Heard
Blog Series #6: How Jesus Treats Women, Part 3a He Learns from Her - Matthew 15:21-28
There are two versions of an incident where Jesus listens to a gentile, non-Jewish woman and changes His mind as a result of what she has to say. Mark shares his version of the story in chapter 7, verses 24-30 and Matthew in chapter 15:21-28. I encourage you to read both versions of the story. Since we know Matthew walked with Jesus as one of His disciples, it is likely that Matthew was actually present with Jesus during this conversation — he may have been one of the disciples who tried to silence the Indigenous woman following them. That is why I’d like to examine Matthew’s version of the story today:
The Faith of a Canaanite Woman
21 Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. 22 A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is demon-possessed and suffering terribly.”
23 Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
25 The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said.
26 He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs.” 27 “Yes it is, Lord,” she said. “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”
28 Then Jesus said to her, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed at that moment.
~ Matthew 15:21-28 (NIV 2011 edition)
Verse 26 is a poignant metaphor. The ‘children’ are generally understood to be the children of Abraham, or the Israelites. The Jews often referred to pagan non-believers as ‘dogs’, a metaphor not lost on this Canaanite woman. The term ‘dog’ was a slur against foreigners, and in this case, the indigenous who never converted to Judaism following Israel’s violent annihilation of the Canaanite people. Jesus’ use of this demeaning term in verse 26 shows us where His thinking was at the beginning of their encounter. He had been indoctrinated throughout His earthly Jewish life to think of anyone NOT Jewish as less intelligent or less valuable than Himself; more like an animal than a human. This passage provides us with an amazing window through which we can view Jesus as He catches Himself, stops short, and then visibly changes how He has been taught to think about the gentiles who existed all around Him.
If you are unfamiliar with who the Canaanite people were, you can check out Genesis 17:8, 1 Chronicles 16:14-18, Joshua 10-11, and Judges 4. You will find that the Old Testament history of Israel conquering the Canaanites and invading their land is violent. Sadly, it is strikingly similar to our North American history of caucasian Europeans exterminating ‘Indians,’ over-hunting their bison food source to near extinction, occupying their lands by force, and shoving our Indigenous neighbors into the least desirable places. Because the First Nations were defined as ‘savage’ by white Europeans, this label justified treating them as non-humans; less valuable than dirt.
I am grateful that one difference between the Old Covenant that God had with the Israelites (as testified to in the Old Testament) and the New Covenant that Jesus established between our Creator and ALL human beings (as testified to in the New Testament of the Bible) is Jesus’ up-side-down proclamation:
love your enemy.
This changes EVERYthing about how we Christians are to move about in our world under the New Covenant, loving our neighbor (even if our neighbor is an enemy) rather than conquering our neighbor by force. It is because of my faith in Christ and His New Covenant that I am against any colonization by force or the oppression of one people group by another today.
Even with these faith-centered convictions, both Jesus and people like me have had to contend with the history of our ancestors who came before us. Dealing with the dissonance between the violent wars depicted in the Old Testament and Jesus’ encouragement to ‘love your enemy’ in the New Testament can be confusing and … unsettling if I’m honest. The Bible Project offers and indepth look at this dissonance in their podcast: Judgment or Cruelty? Conquering the Promised Land. The Bible Project and Philip Yancey’s The Bible Jesus Read are good places to start if you’d like to resolve that inner dissonance.
There is another reality that eludes me. I have to keep reminding myself: It’s not God’s character that changed between the Old and New Testaments, but people. God didn’t transform from a vindictive ‘war-monger’ with too much power to a gracious ‘Father’ figure between the two testaments of our written account. God’s character remains the same. It is humans, as a collective, who are constantly evolving, growing, and changing (Malachi 3:6 and Isaiah 40:28-31). It is the humans in each testament of our Bible who increased their capacity for grace, kindness and forgiveness over the course of hundreds of years. Throughout both testaments of the Bible, it is our Creator who steadily seeks human beings out for relationship; to meet with His Creation wherever it is at in it’s development, then begin a friendship there (Jeremiah 29:13-14). In fact, to BE human at all, the Son of God had to continue learning, growing, and changing while He walked this earth. That is why, though He was God incarnate, Jesus was also capable of learning something new from this Indigenous mama.
[For more on these thoughts about God’s unchanging character traits versus the human tendency to constantly grow, change, and evolve I’ve gleaned much from Philip Yancey’s work in — well ANY of his books really, but especially — Disappointment With God and The Jesus I Never Knew.]