Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

So when I read stories like the one in today's gospel, where a Canaanite woman deliberately approaches Jesus a stranger, a strange man, ethnically and nationally a Jewish man, who is considered the enemy.

The story says that Jesus withdrew to the district of Tyre and Sidon.

Previously, he and his disciples were in Galilee, some 40 miles south.

So they trekked all that way up to Tyre and Sidon, which were cities that promoted pagan worship where persons were considered to be immoral and unethical, irreligious, and consequently not at all liked by Jews.

They were enemies.

And here I was going thinking the Samaritans were the bad ones.

And here about the Canaanites, the Syrophoenician people.

Let's be reminded that the Canaanite woman was in her own territory, her community.

It was Jesus and his disciples who were the outsiders, and get this, he did so to withdraw to rest privately and escape the intense pressures, the massive crowds seeking healing of one kind or another.

Not to mention the rising hostility received from the religious and political leaders in Galilee.

And once again, the disciples were more than willing to have Jesus shoo someone away.

Send them away, they said.

Send her away.

She's bothering us.

Remember the feeding of the 5,000 a couple weeks ago? The disciples asked Jesus to send the people away so that they could go buy food for themselves.

And Jesus then told them, no, you give them something to eat.

But today, he says, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Which in itself, to me anyway, sounds out of place in this context and seems not to make sense because the disciples were not asking Jesus to help her.

They were asking him to send her away.

Nonetheless, the statement echoes what we already have heard and what he has told his disciples earlier in chapter 10 about their mission being within an ethnic boundary.

which only included the Jews, the initial mission.

That mission would change, right? This incident occurred long before the Great Commission of Matthew chapter 28, that post-resurrection moment, at which time Jesus instructed them to do what? To go into all the world to take the promised salvation to humankind, Gentiles, maybe Canaanites included.

Perhaps he made that statement as a reminder to himself that his first mission was to the Jews and not to folks like the Canaanite woman who was a Gentile because she was not a descendant of Jacob and not part of the ethnic and covenant people of Israel.

Jesus did that because he knew that he was about to break that expectation and respond to the Canaanite woman one way or the other.

I mean, he was also teaching them the disciples and all who followed.