Jesus and the Canaanite Woman. Photo: Annibale Carracci / Public domain
I have always struggled with this incident in St Matthew’s gospel. Jesus is in the pagan territory, and a Canaanite woman comes to him and begs him to cure her sick daughter. He tells her to get lost! I shudder when I read this.
Jesus shows his temper with the Pharisees and with his disciples, and the text explains why it happens. But this is a woman with a sick daughter! He treats her like a dog, but she doesn’t give up and with great humility beats him in a contest of sparring words.
Jesus heals her daughter ( and rightly so). The focus is on Jesus in this incident, and it makes me uneasy to see what he said and did. What have I to learn about him, and myself, What is St Matthew trying to tell us? What does it mean for us today?
I always start with the statement that he was like us in all things, but he was rude with this pagan woman.
The thrust of the episode seems to be that Jesus was in pagan territory, what was he doing outside his own country, when everyone knew that the Jews despised the gentiles?
He says to the woman that he has come to the Jewish people and not to the pagans, but this encounter makes him re-think his attitude, and this pagan woman causes him to open his mind and heart to the gentiles as well.
It always disturbs me that he changed his view. A part of me says to myself that he would have known all that surely? He ended up telling the apostles to baptise all people, so the Canaanite woman caused this universal outlook? Apart of me thinks that he did not have to change his mind because he knew everything!
The trouble is as one commentator of this scripture passage comments that Jesus was like us in his humanity; therefore, it was natural for him to swayed by another opinion and to change his mind – if he is human like us.
It makes sense to me, but I still feel uneasy about the whole incident - I can admit that I am probably investing too much divinity into his humanity.
St Matthew was writing for a community in which the Christians were Jews, still believing in their Jewish faith. But Gentiles were now members of the community, and the difficulties were enormous from cultural and religious points of view. How would the Canaanite woman fit into that community?
There was a lot of drama in the early Church; there is drama now in the contemporary Church. We look to the same guiding Spirit who guided the Church then and who reveals Jesus to us today in a new cultural context.
It was never going to be less than a challenge but always life-giving! That was his promise.
Columban Fr Gary Walker is currently living at the Columban house in Sandgate, Brisbane.
