Build a Larger Table

Proper 15A-26

Immanuel Lutheran, Chicago

Jesus is having a really-bad-no-good-day. Can you think of a time that Jesus acts less ‘Jesus-y?’ It’s the kind of story, caught on a cell phone camera, that goes viral today.  Proof among foes that Jesus is not qualified to be the Messiah. So why does Matthew include it?  I hope you’ll bear with me.

We start with the context. Jesus and the disciples are near the Lebanese cities of Tyre and Sidon, which today, experience severe humanitarian strain and displacement amid ongoing heavy Israeli airstrikes, prompting thousands to flee north toward Sidon and Beirut. Today’s wars and today’s gospel link ancient and modern conflicts together in an unholy thread. Jesus is 70 miles north and west of where he was last Sunday near the Sea of Galilee—and approximately 50 miles north of Israel’s border—and it’s here, in a foreign land that a nameless woman begins following them. Her daughter is suffering. She knows Jesus has power to heal. Desperate for help, she approaches him with faith, shouting “Have mercy on me.” She calls him “Lord” and “Son of David.” (Matthew 15:22). Jesus ignored her but, nevertheless, she persists, breaking the ancient boundary between insiders and outsiders. She schools us, there are no outsiders when it comes to grace.

Just one chapter earlier, the disciples looked at a hungry crowd and urged Jesus to “Send the crowds away” (14:15). Jesus refused. “They need not go away,” he told them. Instead, he fed them until everyone had enough, and twelve baskets of bread remained. Now another person approaches in desperate need. Again, the disciples say, “Send her away” (15:23). But this time, Jesus is silent. Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24), and he doubles down: “It is not fair,” Jesus said, “to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (15:26). Calling someone a ‘dog’ is an especially scandalous slur in Middle Eastern culture to this day. The same Jesus who refused to send away the hungry crowds now seems ready to send away a desperate mother. What’s going on?  (Micah Krey, “Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28,” Writings on Recovery and Preaching, August 16, 2026)

Matthew clues us in on what he’s up to. He says the unnamed woman was a Canaanite.  The label is strange, because, in Jesus’ time, there were no “Canaanites.” The land of Canaan was ancient history even then. It would be like calling “Chicago” by its old Algonquian name “shikaakwa,” meaning “stinking onion.” Matthew’s audience would understand perfectly. He is making use of Jesus’ really-bad-no-good-day to challenge ancient enmities between nations based on religion, gender, and culture.  Matthew connects this Jesus story with Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land more than a thousand years earlier.

This is something Matthew loves to do.  He loves to weave together storylines from the Hebrew bible to teach us something important about Jesus and about discipleship. It’s not obvious to English speakers, but Jesus and Joshua are the exact same name. In Hebrew and Aramaic, Jesus was called Yeshua (or Yehoshua), which translates to English as “Joshua.” Both names mean “Yahweh is salvation.” According to Matthew, therefore, this annoying but faithful woman is not only an outsider, not only the wrong gender, but she is part of an enemy people. (Barbara Lundbland). This time, however, the story of inter-faith, international encounter has a different ending. In Jesus’ hands, there is solidarity and transformation rather than conquest and genocide,

Jesus does not supersede or replace the Hebrew bible but is its fulfillment. Jesus quotes the prophet Hosea twice (Matthew 9:13 and 12:7) saying “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” It means that God values genuine love, human compassion, and kindness higher than empty religious rules or traditional rituals. What defines us as children of God proceeds from the heart and not from our cultural or religious habits.

This gospel is especially scandalous for believers who are taught that Jesus has nothing to learn. This idea that Jesus has nothing to learn mirrors our own cultural arrogance not the bible. Jesus learns something important about himself and his God-given mission from encounter with the Canaanite woman. Jesus’s self-understanding expands beyond the “house of Israel.”

This story is difficult for many Christians to hear especially if we grew up with the idea of a “Perfect Jesus” who is technically human, but his incarnation falls several steps short of actual human-ness.  He never messes up, never doubts, never backtracked, and always knows what he is doing. The problem with “Perfect Jesus,” of course, is that he doesn’t exist. The Jesus who appears in the Gospels is not half-incarnate.  He is as fully human as he is fully God. Which is to say, he struggles, he snaps, he discovers, he grows, he falters, he learns, he fears, and he overcomes.” (Debi Thomas, “Is It Good News Yet?”, Journey with Jesus, 8/09/20)

The question then becomes –can we like Jesus learn from each other? Can we recognize the truth when we hear the truth regardless of where it comes from or who said it? We should not be surprised that Jesus bears the wounds of his community as well as its hopes. “Humanity is not simply hunger and fatigue. It is also inherited grief, inherited enemies, and inherited stories about who belongs and who does not. But those inherited divisions do not have the final word. The woman refuses to accept the boundary. She takes Jesus’ own image of bread and transforms it.” (Krey)

Matthew started down this path in chapter 1. Jesus is descended from other Canaanite women, Tamar and Rahab listed in Jesus’ genealogy. They were both outsiders who proved to be women of great faith. Like them, this Canaanite woman absorbs Jesus’ insults and turns the other cheek in a creative, nonviolent response to injustice (just as Jesus advised us to do in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:39).

            Love your enemies, Jesus said in Matthew 5:44.  But here, in Matthew 15 it’s not so easy, not even for Jesus. Jesus’ really-bad-no-good-day challenges us to look beyond the artificial boundaries and borders of ethnicity, nation, and religion that divide people into insiders and outsiders –divisions that make us feel safe with some people, and afraid of others. Earlier I said this gospel exposes the unholy link between ancient and modern grievances—not just of others—but also our own unspoken and subconscious biases. Are we, like Jesus, ready to be changed by God’s grace?

Jesus was converted that day to a larger vision of the commonwealth of God. Jesus saw and heard a fuller revelation of God in the voice and in the face of the Canaanite woman. She became visible rather than invisible. Jesus looked and listened, and she became fully human, a mother, a child of God, because—yes—Jesus realizes, Canaanite lives matter. Palestinian lives matter. Brown lives matter.  Immigrant lives matter. Trans lives matter.

Can we like Jesus grow ears that recognize the truth when we hear the truth? Can we abandon our prejudice, our inherited wounds, and inherited enemies rather than perpetuate them? Can we, as Americans, be honest about the genocides that lay at the foundation of our birth as a nation? Our ancestors used the stolen labor of Africans and the stolen land of Native peoples to build our democracy, with tragic irony, on the ideal that all human beings are created equal.

Jesus finally said to her, “Woman, great is your faith.” Jesus will go on to heal Gentiles later in this chapter 15 (Matt 15:30-31) and then perform the same miraculous feeding among the Gentiles (Matt 15:32-38) as he did among his fellow Jews (in Matt 14). The unnamed Canaanite woman is the only person in all four gospels to enter a verbal sparring match with Jesus and prevail. Matthew dares give us a very human pre-resurrection Jesus and paints a compelling picture of this woman. Even Jesus must learn how radically good the Good News is. Her persistence, perceptiveness, and humility garner the admiration and blessing of Jesus. She becomes an example of faithfulness for us to emulate. She turns Jesus’ slur right back at him. She replies, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table’ (v. 27).

Her brilliant response cuts to the very heart of Jesus’s boundary-breaking, taboo-busting, division-destroying ministry of table fellowship. Her witness shatters the arrogance and prejudice that we continue to harbor today.  The Messiah eats with tax collectors and prostitutes.  We are one body with the rabbi who breaks bread with sinners.  The table is precisely where Jesus shows the world who God is.  (Thomas)

“Christ became our doorway to the reign of God. So must our tables welcome all who roam. None can be excluded; all must find a home” (Build a Larger Table, ACS #1062).