Learning from Outsiders

August 16, 2026

Isaiah 56:1, 6-8         Matthew 15:21-28

           

Does Jesus ever change his mind? If he does, is that an admission that he was wrong? Would Jesus ever test our faith in hurtful or manipulative ways? These are some of the unsettling questions that this gospel text may have us asking this week. A Canaanite woman approaches Jesus and asks for mercy. By the sounds of it, she’s making a scene, shouting for all to hear that her daughter is being tormented by a demon. And first Jesus just ignores her. His stubborn silence may sound harsher than her desperate shouts. And the disciples want to send her away because they’re distressed, not by her grief or her daughter’s torment, but by the impropriety of her behavior and the disruption to their ministry. The Canaanites were the Jews’ historical enemies. They stood in the way of God’s divine plan to give God’s children the promised land where they could form a nation. The commentators of the Annotated Common English Bible note that the term “Canaanite” appears more than 80 times in the Old Testament, but in all of the New Testament it is reserved just for this woman, just for this story. By referring to her, not just as a gentile, but a Canaanite, the author of the gospel is letting us know that this woman is more of an outsider than perhaps anyone else. And Jesus seems to treat her that way. He tells her, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." He’s echoing what he’d said earlier in this gospel when he sent out his disciples to heal the seek and bring the good news to the downtrodden, but to not enter any gentile villages.

 

And here - this is where I’ve often winced when reading this story - Jesus implies that the Canaanite woman is a dog, the very lowest in a family hierarchy, not even human. Now, he’s not saying anything that most other Jews wouldn’t say about Canaanites, or that Canaanites wouldn’t say about Jews, for that matter. But Jesus should know better, right? Know that God’s love breaks down any human-constructed barriers like race, ethnicity, or gender. Jesus should be better. Right? Jesus, the Messiah, the divine son of God, couldn’t be wrong, couldn’t be corrected on the spot by just any human…right? The Canaanite woman responds to Jesus using his own logic and Jesus immediately concedes and commends her faith and her daughter is healed from that moment. We know that Jesus is fully divine and fully human, but it can be uncomfortable to imagine that he could be so wrong and, on top of that, so bigoted.

​

I’ve chewed on this story a bit over the past couple years and I think there is actually a super human quality to Jesus’ behavior. I think he’s teaching us by example a lesson for just such a time as this. How often has someone challenged a stance that you held, and you immediately saw the error in your opinion and changed your mind? For me, it can take years after someone’s planted a seed of truth in my heart till I finally come around to see the error of my ways, the false assumptions that have informed my opinions, the ways I haven’t been living into my own principles. To bless the person who triggered my defensiveness and doubt and to be grateful for the lesson. For Jesus, it takes one interaction to admit that he has been beaten in a theological debate. And it doesn’t just change the life of the Canaanite woman and her daughter, it changes the direction and pace of Jesus’ whole ministry. By the time he has been killed and risen, he is sending out his disciples to minister to all the nations on his behalf.

​

We are living in a time of deep polarization. It’s not just that the opinions we hold on certain topics are strong. It’s that those opinions are intertwined with our very sense of self, with our entire worldview. To give even a little ground in a disagreement puts us at risk of having the world as we know it shattered. When someone says, “The facts that your opinion is based on are wrong. You’re using bad data,” so often what we hear is, “You are wrong. You are a bad person.” Shankar Vedantam of “Hidden Brain,” a podcast that looks into the fascinating way our brains work, notes that we have to focus on changing hearts, not minds. It’s assumed that humans cannot be won over by logic and facts. We are too fragile for that; we have too many mental barriers. We have to start with connections and relationships. People have to see how harmful or erroneous opinions affect them personally or affect those with whom they have personal relationships before they can begin to change their minds. But not Jesus. He’s not fragile. His mind isn’t narrow. His heart isn’t closed.

​

And maybe it is a little easier for Jesus to change his mind because the Canaanite woman is pretty exceptional. She doesn’t insult Jesus or his beliefs. In fact, she addresses him as Lord, Son of David. Jesus’ own disciples haven’t even caught on to his messianic identity yet, but this outsider sees it immediately. She’s a Canaanite, but she must know something about the Jewish faith, some knowledge that makes her respect the Jewish faith. She doesn’t dispute Jesus’ logic. She says, “You want to call me a dog? Fine. Let’s follow your logic to its natural conclusion.” Just as Jesus came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, the Canaanite woman doesn’t refute Jesus’ frame of understanding, she works within it.

​

In a conversation among Luther Seminary professors on this text, Matthew Skinner wonders if the Canaanite woman knows the Isaiah text that we heard this morning. “And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the Sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant--these I will bring to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples. Thus says the Lord GOD, who gathers the outcasts of Israel: I will gather others to them besides those already gathered.” Does she know other texts about God’s commands for Israel to welcome and care for the stranger, to be a light of God’s love to all the nations? Could she be turned off by Judaism because of the current leaders’ hypocrisy and propensity to cozy up to earthly power, but could she still see and believe in the healing, liberating love of Jesus and his ministry?

​

In that same Luther Seminary conversation, Cody Sanders notes that Christian themes and biblical allusions saturate our culture in America. Most people know Jesus taught that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. Sanders wonders if we could be as open to outsiders’ critiques of the way we practice our faith as Jesus is. I’m of a generation that is largely unchurched or that has been turned off from church or, in some cases, turned away from church. For many it’s because of the hypocrisy. They may not be familiar with the first verse of today’s Isaiah reading, but they likely know that our God does indeed tell us to “maintain justice and do what is right.” They know Christians are supposed to love their neighbors, but they don’t always see us doing that. What they’re seeing a lot of right now is violent Christian nationalism and exclusionary Christian fundamentalism. What they’re not seeing enough of is mainline Christian churches speaking out publicly against those distortions of Jesus’ love. And the loudest voice wins rights to the airwaves and the ability to define how the wider community sees their Christian neighbors. How would we feel if we were held accountable according to our own faith by non-Christians with the disruptive tenacity of the Canaanite woman? If we were asked why we don’t speak truth to power as loudly as Jesus does? Why we don’t stick our necks out for the dispossessed and the downtrodden as far as Jesus does? I can already feel my body tense up with the need to defend and explain. Can you feel that? Does Jesus feel that when the Canaanite woman holds him accountable to his own faith tradition?

 

We often talk and pray and sing about bringing the light of Christ out into the world, which is wonderful. And I wonder if we could balance that by standing with the outside world and shining a light in. What can we learn about our faith tradition and practices from an outsider’s perspective? Where are we hitting the mark? Where are we missing it? What are the different ways of bringing Christ’s light out into the world, and are we bringing it out in the ways that are most needed by our current world? The theme of this summer has been faith in God’s abundance. God equips us with what we need to answer God’s call, as individuals and as a church. The results aren’t always what we expected. The timetable is almost never as immediate as we’d like. And I also wonder if the gifts for our journey are found in unexpected places. If we have to break some of our assumptions and wade through discomfort to find them. I wonder if we could recognize them as gifts when we do find them. If they are as unsettling as a desperate Canaanite woman disrupting our ministry by making a loud, public spectacle. I wonder if we could accept that gift and learn from it half as quickly as Jesus does. And I wonder how much brighter, how much deeper, in how many more spectrums Christ’s light could shine if we did.