Matthew 15:(10-20), 21-28 Commentary

The lectionary’s focus is on the story of the Canaanite woman’s transforming conversation with Jesus but also provides us with the preceding section where Jesus teaches about holiness being measured by what’s within—much to the chagrin of the Pharisees. The two scenes are connected by a participle in verse 21: having discussed that it’s what comes out of you that makes you holy more than what comes into you, Jesus departs from the “safe space” and goes to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Surely there is enough to preach on if we only focus on verses 21-28, but letting verses 10-20 help us interpret Jesus’s motivation may help us with its most confusing aspects.

Because for all intents and purposes, Jesus is a jerk. Not only does he ignore this woman when she first cries out to their group, he refers to her with an ethnic slur: it is not a nice little image of love and cuddles with a puppy but much more like what many women have the bitter experience of having slung in their direction. What has “come out” of Jesus’s mouth is ugly, nasty, mean-spirited, elitist and separatist.

And yet, he’s the one who has brought his disciples into the region of Tyre and Sidon—a land full of Gentiles, not Jews, the very people Jesus told his disciples to avoid on their first mission (see chapter 10). So, the question becomes for me, is Jesus giving the disciples an object lesson about holiness here? He’s entered a region that crosses a boundary, from holy to unholy so to speak, but that’s not what leads him to his actions.

His choice to ignore the woman, just as the reason probably motivating the disciples to ask Jesus to send her away so that she’ll stop yelling at all of them, is that she doesn’t belong to the family of God. The law forbids their interaction—the law given by God to preserve and protect his people, an expression of God’s will. There’s a whole reason why these laws came to exist in the Torah in the first place, most of it having to do with the fact that the Israelites were really bad at staying true to Yahweh; easily tempted and enticed to assimilate to the cultures around them. So God’s will (seen in covenantal commitment) was to guard them from themselves in this regard by telling them to keep to themselves.

In other words, it is an internally held belief and guiding principle that is leading him to respond and react as he is—not the external circumstances of being in this particular region. Here Jesus is, crossing a significant cultural boundary, living out his people and his God’s ‘intent’, and then seeming to realize that it’s all wrong.

It’s just like he’s said about the Pharisees—they’ve gotten it all wrong. What goes in can be constantly changing, but it’s what sticks inside and roots itself in us that will measure us. Douglas Hare put it in a way that helped me see the connection. Regarding the holiness section he wrote, “Exalting the merely legal over the truly moral is sheer hypocrisy, Jesus claims, because it professes allegiance to God’s law while disregarding God’s will.”

At one point, the law reflected God’s will for the people of Israel, protecting them from putting their faith in idols. But the law that kept them separated became about something else somewhere along the way, no longer reminding the Jews of their own weakness and besetting sin but giving them a sense of superiority. Not to mention the fact that Jesus’s time on earth was a revelation of God’s will and an ever-expanding meaning for belonging to the family of God.

So Jesus follows the old playbook and makes a point about these deeper principles reflecting who we truly are, even if it means he comes out looking like the one who’s the bonehead. He does so to show in real time the power of living a deeper reality than surface law keeping, that true faith knows no ethnic boundaries. All the while, he progresses the call to beyond the lost sheep of Israel and begins to show them what he means and what he will say more explicitly from here on out. This expanding love is from his heart, the heart of heaven; it can be trusted for it is the perfect image of God’s will.

Textual Points

My colleague Scott Hoezee pointed out in a previous commentary that this is the only time Jesus is said to ignore a cry for help from someone. We know that Jesus left crowds, snuck away from people who were there to be healed, and disappointed many with what he told them as they talked (though those situations weren’t ever about healing), so what might we make of the fact that the text says Jesus “did not answer her at all”? Why would Jesus go to this region and then ignore the people there?

Eugene Peterson’s The Message leans more heavily towards this story having Jesus’s full humanity on display. Though the same Greek word is used throughout the story for “answer,” Peterson implies Jesus’s emotional state, describing Jesus as “giving in” to the woman instead of simply saying he answered her.

Illustration Idea

There was a running gag on the early 2000s show Arrested Development about the importance of always leaving a note about things like drinking the last of the milk. Usually, it ended up with the kids being traumatized by some elaborate fake accident where J. Walter Weatherman (an employee of the family patriarch George Bluth) ended up losing his hand—Weatherman was already an amputee so he just pretended to be injured. To be sure, the object lessons were in very poor taste and they did harm to the persons meant to learn something. In Jesus’s case, he takes on the harm and shame himself, willing to become the ‘bad guy’ so that the disciples can see what he’s been talking about.