What Jesus learned from a Canaanite (Matthew 15:21-39)

Something changed when a Canaanite recognized Jesus as the Davidic heir.

Up to this point, Jesus had focused on Israel. Israel was the nation God had rescued from the oppression of human rule (Pharaoh) and established as a nation under God’s reign through the Sinai covenant. By Jesus’ time that kingdom had fallen. The good news was that God was restoring the kingdom, for his anointed king had come (Matthew 3:2; 4:17).

Last time Jesus visited the Decapolis, he wasn’t welcome (8:34). The shepherd of Israel appointed twelve to help gather his harassed and helpless sheep (9:36), sending them exclusively to the lost sheep of Israel (10:5).

So, we’re not surprised when Jesus denies a Canaanite’s request on the grounds that “I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel” (15:24). The commission he had received from his Father was for the covenant children who sit at God’s table (15:26).

The nameless Canaanite pushes back. She questions the notion that the God of Israel made no provision for the rest of creation. A creature like herself may not have a place at the covenant family’s table, couldn’t she have a crumb?

She reminds me of how Jesus taught his people to respond to “outsiders.” He asked us to see that even people of other nations love their own, the way this Canaanite loves her daughter. He said the Father sends rain on everyone, good and bad. He called his people to love their enemies like that, to reach out and love as completely as their Father does (Matthew 5:45-48).

Jesus has not seen his people loving like that. They claim to honour God, but their words reveal a deadly intent against God’s anointed (15:18-19).

So where did this foreigner get her understanding of the Christ? Something radically unexpected is happening when someone from an enemy nation seeks him out, kneels before him, and calls him Lord! Where did this Canaanite get her understanding of Jesus as the Son of David, with authority beyond Israel? (15:22)

His own disciples are still finding the words to describe Jesus as the Messiah, the heir appointed by the Father in heaven to reign on earth. When they do, Jesus tells Peter how blessed he was to receive this revelation. It’s not something Jesus demanded or Peter figured out. The regal authority of the Son comes as a revelation from his Father who reigns in the heavens (16:16-17).

Is that what’s happening with the Canaanite? Her great faith (15:28) — far beyond what Jesus has seen in Israel — must be a revelation from the Father. And if the Father has given her this revelation, what happened to “I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel”? (15:24)

That makes sense of what comes next. Jesus returns to the Decapolis, the largely gentile region on the eastern shores of Galilee (Mark 7:31). This time crowds flock to him. They bring all sorts of needs, and Jesus heals them. Even the non-Jews are now praising the God of Israel (15:31).

Thousands of them — four thousand plus women and children — are listening to God’s Messiah. He heals them. He feeds them. He provides for them now in exactly the same ways he has provided for the children of the covenant who sit at his Father’s table.

When a Canaanite placed her trust in the heaven-sent son of David, Jesus realized that his Father was giving him authority beyond the lost sheep of Jacob’s household. Jesus was always looking for what his Father was doing, because that defined what he was doing (John 5:19). If his Father was giving this revelation to a Canaanite, the time had come for the Son to extend his Father’s table beyond the Sinai covenant family.

Of course, the resurrection is the moment when Jesus receives global authority. He dies as the king of the Jews; he is raised up with all authority in heaven and on earth. But that future was already breaking into the present.

Jesus heard the prophetic voice of his Father in her words. Jesus saw his Father extending his authority to the nations when a Canaanite — previously enemies marked for destruction — received the revelation of his authority to rescue more than just the house of Israel from oppression by evil.

So what?

If that’s right, it shapes our ministry too.

Look in your world. Beyond the church. Where do you see the Father giving the revelation that his Son is our Messiah, the ruler with authority to rescue us from oppression and resore us to heaven’s reign?

We need eyes to see what the Father is doing in places we don’t expect. We need ears to perceive how people are responding to the revelation God gives them. The Father’s revelation of his Son is the good news.

If Jesus could hear from the Father though the faith of a Canaanite and adapt his ministry in line with what God was doing, we can expect to see God in unexpected places. We just need ears to hear.

What others are saying

R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, NICNT (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2007), 588, 598:

But now there is a marked change of focus. Jesus “withdraws” not merely outside Galilee but outside Jewish territory altogether. The first person he meets is pointedly described as a “Canaanite” who belongs to the Phoenician area into which he has now traveled (v. 22), and while his itinerary from there is not clear, the local crowd will respond to his miraculous power by praising “the God of Israel” (v. 31), an unusual phrase which suggests that Matthew is speaking of Gentiles. We shall note reasons for believing too that the following feeding miracle (vv. 32–38) is not just a repetition of what Jesus had previously done for a Jewish crowd, but is a deliberate extension of their privilege to the Gentiles also. … This section at the close of the Galilean phase of Matthew’s story thus marks a decisive break from the previous pattern of Jesus’ ministry, a deliberate extension of the mission of the Messiah of Israel to the surrounding non-Jewish peoples. …

The summary of Jesus’ healings in this Gentile area is as comprehensive as among the Jews in 14:34–36, but this time it is expressed in terms of specific complaints rather than in purely general terms, though with a generalizing “many others” at the end of the list. The complaints mentioned recall Isa 35:5–6, the blessings promised as part of God’s redemption of his people, a passage which was also echoed in Jesus’ depiction of the “deeds of the Messiah” in 11:5; but now those messianic blessings are being experienced also outside the covenant people.

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone, Part 1 (London: SPCK, 2004), 200–201:

Israel had to hear the message first. … But, as with so much of what happens in Jesus’ public career, the future keeps breaking in to the present — even, as here, seeming to catch Jesus himself by surprise! …

The Canaanite woman does indeed have great faith. … She addresses Jesus as ‘son of David,’ the Jewish messianic title which the disciples themselves were only gradually coming to associate with him. And, most remarkably, she understands, and uses to her advantage in the banter with Jesus, the way in which God’s choice of Israel to be the promise-bearing people for the sake of the world was to work out in practice. Yes, she says, the dogs can’t simply share the children’s food. This is remarkable enough, that she accepts the designation ‘dog’, which was a regular way of dismissing the Gentiles as inferior. But she insists on her point. If Israel is indeed the promise-bearing people, then Israel’s Messiah will ultimately bring blessing to the whole world. The dogs will share the scraps that fall from the children’s table.

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