The Gospel text at our church yesterday was about the Canaanite woman who implores Jesus to exorcise a demon from her daughter:

“21 Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22 Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 24 He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26 He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27 She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28 Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.” (Matthew 15:21-28)

What is shocking given the character of Christ we see elsewhere described in the Gospels is the harshness of His response. She comes to Jesus as humble as can be knowing that she is transgressing multiple societal conventions. A Canaanite was not supposed to talk to a Jew, let alone ask for assistance, and it was improper for a woman to approach a man.

What is the Son of God’s response? Silence. Jesus completely ignores the woman. She doesn’t give up and the irritated disciples urge Him to send her away. Shockingly, Christ does just what they ask saying to her that He is only supposed to help Jews. Even then the woman soldiers on despite the humiliation, only to be compared to a dog. Imagine if you were asking someone for help and their response was to compare you to a dog. How would you feel?

In spite of all this, the woman lowers herself still further by accepting the indignity and persisting with her request and finally she is rewarded for her self-abasement. What a remarkable woman to show such a perfect example of turning the other cheek!

To put it mildly, this story does not paint Jesus in a good light and so unsurprisingly the church has made efforts to soften its troubling aspects. One way is to pretend that Jesus wasn’t comparing her to a dog but to a puppy - but is that really much better?

Another more common one is to reframe the story as being about testing the woman’s faith in God, but she makes no confession of faith in the verses we see in Matthew. The Canaanite certainly seems to have had faith in Jesus’s ability to heal her daughter, but it is unclear what her religious views are. She calls Jesus “Lord” but the term was more commonly used by women for men in Biblical times than now, for example “Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord” (1 Peter 3:6).

For those who ascribe to unconditional election, the woman’s faith would already be perfectly known to God and even for those who don’t, the biggest problem is that it doesn’t explain why it was necessary to insult the woman to test her faith with behaviour that seems far out of character for Jesus.

An alternative approach which until recently I thought was most probable is that Christ in his humanity learnt a lesson that day. He thought that His objective was to reach out only to the Jews, but the persistence of the woman woke Him up to the realisation that His mission was far greater than that. Jesus was responding as any typical Jewish man might at that time to a Canaanite woman seeking help, but became a changed person because of the interaction.

This idea is certainly attractive because it fits in with Paul’s later efforts to preach to the gentiles and it gives hope that like Jesus, we can change radically for the better in our communications with people we would normally regard as outsiders. For many the concept of a Christ who learns as he meets new people is challenging, but for me it isn’t that which I struggle with but that it depicts Jesus as having a deep human flaw that needs to be corrected. To put it bluntly, it implies that He was a racist.

Recently I came across a novel interpretation in Matthew Korpman’s book “Saying No to God: A Radical Approach to Reading the Bible Faithfully”. I am very excited by his proposal because of the way it resolves issues in this and many other challenging passages. Korpman suggests that in this and other stories where God appears to change, God was in fact challenging individuals. However, this isn’t the common idea of faith being evaluated, at least not in the way it is usually described. Instead, what is being tested is the person’s understanding of God’s character. In this story, Jesus presents an unChristlike image of Himself, full of prejudice and using derogatory language. He challenges the woman to correct Him, to in effect say “no that’s not who You are. I know Your character and it isn’t this”.

The woman’s “great faith” is that she believed so strongly in God’s goodness that she pushed back against Jesus’s misrepresentation of Himself, passing the same test that Moses and Abraham once did when confronted with a God that did not match the one they had come to know intimately in their hearts. Let her be an inspiration to all of us of what it means to have great faith in a Christlike God.



Please feel free to join the discussion at r/cruciformity on reddit or in the cruciform theology Facebook group.

