After Pentecost Devotional - Day 26

“She said, 'Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.' Then Jesus answered her, 'O woman, great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.' And her daughter was healed instantly.” Matthew 15:27-28

Once again, Matthew turns our attention to a gentile and Jesus' concerns over faith. Earlier in Matthew, we saw a Roman occupying soldier declared as having the greatest faith Jesus had seen in Israel. Now we turn to a Canaanite woman outside of Israel.

Jesus and his disciples had traveled outside the boundaries of Israel. Jesus had been speaking about ritual purity laws and definitions that classed people as ritually pure or impure in regard to joining in the public worship of Yahweh. Jesus had spoken about how foods are unimportant in relation to ritual purity. He had stressed for the disciples that it is much more important to look at the quality of one's words and decisions than the foods one ate and participation in the rituals of purification.

They have traveled outside of Israel where it is to be assumed that most anyone they meet will be ritually impure and beyond the definitions of being found acceptable to God. It is in this context that we meet this Canaanite woman whose daughter was suffering from demonic possession.

If anyone would be impure and beyond the reach of God's love and grace, this was the woman. Standard interpretation would grant her responsibility for the oppression under which her daughter suffered. She was understood as living under God's judgment.

As she speaks, Jesus first of all gives her the traditional Jewish response, silence toward one who did not deserve so little as an answer. He allows the angst to build until the disciples ask him to turn her away. He once more gives the traditional response the disciples would expect. Then she comes directly before him to plead her case. On hearing once more the traditional Jewish response, she accepts her status as granted by Judaism, claiming that even the dogs eat what falls from the master's table.

It is at this point that Jesus gives her the answer we have come to expect from him. First of all, he points to her faith. Regardless of how many strikes there were against her in the perspective of Judaism, Jesus both saw and respected the faith she demonstrated in seeking intervention based simply upon grace and mercy. Jesus finds more than simply accommodation for her. He grants her inclusion and access to God's saving grace. He goes beyond this to exclaim over her faith, placing her as a model of faith before the disciples who had just asked him to send her away as unworthy.

All too often, we find ourselves much closer to the attitudes of the disciples than that of Jesus. We look askance at others, seeking the standard definitions that will mark them as less than deserving. We place them in categories that would allow us to exclude and ignore them. Meanwhile, Jesus calls us to look beyond our social and religious definitions to seek the hidden value in others beyond our expectations.

Determine to look beyond the quick categories we use to exclude people. It is as we invest our time and lives in people that we come to appreciate them in new ways.

"Lord, give me the courage and awareness to look beyond the surface to see what you value in those around me."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin

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