The Kingdom Movement

A Literary & Pastoral Study Guide to the Gospel of Matthew

The Inspiration of Matthew,

by Caravaggio

On the King's Errand

Devotional Reflections on Matthew's Gospel

Jesus Exposes Prejudice in Us, Racial and Otherwise:  Mt.15:21 – 28

^15:23 But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man…²¹ Jesus went away from there, and withdrew into the district of Tyre and Sidon. ²² And a Canaanite woman from that region came out and began to cry out, saying, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed.’ ²³ But he did not answer her a word. And his disciples came and implored him, saying, ‘Send her away, because she keeps shouting at us.’ ²⁴ But he answered and said, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ ²⁵ But she came and began to bow down before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me!’ ²⁶ And he answered and said, ‘It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ ²⁷ But she said, ‘Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.’ ²⁸ Then Jesus said to her, ‘O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed at once.

          Jesus calls us into relationships where our resistance to them can be seen, offered back to him, and transformed.  For example, I had recently developed a resistance to Haitians, or at least some Haitians.  Why?  Some Haitian men used to gather in my neighborhood, across from my house.  The police department said they knew that these men were dealing drugs; they had their eye on this house.  Cars sped through our street more frequently, posing a greater danger to children playing outside.  I had tried to get to know them, because I had heard of Christians sometimes finding a relational inroad to people.  But I was consistently waved away, my attempts at friendship laughed off.  Afterwards, every time my wife or I saw them hanging around outside and when we smelled the cloying scent of something strange being smoked, we called the police.  Almost every day.  Sometime during that summer, they moved away.  A half year later, I was in a worship service where the worship leader sang a song in Haitian Creole.  Immediately, I stopped singing.  I sensed resistance inside my heart.  Why?  That language reminded me of being rejected, troubled, and angry.  I had to ask Jesus for strength to forgive and love those Haitian men with his love.

Eventually, the apathy, prejudice, or fear we feel towards other people comes out in how we talk to them or about them.  Stereotypes or bad memories tumble out of our mouths.  It sounds like this:  ‘But don’t you feel unsafe around those people?’  ‘Why do you invest in those people?’  But how can Jesus use us to reach the world unless we allow him to love others as he does?

Jesus took his disciples into a place where Jews usually didn’t go:  the city of Tyre, past the northern border of Israel.  There they encountered a ‘Canaanite woman,’ identified that way by Matthew because ‘Canaanite’ was the ancestral enemy of the Jews, and Matthew was addressing Jews.  And as a woman in that society, she had less power and status than a man.  The disciples’ reaction to her was poor.  She ‘came out and began to cry out,’ calling to Jesus over and over to come and heal her daughter.  Jesus, strangely, stayed silent.  Silent, that is, until his disciples said something that revealed their prejudice.  The juxtaposition of these two verses, close to each other, make the point:  ‘But the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man’ (15:18).  ‘And his disciples came and implored him, saying, ‘Send her away, because she keeps shouting at us’’ (15:23b).  The disciples’ defilement had just become evident. Though they had seen Jesus heal Gentiles possessed by demons (8:28ff.), been approached by blind men shouting for Jesus (9:27 – 28) and the crowd of five thousand men whom Jesus challenged them to serve (14:14 – 21), the disciples did not make the connection.  They just wanted to dismiss this Canaanite woman.  In their view, she was beneath them.  They had resistance in themselves towards her.

Against whom do you sense resistance in yourself?  Perhaps you have feelings towards those people with too many body piercings, the other youth gang, the other family down the road, or the clique who excluded you and made fun of you.  Maybe it’s people that you are envious of?  Maybe it’s an emotional prejudice for you, not very well formed but still there.  Maybe it’s that you’ve never really ‘seen’ certain people before.  Or, if you live in the ideological realm, perhaps the prejudice has to do with race, class, gender, and perhaps sexual orientation and political orientation.  If you identify yourself as part of an oppressed community, you might feel like ignoring white men in the U.S., elites in college, wealthy suburbanites living in McMansions, etc.  To you, Jesus’ desire to invest people and money in outreach to these communities seems like a dangerous compromise with neo-colonialism in itself.  On the other hand, if you identify yourself as part of the cultural ‘pillars of society,’ you might not think too much about Jesus’ love for immigrants and aliens, gays and lesbians, and high school dropouts.  In fact, Jesus’ desire to invest people and money in these communities seems at best like a tangent from the real purpose of Christian faith, which in your opinion is to anchor society and culture, and at worst a waste of resources. 

Jesus’ command to love your enemies still stands.  Jesus loves every single person, and his love for them trumps all other factors.  To him, a person is never reducible to the category that we place them in.  After all, do we allow other people to completely define us by social categories?  We resist that, yet we often reserve the right to do it to others.  Neither are people reducible to their relationship to us.  Just because we have a hard time getting along with them, or liking them, or overcoming some historic tension, doesn’t mean that’s who they really are, nor who God probably wants them to be.  Fundamentally, people are only reducible to what they mean to Jesus:  Because he loves them, he calls us to love them, too.  Jesus understands how people are influenced by their backgrounds, but fundamentally, he sees each person as made for himself. 

Startlingly, Jesus used the common Jewish idiom for Gentiles: ‘dogs.’  Typically, Jews used the Greek term kusin (e.g. Mt.7:6), referring to street dogs, as a label of exclusion, for ‘in those days the dogs were the unclean scavengers of the street.’1  However, Jesus used the diminutive term kunariois (15:26), which were not the larger street dogs, but smaller household pets.2  He gave the woman a ‘way in’ to the family of God.  He cleverly changed the idea from exclusion to inclusion.  I imagine that Jesus had a wry smile on his face during this exchange, inviting her to respond with the same language.  She picks up on this and says, with quick wit, ‘I’m part of the family!’  ‘Even dogs benefit from the bread crumbs dropped from the table’ (15:27).  That’s what it means when the dogs are part of the master’s family.  Notice that she’s also called Jesus, ‘Lord, Son of David.’  She’s counted herself as his. 

So Jesus constantly leads us to ‘see’ people who were ‘invisible’ to us before.  The disciples hadn’t really ‘seen’ the Canaanite woman, not her need, her care for her daughter, nor her full humanity.  This Canaanite woman was the first of many Gentiles that Jesus led his disciples to serve.  Even the motif of bread crumbs connects with the bread served to the five thousand Jews, and the next episode, the bread served to the four thousand Gentiles.  Jesus was preparing his disciples to reach more of the world, and it continued with this one person.  Perhaps she was the first Jesus-devotee in the Gentile city of Tyre, and the Jewish disciples must have returned later to Tyre to continue to support her and to spread the truth about Jesus in that community.  Our development as his disciples is the same.  Who is it around you that Jesus is leading you to see?  Perhaps that one person you’ve never really tried to befriend will be the relational gateway to many others?