At that time, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman of that district came and called out, “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.” But Jesus did not say a word in answer to her. Jesus’ disciples came and asked him, “Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.” He said in reply, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But the woman came and did Jesus homage, saying, “Lord, help me.’ He said in reply, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” Then Jesus said to her in reply, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And the woman’s daughter was healed from that hour.” (Matthew 15.21-28)
When Rick Bragg found a stray dog wandering around the road near his Alabama home, an illegitimate Australian collie as he called the mutt, he felt sorry for him and decided to take him in. Looking at the dog, Rick said to him, “You had a damned hard ol’ time of it, didn’t you buddy?” Bringing him into the kitchen, he got the dog a bowl of water. Then he gave him a big bowl of dried food.
His eighty-three-year old mom, taking it all in, informed Rick that no dog could ever get healthy again on such a dry, rattling mess as that. As he explained, his mom did not believe in dog food squeezed out of machines and sold in fifty-pound bags. “It didn’t even smell like food,” she told Rick. So she went to her stove and made a big skillet of milk gravy rich in bacon grease.
Putting the gravy in a bowl, Rick watched as the dog ate it all, a quart or so, he said, even licking the bowl. Then the bedraggled dog wobbled to the dried food, sniffed it, and ate it too. Sitting next to the dog, Rick petted him until the dog eventually went to sleep on his foot. And so began the saga of a sick man and his even sicker dog that Bragg tells us about in his book called “The Speckled Beauty: A Dog and His People.”
If nothing else, that short vignette from the book proves right the Canaanite woman whom we meet in the gospel today. Feisty, fiery, the woman is fearless, or has moved way past fear when she approaches Rabbi Jesus, a Jewish teacher, to beg him to heal her daughter who is possessed by a demon. A curious exchange between her and the Rabbi begins with her cries for help.
At first, Rabbi Jesus says nothing to her. But she is not dissuaded by his silence, continuing her appeal. So he turns to her and says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That brush-off does not have any effect on her, the woman imploring him again, “Lord, help me.” Probably impatient at her persistence, Rabbi Jesus pointedly tells her, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”
Under normal circumstances, such a statement might have stunned into silence a person who doesn’t know how to take no for an answer. But, apparently, these were not normal circumstances and the woman was not your typical pest. Snappy, maybe even sharp-tongued, the woman answers, “Even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”
Whereupon, Rabbi Jesus recognizes he has been bettered in this argument and he freely admits admiration of her spunk and resolve. “Woman, great is your faith!” he tells her, and assures her that her request will be answered. The story ends with the evangelist telling us in short form that “the woman’s daughter was healed from that hour.”
Without a doubt, there is much to ponder in this story, beginning with the elephant in the room. Why in the world is Rabbi Jesus so short-off with the Canaanite woman? Here is a woman clearly in need, anguishing over her daughter’s problems. And what does Jesus do? He ignores her. Then he tells her his work is for the benefit of Jews, not heathens. And when that doesn’t quell her outbursts, he really goes for the jugular, more or less comparing her to a dog that tries to steal food from children.
This is not the sweet Jesus we’re accustomed to, ever-patient, ever-kind. His snark is usually reserved for the scribes and Pharisees, not for women and their ailing daughters. Obviously, we could sidestep the whole unpleasantness of his attitude and rush to the end of the story where we find him heaping high praise on the woman, but that really isn’t being honest with the situation.
The first thing we have to remember is that Matthew wrote his gospel for a Jewish audience. Therefore, the Jewish worldview and mindset are always front and center, not on the periphery or edges. We’ve been with Matthew for many months, so we know this is true. So, for Matthew’s crowd, it would have been quite extraordinary for a Jewish rabbi to converse with an outsider, particularly a pagan woman, who approaches him on the side of the road. The relationship between Jews and Gentiles is a sensitive one for his listeners and he is going to present it as such.
By way of contrast, Luke, who writes for a Gentile audience, more often than not puts outsiders in a favorable light, most notably the Samaritan in the Good Samaritan story and the Roman centurion who who receives high praise from Rabbi Jesus, the Rabbi saying of him, “I tell you, not even in Israel have I found such faith.” So strong is Luke’s portrayal of Jesus’s offering an olive branch to the pagans that his text is often called the “gospel to the Gentiles.”
So, Matthew knows his audience just as Luke knows his and, at a fundamental level, Matthew is going to present the traditional Jewish belief on salvation, that is, the Jews are the chosen people. Therefore, salvation comes first to them and only later to the Gentiles. Matthew constructs his gospel in alignment with this belief–Jews first, Gentiles later. It is no coincidence, then, that it is only at the end of his gospel that Matthew has Rabbi Jesus instruct his trusted followers to extend his mission beyond the Jews, telling them, “Go and make disciples of all the nations.”
In fact, as we saw in Chapter 10 of Matthew’s gospel, Rabbi Jesus instructed his followers to preach and teach among the Jews, instructing them “not to go into pagan territory or to enter a Samaritan town,” explaining it as a missionary effort “to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words, in the story of the Canaanite woman, Jesus is practicing what he preaches. Many scholars go so far as to say that Rabbi Jesus did not step foot in the region of Tyre and Sidon, but only went “towards” the towns, and that the woman “came out” of the district to meet Jesus.
With this background, I think we can agree that Jesus’ actions make more sense. However, it still leaves open the question of his using the image of a dog, telling the tearful woman that “it isn’t right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” Here, the translators agree that the word he used wasn’t dog per se, but a puppy, or perhaps a household pet.
That tidbit is helpful, toning down somewhat the harshness of the Rabbi’s words, allowing us to see Jesus is talking about the family pet yapping beneath the table, hoping someone will take notice, not a snarling dog eating out of a dumpster behind the fast food restaurant. And, all things considered, the woman did not take great offense at his choice of words because she continued to petition him for help and, using his own image, outwitted him, informing him that “even the dogs get scraps.”
I suspect it was at that point that Rabbi Jesus smiled, maybe even sniggered. One thing is for sure. The chutzpah of the woman impressed him, so much so that he compliments her, stating the obvious, “Woman, great is your faith!” And, as the story ends, the woman gets what she wants, and the daughter is healed of whatever was ailing her, demonic or otherwise.
To be honest, I’m not overly bothered by Rabbi Jesus’ initial response to the woman, slowly coming to her aid rather than immediately. I get what Matthew is doing here and I can live with it. The bottom line is the God whom Jesus addressed as Father is the God of Israel. That means the table was set for the Jews, but Gentiles can find a place in the empty seats. Or, in the highfalutin language of scholars, “The roots of Christianity are Jewish and Gentile Christians have been grafted onto the olive tree.” Fair enough.
Really, what bothers me the most in the story is not so much what Rabbi Jesus says, but what the disciples say. When the woman begins to make a scene, the disciples’ reaction is more mean-spirited. They say to Jesus, “Send her away! She keeps screaming at us!” Quite literally, they want the Rabbi to get rid of her, to get her out of sight.
Their response bothers me because it is only too typical of disciples, then and now. We may want to recall that when the crowds followed Rabbi Jesus to a deserted place and evening fell, the disciples said to him, “This is a deserted place and it is already late. Dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the villages and buy food for themselves.” So, the disciples first response to a problem is to push it away, not wanting to be bothered by it or taking the time to fix it.
Of course, in that particular episode, Rabbi Jesus tells the disciples that “there is no need for them to go away, give them some food yourselves.” It was his way of telling them to fix it themselves, not to push the problem–more specifically, people with problems–out of sight. They are to deal with it, finding a remedy, offering help, not to dismiss people as if they don’t exist.
I find the disciples’ response troubling, much more troubling than Rabbi Jesus’ back-and-forth with the Canaanite woman. He comes around. Given a choice, they wouldn’t. And, as I said, it is the first response of too many would-be followers of Rabbi Jesus to want to avoid the tattered and tattooed man on the street asking for a dollar, to walk away from the immigrant woman with children hanging onto her dress and with desperation in her eyes, to push out of sight the despicable conditions of the poor living in slums or on the streets of America. We, like those disciples, have a nasty tendency to want to send away these people, probably because their calling out to us pricks our consciences. Or, worse case scenario, we just don’t want to get involved.
I guess what I’m saying is we may want to spend less time quibbling over the way Rabbi Jesus responds to the Canaanite woman and more time questioning the way the disciples wanted to deal with her. As we saw, he eventually helps her, even if it means breaking his own rules. The disciples, for their part, want to turn their back on her and walk away from the problem.
So, as I see it, who do we want to be in this story? Rabbi Jesus who comes around and answers the woman’s cries for help. Or the disciples whose first instinct is to shove the problem out of sight, leaving the poor woman still crying, still desperate, still alone. That’s the real question raised in this story. Not why Rabbi Jesus compared the woman to the family pet.
–Jeremy Myers
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