Caught

Lections: The Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 20), AD 2026 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

So—is Jesus a jerk?

That’s the uncomfortable question in everyone’s mind once we read this passage. A woman comes to Jesus, begging His help, not for herself but for her daughter; who suffers, mind you, not from any earthly ailment but from the spiritual predations of a demon. First Jesus ignores her pleas. Then He says that it’s not His job, that she isn’t within His purview, and therefore not His problem. Finally, He calls the woman a dog—she a mother who wants nothing other than for Him to save her child.

That’s pretty rough, no matter how you slice it. The whole thing’s hard to spin in a positive light.

Many will say, from their various pulpits this morning, that the woman in this story taught Jesus a lesson; that her cleverness and persistence opened His eyes to His racism, His sexism, His sin; that she made Him a better Messiah. And that’s problematic on a number of levels. Because if we need to teach Jesus—if we need to force Him to confront His sins—then what on earth are any of us doing here? Either Christ is God incarnate, incapable of sin, the one Word of God who expresses to us the entirety of who and what the Father is, or we’re all bloody well wasting our time.

If there is a lesson here—which is really the only reason why Matthew would have bothered to write it down—then it must be Jesus teaching us, not us setting Him right. Savvy? So let’s take another look, a closer look, because this is a scandalous story. But as usual, the scandal lies in pretty much the opposite direction of what we might assume.

At this point in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ ministry is well and truly under way. He has gathered His Apostles, preached the Sermon on the Mount, taught many things in parables, and healed every sort of sickness you could think of. And through it all, He has not limited His works to His own people. Yes, Jesus is sent first to the lost sheep of Israel; Matthew makes this very clear. But along the way, He cures a centurion’s servant. He casts out demons amongst the Decapolis.

This would have shocked Matthew’s Jewish-Christian audience. Greeks and Romans, after all, were the enemies of the Jews, pagan invaders. Yet his Gospel had foreshadowed this. When recounting Jesus’ birth, Matthew emphasizes four non-Jewish women within Jesus’ genealogy. And Matthew claims that Magi from the East, pagan priests, recognized the Christchild whom the Jewish clergy missed. Jesus is Jewish, but not for Jews alone.

After the death of John the Baptist, Jesus feeds 5000 people, enough to raise a Legion, certainly enough to frighten the Roman powers-that-be. He also butts heads against His coreligionists, arguing with Pharisees and scribes that God cares more for justice, love, and mercy than for any human traditions that we build up around the Law. He’s causing good trouble, in other words, kicking a few hornets’ nests—after which He needs to lie low for a bit, go incognito. Thus He withdraws to the land of Tyre and Sidon.

Now, Tyre and Sidon are famous cities in the Bible, Canaanite cities. You may recall from Sunday School that the Canaanites were the people whom the Israelites fought for control of their ancestral land, after the Exodus from Egypt. They were related peoples, semitic peoples. And so, as is often the case with siblings, sometimes they worked together, and sometimes they tried to kill each other. For much of Hebrew history, the people of God defined themselves as explicitly not Canaanite.

So here’s Jesus—by now a rather famous, if not infamous, Jewish exorcist and rabbi—in a Gentile town, a Canaanite town, with all the bad blood that this entails, when a woman from that region starts to shout at Him: “Have mercy on me, Lord, son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon!” So much for lying low. What makes this so remarkable, to Matthew’s audience, is that this Canaanite woman, this enemy foreigner, calls Jesus “Son of David,” a royal and messianic title, a Jewish title. She also calls Him Lord, κύριος, which is the Greek substitution for the Name of God.

She addresses Jesus as the Jewish King, addresses Him as divine! Peter hasn’t even had the guts to do that yet. But Jesus ignores her. He remains silent. Why? He hasn’t turned Gentiles away before. Remember the centurion, the Gadarene demoniacs? Nevertheless, she persists. Now the Apostles grow uncomfortable, as much at Jesus’ silence as at the woman’s pestering. “Send her away,” they say, with the clear implication that He should give to her what she wants. Just do it already, the Apostles implore Him.

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel,” Jesus sniffs. Talk about stone cold. Who would deny a mother help for her child? And she begs, “Lord, help me,” a line right out of the Psalms, right out of the Hebrew Scriptures, imploring God for mercy. To this He replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” And again, the Greek is a bit subtler: house dogs, little dogs. It implies order, priority, not outright rejection. Still, calling someone a dog in the first century was never a positive thing.

“Yes, Lord,” she fires back, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” And this totally, instantly changes His demeanor. You can almost see the smile split across His face. “Woman,” He now praises her, “great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed in that exact moment. Jesus then goes on to feed 4,000 Gentiles, just as He had previously fed the 5,000 Jews.

What is going on here? Why the sudden reversal? “Great is your faith!” He cries. Keep in mind that He has called His own disciples, no less than five times, “O ye of little faith.” This foreigner, this female, this ancient foe, now stands as the model for his disciples. She has shown to them true faith. And that’s the lesson: not for her, not for Jesus, but for us.

This is what prayer is in the Scriptures. It isn’t informing God of what He already knows. It’s calling upon God to remember who He is, what promises He has made, insisting that God be God! Such is how Moses prays, how the Psalmists pray, throughout the Bible. When God is silent, we persist in prayer. When God rejects our petitions, we reject God’s rejection! We hold to His “yes” in the face of His “no.” We cling to His mercy in the face of His judgment. We wrestle with God as Israel, refusing to let go until He bless us.

To paraphrase Martin Luther: we catch Christ in His own words, and He is happy to be caught.

Faith is trust. That’s all it’s ever been: faith that God is good; that He loves us, sees us, cares for us, even in the midst of our suffering, even in the middle of this fallen, broken world. Have faith that God is good, that God is God, despite the seeming ascendancy of evil, trusting that sin and death and Hell can never have the final say. For Christ is the final Word of God upon the Cross: “Father, forgive them! They know not what they do!”

Of all that I learned from my old Confessions professor, the thing that has stuck with me the longest—the promise that I have preached from this pulpit, oh, so many times—is the notion that if we were to stand before God this very day, and He were to say to us, “You wicked, vile sinner! You deserve to burn in Hell!” then we must hold up our Baptism like a shield and cry out, “You know what, Lord? You’re right. But that’s tough! Because you promised, and God does not break promises!”

That was the prayer that I prayed in my darkest hour. “He has been baptized,” I snarled. “He’s yours now. So you better remember who you are, and you better do what you do.” And He did. By God, He did. And so here I stand, as reluctant a convert as ever, with faith in Him alone whose faith has never failed.

Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David. Lord, help me. For even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.

Woman, great is your faith.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout

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St Peter’s Lutheran

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Nidaros Lutheran

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