Fr Peter Helman

"Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David."

+

Dear friends,

The story we encounter this morning from the Gospel of S. Matthew is among the most difficult and painful in the New Testament—the story of Jesus and the Canaanite woman. I’m not quite sure what to do with the despicable way Jesus treats the woman when she humiliates herself before him and begs for mercy on behalf her tormented daughter. He ignores her, sees her suffering and remains, by every appearance, casually indifferent. The Twelve urge Jesus to send her away for her incessant clamoring, and when the woman will not be silenced and pleads for mercy again, he insults her by calling her a dog.

I set myself with those who want to mitigate any difficulty here because I need Jesus to be more than the worst of me. I know the traditional interpretations: he’s not actually being callous and cruel but, believe it or not, pastoral. He tests her faith to encourage and awaken it and then kindly confirms it by healing her daughter.

It’s all nonsense, though, really, and we find ourselves on the verge of admitting something we perhaps wouldn’t expect—that Jesus learned through this woman’s teaching just what it was he had come to do. Jesus tells the Twelve “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” but he says as much while standing on foreign soil, in the homeland of a people reckoned outside the covenant of Israel. Why then had he traveled to the region of Tyre and Sidon if not to bring good news? S. Matthew, more than the other evangelists, emphasizes the particularity of Jesus’s mission to the people of Israel. He is their long-expected Messiah. So curiously then do we find on the lips of this outsider the very hope of Israel’s deliverance: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” Something about the woman's resolve and faithfulness breaks wide open Jesus’s sense of purpose at this point in the Gospel of S. Matthew, the gospel that concludes with the passage we encountered yesterday, the Great Commission to take the good news to the ends of the earth.

However difficult it may feel to say the Canaanite woman teaches Jesus that the mission of God, the compassion and mercy of God, exceed what he may have initially thought, she certainly teaches us as much: that we do not have a heaven or a hell to send anyone to, and it is not ours to judge who is in and who is out, for God finds a home in widely different places. We are all made children of God, created in the divine image and beloved.


Yours in Christ,
Peter+