rather the foreign woman who has a possessed daughter? In the same way, we need to constantly be searching our own hearts to make sure that our faith is authentic – that it isn’t just a superficial thing, something we do for an hour on Sunday, but something that truly reaches the level of our hearts and leads us to conversion. Faith requires an openness to being changed: a change of preconceptions, as the disciples experienced; a change of heart, as the Pharisees and scribes were called to, but failed; or even a change of identity, as the Canaanite woman experienced. We don’t know what happened to her after this story, but it is safe to say that her relationship to God, and her faith in Jesus would have been forever changed.
Friends, as we prepare to receive the Holy Eucharist, it may be that, just as he did for the Canaanite woman long ago, Jesus desires to elicit from us a renewed and deepened act of faith today. Like her, we can come to him with our needs and desires, and we can echo her words: “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!” Sometimes it requires great patience and perseverance, but with great faith, the Lord never leaves our prayer unanswered.
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