I mean, drop your piety filter for just a moment. Jesus leaves familiar territory in Galilee and, immediately upon entering foreign territory, encounters a Canaanite woman. To call her that is already to tip you off to something we’ll cover later, but for now keep in mind that this non-Jewish woman starts shouting at Jesus for help. We expect Jesus to help her right off, because after all, well, he’s Jesus, right?

My friend John Clardy is visiting today. He is my longtime eye doctor from Mobile. He recently returned from a mission trip in Nicaragua. They did 300 eye exams in a week, prayed with and witnessed to people across a language barrier, saw two babies born and 108 adults reborn. Now, what if he had gone there and some Central American woman had come shouting at him in Spanish to help her daughter who could barely see, and he just looked at her, said nothing and did nothing? We would say he was very unchristlike, right?

Well, here’s Jesus being very unchristlike, odd as that might sound. Even when the disciples try to shoo the woman away, we expect Jesus to jump on them with a good scolding and tell them they don’t understand his mission, that he makes no distinctions between people, that his office is always open. He doesn’t.

Then, when the woman persists, and when Jesus finally speaks to her, he talks down to her. Isn’t Jesus the one who teaches us to treat everyone as equals? Isn’t he the one that elevated women and taught us to stop the male power thing over women? Well, hold on for this—he calls her a dog! And it has nothing to do with her make-up; it has to do with her breeding. It’s about her unclean Gentile status before God. She is not yet on the messianic radar screen. And when he finally succumbs to her and grants what she requests, it seems as if it were against his will and only because she persists. Go figure!

This is not the Jesus we normally think of, the all-knowing self-directed one who takes his cues straight from God, isn’t taking steroids, and is the perfect example for the children. But then again, this makes me love him more. This makes me trust him more, to see how human he is.

Theology says that Jesus could not have healed those things in us that he did not take into himself to experience. Well, he took into himself my own struggle with prejudice against certain kinds of people. He took into himself my temptation to think that I have God to give but not God to receive. He took into himself my need to discern God’s will through experience and not assume I always know it beforehand. This Jesus may be exactly what we need if we look below the surface.

Sometimes you have to travel to get outside your comfort zone. This summer was that way for me, not for the first time but for the latest time. Every time I go somewhere unfamiliar, I am challenged by the different ways people live and think and act. The biggest challenge involves

accepting the differences as mere differences and not essential differences. They may be real differences, but that does not extend to the matter of whether their humanity before God is lesser. Notice I said lesser, not greater. Don’t we usually look down, not up, at people who are different? Why is that?

But here’s the odd thing about this passage with Jesus: in social and economic terms the Canaanite woman would have been looking down at Jesus. Scholarship tells us that she was probably of the merchant class, being in that part of Palestine, which was controlled by Phoenician traders. For Jesus to have called her a dog and for her to have accepted the label in her retort to him tell us that something else is going on here.

Jews called Gentiles dogs because they were unclean in Jewish religious terms. They were like dogs in that they did not distinguish between undercooked pork and kosher beef. But more than that, they tended to be wealthier than the generally poorer Jewish peasant class of shepherds and farmers. Jews felt that Gentiles like this woman stole their bread, so to speak. So for Jesus to contrast children and dogs was a way of talking about the difference between God’s chosen children and those ungodly animals who oppressed God’s dearly beloved.

But before Jesus called her a dog, he did something else we should not miss. He kept his mouth shut. He said nothing. The disciples spoke when he was silent. What are we to learn from his silence?

Maybe this is the first step in Jesus considering something new about his calling. Before this moment in Matthew’s gospel Jesus has been in his home country, curing the sick and casting demons out of Jews. Apparently, the

devil is a democrat after all—with a small d, don’t you know?! The devil doesn’t distinguish between Jews and Gentiles, rich and poor, male and female, young and old, Democrats and Republicans. He seeks to possess us all.

Jesus already knows himself as the messiah of Israel, but he has to learn that he is the savior of the world as Israel’s messiah. I have come for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, he says. That is true, as far as it goes. But he has to learn that when he goes looking for Israel’s lost sheep, he’s going to end up finding lost sheep of all kinds that need to be brought into the fold. God uses this woman to help him come to this by her encounter with Jesus. He doesn’t know everything automatically; he has to learn the will and ways of God the way we do.

So his silence opens a space for this new light. When he finally does speak, Matthew does not say whom he is speaking to. It’s almost as if he is talking out loud to himself and the woman overhears. He offers an accepted cliché about Jews and Gentiles. Everybody would have known the proverb about giving the children’s bread to the dogs. So he states longstanding accepted prejudice that sounds like wisdom.

It’s like saying out loud that everybody knows blacks are great athletes but lack the intelligence of whites for professions like law or medicine or politics. And then you look up and see Ron Kirk or Ben Casey or Cohn Powell standing in front of you, and it sounds less like the truth than a flimsy excuse for prejudice. But Jesus’ very willingness to speak it aloud allows the struggle for change to begin.

The same can be said for so many experiences that challenge the church. Some things require us to speak them out loud in order to test the truth of them. Can divorced people be effective leaders in the church? Can women preach? Can people with moral failings be agents of God? Can people of homosexual orientation be partners in the gospel? We will find answers to these questions only if we dare to encounter, if we experience the questions personally. If we cordon these people off from the church, or if we only talk and do not listen, we will not know.

Of course, it’s also interesting that when Jesus speaks the standard proverb, the word he uses for dogs is not the standard for street dogs, but more like domesticated animals. He actually calls the woman a house pet. He’s making progress already by getting her out of the street and into the house. But this woman will not be content until she’s under the table in the house, eating the crumbs. And by the time Jesus’ minis- try comes to full understanding, he will have her as a welcome guest at the table of Israel, sharing fully the bread of heaven.

What if God wants to use different kinds of people to help us to grow spiritually, just as God did with Jesus, and we would rather use the disciples for our model than Jesus? The church cannot be an agent of reconciliation in the world if it keeps itself from contact with the world. The world was not reconciled by a Christ that came fully formed in Israel. Salvation was won through a suffering savior who learned that holiness requires contact with the unholy, because there are lost sheep everywhere that matter to God.

John Drinkwater’s play Abraham Lincoln has the president meet a woman passionate for the northern cause in the Civil War. She asks him for news, and he replies, There is news of victory. They lost 2700 men, and we lost 800. The woman is thrilled. How splendid, she says. The President is disturbed by her reaction. Thirty-five hundred lives lost ..., he reminds her. But the woman interrupts. Oh, you must not talk like that, Mr. President There were only 800 that mattered. At that, Liii- coin’s shoulders droop and tears appear in his eyes. Madam, he says, the world is larger than your heart [Cited by Dan Flanagan in Lectionary Homiletics 16.5 (August /September 2005): 27.]

Is the world larger than your heart? That will only change when you get the heart of God into you the way Jesus did. God’s heart is larger than the world. If you feel uncomfortable about the kind of people that might become part of our church’s life, you might feel like your church is going to the dogs. Good. It must. Until the church goes to the dogs, so to speak, it is not the church of Jesus Christ.

A friend of mine told me that when he first visited churches in Dallas, the pastor of one church came to the house in hopes of getting his family to join. My friend asked about the church’s mission in Dallas. The pastor told him that their mission was to attract people just like them. My friend joined Wilshire sometime later, even though it meant switching denominations and being rebaptized.

But look again at this woman. Look at her dogged faith. She willingly humbles herself before a Jew and begs for mercy. Jesus heals her daughter and says she is a model of faith.

Curiously, until this moment Matthew refers to Jesus speaking only as “he said” and to the woman as “she said.” But when he realizes the genuineness of her faith, Matthew says, “Jesus said,” as if he had finally come to himself He had been trumpeting accepted religious clichés, but now he speaks. And he addresses her personally: Woman, great is your faith.

Dogged faith is personal faith is saving faith. The faith that willingly lowers oneself is the only faith that saves. If you want to know the power of God in your life, you have to let go of your pride and go to the dogs, so to speak. You have to beg for bread from the table of heaven. And when you do, God lifts you up and gives you a seat at the table, too.