“Jesus…went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon.  Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon’.  But he did not answer her at all” (NRSV, Matthew 15:21,22,23)

In Our Lord’s day the coast of Northern Palestine was inhabited by one of the most remarkable peoples of the ancient world – the Phoenicians.  They were from early times a nation of seafarers.  This was due to the geographical fact that their country was just a coastal strip between the mountain range of Lebanon and the Mediterranean.  Though nowhere more than 20 miles wide this strip was some 120 miles in length and contained the fine natural harbours of Tyre and Sidon.  From there the Phoenician seamen, who were incidentally the first to navigate using the pole star, sailed out into the Mediterranean and beyond.

The Jews had never attempted to establish themselves in Phoenicia, and in both Old and New Testament times its people were heathen.  Jezebel, the wife of King Ahab, was the heathen daughter of the King of Tyre.

Thus it was that Our Lord, who deliberately confined his ministry to the Jews, the Chosen People of Israel, regarded the frontier of Phoenicia as marking the north-west limit of his travels.  Of course the news of his teaching and especially of his miracles, spread far and wide; and St Mark tells us that very early on the vast crowds which converged on the Lake of Galilee, where he had his headquarters, contained many folk from Tyre and Sidon.

Our Lord was, therefore, already well-known in Phoenicia at the time when an event occurred which caused him to take refuge in that area.  The event was the murder of St John the Baptist by King Herod Antipas; and Jesus, in order that his own ministry might not be prematurely ended, withdrew secretly to the district round Tyre and Sidon.

But so prominent a personality could not go unrecognised for long and he was soon discovered by a Phoenician woman in great distress.  His arrival must have seemed to her a godsend because her daughter was, in her own words “tormented by a demon” (NRSV, Matthew 15:22), and she knew that he was the only one who was able to cure her.  Any doubt as to his willingness to do so never entered her mind.  He had never yet been known to refuse to heal anyone, and even though he was in non-Jewish territory, there was an excellent precedent.

Did not the great Elijah himself, when he was in hiding from King Ahab, heal the widow’s son at Sarepta between Tyre and Sidon?  So surely there could be no question of Jesus not doing the same for her, even if he happened to be in hiding from King Herod Antipas.

So she did not even ask him.  She just stated her need, obviously expecting him to satisfy it without hesitation, let alone delay.  “‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon’.  But he did not answer her at all” (NRSV, Matthew 15:22,23).

So she went on repeating her request, and now her words had some effect – though not on him.  It was the disciples who spoke, and they begged him to do as she asked and to get rid of her because she was just making a nuisance of herself.  “Send her away”, they said, ”for she keeps shouting after us” (NRSV, Matthew 15:23).

At this, Jesus turned and reminded her that as she was not a Jew, she was outside the scope of his ministry which was restricted to the Jews.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (NRSV, Matthew 15:24).

But even those seemingly unsympathetic words, so unexpected from the gentle healer she had heard so much about, even those words did not quench her faith in his power to help her nor her hope that he would.

Yet the very delay and uncertainty served to bring home to her how greatly she depended on her daughter’s recovery and on Our Lord to bring that recovery about; and she now identified her child’s distress with her own.  She came and knelt before him and pleaded, “Lord, help me” (NRSV, Matthew 15:25).  That surely would overcome his strange unwillingness to make her daughter better.  Instead, she was met with an apparent rebuff.  “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little puppy dogs” (Matthew 15:26).

But the mother was a woman of resource and humour and as he spoke she pictured to herself the familiar scene of the family round the table and, after the custom of the time, wiping the gravy off their fingers with pieces of bread and then throwing them down for the pet dogs to eat.  And she wittily turned Our Lord’s words to her own advantage.  “Ah yes, Lord, yet even the little puppy dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (Matthew 15:27).

Then Jesus answered her, “’Woman, great is your faith!  Let it be done for you as you wish’.  And her daughter was healed instantly” (NRSV, Matthew 15:28).

We have already seen how Our Lord’s seeming unwillingness to help made the woman persevere in her pleas, and thus called forth from her a faith and hope that she would never have had if her request had been granted at once.  But Our Lord was not satisfied merely with her faith and hope.  He sought also to deepen her humility, because to start with she had made her request as though Our Lord was bound to grant it just because she had asked him – hence his remark about the “little puppy dogs”, and though the use of the diminutive (instead of “dogs”) took some of the edge off his remark, it did not take it all off.  And the woman, by good-humouredly accepting the comparison, passed the test.  In fact by maintaining that these household pets belonged to the family she cleverly turned the reason given for refusing her request into a reason for granting it! (1)

So Our Blessed Lord at once addressed her as “woman”, a word which in the original has all the respect of our ‘Madam’ without its formality.  It is the same word he used in addressing his own mother.

This incident on the border of Phoenicia is an apt illustration of the words of Holy Scripture, “…my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord” (NRSV, Isaiah 55:8).  For the general idea today is that the kind of things one has are much more important than the kind of person one is.

And we ourselves often approach God in the same way.  We ask him for this or that, but we do not stop to think whether we happen to be the sort of people who would in fact make the best use of what we want him to give us.  We want Our Lord to treat us as his disciples wanted him to treat the Phoenician woman – to give us what we ask for and just leave us to it, without bothering to make us any different from what we are.

But that Our Lord will not do.  He is much more concerned with what we are than with anything else about us.  So he strengthened that woman’s faith and deepened her humility by keeping her waiting and making her think before he did as she asked him.

So with ourselves.  Without faith on our part we can have no real relationship with Our Lord at all, for faith is that attitude of heart and mind by which we believe that he truly loves and cares for us, and believing accept him trustfully and completely as our Lord and Master.

So too with humility which recognises that we are utterly dependent on Our Lord to turn us into the sort of people we were created to be; and that we have no claim upon him as by right but only by grace and favour; and that so far from assuming that he should grant our every request as and when we make it, we should be content to leave it to him to answer our prayers as and when he will.

So in the incident of the woman of Phoenicia we read, “…he did not answer her at all” (NRSV, Matthew 15:23).  But in the end, he answered her, “’Woman, great is your faith!  Let it be done for you as you wish’.  And her daughter was healed instantly” (NRSV, Matthew 15:28).

Note

In St Mark’s Gospel the woman is described as “a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin” (NRSV, Mark 7:26).  The term ‘Syrophoenicia’ was used to distinguish the area from Libyan Phoenicia on the north coast of Africa. (2) The Phoenicians were a branch of the Canaanite peoples and, like the Canaanites, were heathens. (3)

References

1. Rattey, B.K. (1938) The Gospel according to Saint Matthew in the Revised Version, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

2. Grollenberg, L.H. translated and edited by Reid, J.M.H. (1956) Atlas of the Bible, Edinburgh and London: Nelson.

3. Kitchen, J.H. (1955) Holy fields.  An introduction to the historical geography of the Holy Land, London: The Paternoster Press.