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Allison Williams is a parishioner at St. Clement's Church who is in discernment for ordination. 

Good morning. I’d like to start with a confession. This is one of my least favourite Gospel passages. I dislike it so much that 3 years ago I chose to write my term paper on the second half of today’s reading in seminary in hopes of finding some kind of redemption for Jesus whom I saw to be cruel, condescending, and callous in this passage.

Spoiler alert, it didn’t really work. I still see Jesus’ actions and response to this unnamed and very tenacious Canaanite woman to be cruel, condescending, and callous. But while I maintain that Jesus does not come out looking good in this story, I have found peace and hope within it. So, if you are also uncomfortable with Jesus’ actions here and were hoping I could help with that, I believe you will be disappointed in me. And it’s just important to set expectations from the start.

To set the scene just a bit, this part of the story takes place on the margins in almost a too-on-the-nose kind of way, Matthew is not being subtle. Physically, we see the movement of Jesus and the disciples from their discourse with a crowd in Galilee about what defiles a person and what does not to the district of Tyre and Sidon, historical enemies of the Jewish people. And the woman whom we encounter is called a Canaanite, famous opponents in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible. So, we have Jesus and his very Jewish disciples wandering into historical enemy territory and being, I would think in their estimation, accosted by this local woman. To a Jewish audience, which Matthew is written to, these places and titles would not have been simple geography, they pull this story back into their history with familiar and dangerous people who should held at as far of a distance as possible. Matthew is setting his audience up for a massive plot twist, which we kind of already know about.

Now, as healing stories go, this is one amongst many in Gospel of Matthew. That Jesus can and does heal is of no question as we work our way through this book. There are lepers and mothers-in-law and servants and children of synagogue leaders and women who have been bleeding for years that all avail themselves of Jesus’ healing power. And yet, those stories are different from this one. In those accounts, the person asking for healing, for themselves or for someone they care about, receives that healing, sometimes without even asking for it. In the case of Peter’s mother-in-law which is told in Matthew 8, it seems that Jesus walks into the house, sees that she is sick with a fever, and heals her. And this woman’s non-Jewish identity cannot simply be the cause of Jesus’ refusal, Jesus’ heals the centurion’s servant, also in Matthew 8, a member of the occupying Roman forces without this sort of treatment. So why does this woman receive such different treatment than others who are also in need.

It seems that Jesus doesn’t even want to initially acknowledge her existence. She’s clearly causing a disruption, the text tells us that she is shouting her plea and yet Jesus does nothing. It must have been pretty bad because the disciples then go up to Jesus and urge him to get her to go away. And yet he still doesn’t speak to her, but rather addressing the disciples, explains that he was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel, although we have stories of him, prior to this encounter, healing people other than the lost sheep of Israel.

Before I move on to my efforts to bring out the peace and hope in this passage that I mentioned before, I want to address a bit of an elephant in the room, when Jesus calls this woman a dog. It might be said that he did not actually call her a dog but was rather using metaphorical language but I think that argument falls short when Jesus labels in his metaphor one group as children, humans, and the other as dogs, animals. Any context that I can provide in the time we have this morning will be woefully inadequate but I would like to still address it. Scholarship on this particular section is certainly diverse. There are those who seem to try to lessen the offensiveness by explaining that the term dog here is a generic insult rather than an ethnic one, or note that grammatically this is a diminutive noun, perhaps akin to calling her a puppy, some argue that Jesus uses this term as a kind of test of faith. Others refuse to try to defend the remark. Even accepting the reasons or rationales, which I personally am not convinced of, Jesus’ response is at best condescending and incredibly problematic and I agree with Warren Carter, professor of New Testament studies at Phillips Theological Seminary, when he notes that “Jesus seems to be caught with his compassion down.” I also find it a bit ironic that this passage immediately follows Jesus’ remarks that what defiles a person is not what they put into their mouths but rather what comes out of it.

I leave it with you, what you wish to do with those remarks. You are in the company of good scholarship regardless of where you fall. I would like to be clear though, you don’t have to be okay with this. If this does not sit well with you, that’s fine. It certainly does not sit well with me.

While this passage would seem to be about healing, I mean there is a young child being tormented, whose parent petitions and does ultimately receive healing for her, I don’t think that’s what this story is really about. As I said before, we know, already, that Jesus can and does heal, quite prolifically actually. We know that he can heal from a distance even, as demonstrated by the healing of the Centurion’s servant. So what’s the point of this story? What does it add?

I put to you a bit of a bold suggestion, this story really isn’t about Jesus. I mean, he there, does the healing, but he isn’t the main character, he isn’t the protagonist, in this account. The Canaanite woman is. Even though we never learn her name or her daughter’s name, she is the main character. So if this isn’t a healing story, what is it? That’s a great question, I’d love to tell you. I think it’s an embodied psalm of lament. It follows the classic form of a psalm of lament, presented in an atypical way. Now bear with me as I get just a little bit geeky with Literary Criticism, my apologies, and this is not my revelation, but that of biblical scholar Gail O’Day. She sees that the actions and responses of the Canaanite woman fall very well within the structure and tradition of a psalm of lament.

There is a petition – Have mercy on me. An address – Lord, Son of David. A complaint – my daughter is tormented. Another address – Lord. Another petition – Help me. And a motivation – Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall

The psalms are a very familiar kind of scripture. In the Anglican tradition we read them communally every week so your ear may already be attuned to hearing this kind of framework in today’s text. While we be used to reading them, perhaps even singing them, Matthew shows us one.

Psalms of lament are a beautiful gift we have in our scriptures. Not only do they demonstrate and then give a place within a community to acknowledge and struggle through suffering, but they are great examples of faithfulness when life has gone very sideways. While not a new concept in any regard it is worth repeating that our relationship with God is not confined to the good and the pretty, when things are going as planned, those times when we may sense God’s presence and blessing in our lives. It is for those times, to be sure, but in the psalms of lament we find reassurance that God not only can handle, but welcomes our grief, our pain, our frustration and anger. This is not a surface level relationship that we see in the Bible nor one that we are invited to today.

One of the other things that we find in psalms of lament is that the psalmist can often take up a kind of defiance in their petitions to God. Their anger or frustration is fuelled by a sense that God is not doing what has been promised and so the petitioner takes on the task of righteously calling God out, asking God to be different from what they have experienced, asking God to be what they were promised God would be. And this is not from a lack of faith, not at all, quite the opposite, the psalmists as well as our unnamed Canaanite woman, know who God is, believe in the ability and the power and the goodness of God, believe this so intensely that they are unafraid to tell God when things are not as they should be, to correct God, to tell God to change. And the scriptures call them faithful for it.

Now you may be uncomfortable with the idea of correcting God, that God can be “wrong”. There is a concept called immutability, that, when rigidly defined, asserts that God does not change and cannot be wrong. And there is a consistency to God a kind of changelessness, but here we have an account of Jesus changing his mind after being corrected by the petitioner before him. There is always a tension with the identity of Jesus. Jesus is attested, as we will say in the Nicene Creed in a few minutes, to be fully God and fully human. Where those lines blur or interact is best left to the mystery of the Incarnation, but there can be concern when Jesus acts a bit too human and some would see this mutability, this changing, as perhaps Jesus’ humanity coming out a bit on the strong side. I disagree, Jesus’ mutability demonstrates his divine nature, one that we can witness in God throughout our scriptures, particularly in the Hebrew Bible. We have many accounts of God being open to negotiation or correction. In the book of Jeremiah. 18.8 where God promises to withhold planned judgement, in Job 2.6 when God is persuaded to test Job, and in Genesis. 18.22f when Abraham negotiates with God, several times, as to how many righteous people must be found in order to save Sodom. The changeable Jesus we encounter here is consistent with how God has always related to God’s people.

I mentioned earlier that some scholars see this story as a test of faith. That Jesus is just trying to assess the strength of this woman’s faith, and once proven, provides healing to her daughter. I reject this for a few reasons. The first being that this perspective commodifies healing, makes healing something only available to the worthy. That is not consistent with how we see God through Scriptures behaving. God demonstrates almost a recklessness with goodness and grace, blessing many people who “do not” deserve it. And thanks be to God for that, I know that I would certainly not fall into the category of “deserving”.

And neither does the Canaanite woman. At least not to the audience of Matthew. She is an outsider, an enemy and she knows that, and yet she also knows that God’s definition of who is in is always bigger than we imagine it to be. She knows this so much that she believes herself to justified in calling Jesus to task, believes herself and her daughter in their otherness to be included in the promises of God. And this changes Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel of Matthew.

This is the second reason I reject this as a test of faith, because I think this passage is so much more powerful than that. This passage, permit me just one more bit of literary criticism, acts as a fulcrum for the whole book. What I mean by that is that this passage is the apex. It sits at nearly the centre of the book and has these echoing stories on either side of it, highlighting this moment as one of great significance. This encounter, this woman, marks a dramatic shift in Jesus’ ministry in Matthew from one where he forbids his disciples to even go to Gentile towns in Matthew 10.5 to one where he commands his disciples to go to all the world! This moment is the plot twist that Matthew has been laying breadcrumbs out for from the beginning of the book. He has subtly been hinting for the previous 14 chapters, this good news is for a far wider audience than you ever thought. We can see these breadcrumbs in the inclusion of Gentile women in Jesus’ genealogy and the salvific role that the Magi, foreigners and practicers of other faith, play in helping Jesus and his family escape Herod, and they all lead to this moment, to this plot twist, when a woman who should be on the outside, who holds no religious or cultural power, it is her that knows who Jesus is, sees who Jesus is, opens Jesus’ eyes to her faithfulness in claiming the promises of God. Matthew gives us a familiar framework of how we may relate to God in the embodiment of a psalm here and does so in a very surprising and novel way.

May we be so bold as to follow in the footsteps of this faithful Canaanite woman and open to having our assumptions proved wrong by the plot twists of God.

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- Koenig, Peter. The Daughter of the Canaanite Woman, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt University Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://act.library.vanderbilt.edu/artworks/58530 [retrieved August 19, 2026]. Original source: Peter Winfried (Canisius) Koenig, https://www.pwkoenig.co.uk/.