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.