He also stepped into the path of a Canaanite women who sought healing for her daughter.
The distant past and the distant future are bound up in this encounter.

There are centuries of events, emotions and theology
packed into the few brief sentences which recount this meeting.

The author of Matthew's Gospel made a point of identifying the womanıs ancestry.
We need to have a sense of why it matters that the women was a Canaanite.

We need to know this because that context says something important
about her, about us and about God.

In the Book of Genesis, a seventy-five year old Abraham sets out under orders from God.
Abraham passes through Canaan and is told by God that this land shall belong to Abrahamıs descendants. The land of Canaan includes a city called Jerusalem.

In The Book of Exodus, Moses leads the Hebrew people out of Egypt and slavery, through the desert toward that promised land.

In the Book of Joshua we hear of the Israelites taking possession of the land of Canaan. It is the beginning of the iron age, and the last throes of the Hittite Empire. The power of the Egyptian Pharaohs is fading and the Canaanite city-states are dissolving in the face of attacks by the Israelites and the Philistines. There is a great shift going on in the world. Power and people are migrating across the face of the earth.

By the time of Jesus, thirteen centuries after Joshua,
Jericho, Jerusalem and all that had once been Canaanite is now home to the tribes of Israel.
The original people of Canaan have dispersed. Some have obviously drifted as far north as Tyre and Sidon for this is where the women is waiting for Jesus to hear her plea.

The disciples know that she is a Gentile. It is clear that they also know she is a Canaanite, one of the people whom Moses called "an abomination". We know the low esteem in which Samaritanıs were held, and they were at least Jews, of a sort. Canaanites were lower in the scheme of things: gentiles with a record.

This is the context we need to see the story clearly.
If Jesus is the expected Messiah, the "King of the Jews",
this Canaanite woman has little claim to be in that entourage.

But it would be hard not to hear the woman.
The women is wailing, no, shrieking is a closer translation.

But Jesus doesn't answer her. After all what's the connection.
The disciples want nothing to do with her.
They try to make Jesus send her away.

His enigmatic reply to the disciples is,
"I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

The woman, at the end of her rope, the end of her wits is willing to try anything.
"Lord, help me," she entreats Jesus, even in the face of his inaction and the disciples' hostility.

³It is not fair to take the childrenıs food and throw it to the dogs,² Jesus finally replies.

What? What kind of an answer is that?

How does this picture of Jesus fit with the one you have in your head?
It is one thing for him to not respond. It is another to apparently demean and insult this stricken women.

It is hard for me to make Jesus' retort
fit with my picture of Jesus as the savior of the world.
I know that the word translated "dogs" is not the pejorative usage ­it is in fact, a word that describes household pets and is really closer to "puppies". But it still seems out of character for the man who would later say that the greatest among us is one who serves.

At this moment, Jesus appears quite unwilling to serve this woman.
He appears barely willing to speak with her.

But she is willing to wrestle with him.
Like Jacob wrestling with the angel of God,
seeking a blessing and ending up with a name and a new life,
the woman counters Jesus' attempt to cast her aside.
"Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table," she says,
standing her ground.

I believe there is a flash of recognition that occurred in the utterance and in the hearing of that claim. I believe that Jesus saw the woman in a new light. I believe that Jesus saw a broader possibility in his own mission. This broader mission was articulated to the disciples after Jesus' resurrection: "go," he told them on that latter day, "Go into all the world and make disciples." That is a big jump from "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

I believe that a flash of recognition happened in the women, as well. She had gone to the mat seeking wellness for her daughter. She had risked public humiliation, rejection, or worse and had discovered the depth of her own faith. She is our ancestor. We may claim Abraham as our spiritual father, but we come from Gentile stock.

We say, in the Eucharistic prayer that Jesus was sent by God into a fallen world, "to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to..the God and Father of all."

It is the nature of God to love, to sustain and to redeem.
It is the nature of human beings to grow and to learn from experience.
One of the core tenants of our faith is that we believe that Jesus was fully God and fully human, having both natures.

In this story of Jesus' encounter with the Canaanite woman, we can see that dual nature portrayed in action ­ human learning and Divine loving coalescing. In this story of reversal we see a model of a life of faith informed by tradition, challenged by experience and changed by revelation.

We can see Jesus growing in the understanding of himself and of his mission.
To be truly human we too must grow, change, risk and sometimes even reverse ourselves in the face of new revelation.

When Jesus heals the woman's daughter, we can see the divine in action. The One whoıs nature it is to have mercy and to extend loving-kindness. Love beyond bounds. The God of the prophets who declared that Godıs house would be a house of prayer for all people.

Our goal is to draw ever closer to God.
Sometimes we wrestle. Sometimes we travel more gracefully.
That befits our heritage.
For we stand with Patriarchs, Prophets and martyrs,
and we sit in the dust with tax collectors, sinners and Samaritans.

There will be days when we are, in spirit,
with the five thousand who were fed abundantly on the mountainside.
And there will be days when we feel like we are kneeling in Sidon and begging for crumbs.

But God is the God of all our days.
Our changing perceptions and feelings do not
change the nature of God.

When we say that God is unchanging,
we do not mean that God is unresponsive or uncaring.
We mean that we can count on God to be steadfast.
We can count on God, the creator to continue to be creative.

As my collegue, the Rev. Linda Fernandez says:
"If God wasn't flexible, there would be no need for the Holy Spirit,
which continues to bring us evolving revelations of God's will and
purpose."