Great is Your Faith
In our Gospel reading for today, I imagine that Jesus was tired. He had to be, moving from town to town with his reputation as teacher and healer always preceding him, the crowds pushing in wanting him to cure them, feed them, give them a good word that would improve their lives. We place Jesus on such a pedestal that it is easy to forget he was not God in disguise, not God simply painted over with a varnish of humanity. No – the Incarnate Word, as John calls him, was fully God and fully human. Fully human means he faced the same physical and emotional limits we all do. He hurt like we do. He got tired like we do. He felt frustration, anger, joy, and sadness, just like all of us. And in our reading this morning, we watch that very human Jesus caught in a ministry-altering encounter with a Canaanite woman.
Jesus and his disciples are traveling through Tyre and Sidon, the two chief cities of ancient Phoenicia – this was not Jewish territory, but even here, people had heard about him. Crowds fill the street just to catch a glimpse, just to be near him. And out of that crowd comes a voice: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” A Canaanite woman, shouting, over and over, until even the disciples are irritated by her.
This woman has no business speaking to Jesus at all. She is a woman addressing a man outside her family, forbidden by custom. She is a Canaanite – a descendant of the very people the Israelites displaced centuries earlier when Joshua led them across the Jordan. She had no business addressing a Jewish rabbi, the people of Israel and the people of Canaan did not get along. But she loves her daughter more than she fears the consequences of speaking out, and so she keeps shouting.
At first, Jesus ignores her. He is on a mission to proclaim the coming kingdom to the people of Israel, and that task alone is enormous – he does not have the time or energy to help everyone who wants something from him. But she does not stop. Finally he answers her directly: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” I have come for my own people, he tells her, and you are not one of them.
Still she will not leave. She comes and kneels before him. “Lord, help me.” And it is then that the very human Jesus says something unkind, even degrading: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Even now, this mother does not walk away. Love for her child drives her on, and she refuses to be offended. Instead, she takes his own words and hands them back to him: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” You can imagine Jesus stopping mid-stride, turning to face this woman for the first time. You can almost hear the penny drop.
I don’t think it was her cleverness that finally reached him, sharp as it was. I think it was the sheer, stubborn, persistent nature of her love. She had already been ignored, refused, and insulted, and still she would not walk away. That is what moved Jesus’ heart – not a cleverer argument, but a love that refused to quit. And in that moment, he sees what he had, in some sense, known all along: that God’s mercy may begin with Israel, but it cannot stop there. The very nature of God demands that it overflow to others – even to those considered dogs. No tradition, no ethnic or national or religious barrier can block access to the grace of God; it is bigger than the house of Israel. By her persistence, her daughter was healed. By her persistence, God’s table of mercy grew wider than anyone standing in the crowd had imagined that morning.
Have you ever heard of John Crowley? Some years ago, there were numerous articles written about him. In 1998, John Crowley’s two youngest children were diagnosed with Pompe disease, a rare and usually fatal genetic disorder. Doctors told him plainly there was no treatment, and that Megan and Patrick would likely not live past their second birthdays. Crowley had no background in science. But he left his job, mortgaged his house, and with his wife poured everything they had into founding a small company devoted to finding a treatment for Pompe disease that did not yet exist.
It took years of failure after failure, before an enzyme therapy was finally developed – the same treatment his own children began receiving in 2003. Both are alive today, grown, still here.
John Crowley did not give everything to save his children because he found a stronger case than the doctors who told him no. He gave everything because he loved them too much to accept the doctors’ no as the end of the story.
And then there is Maria Hernandez, a mother from Honduras who arrived at the U.S. border in 2017 with her two daughters, then eight and three years old, seeking asylum. Officials deported Maria back to Honduras. Her daughters were kept in the United States – first in a children’s shelter, then later released to Maria’s adult son already living in the U.S. They were among the more than 3,900 children separated from parents at the border between 2017 and 2021. For nearly five years, that border stood between Maria and her girls. She worked a job at a banana plantation in San Pedro Sula while she fought her case, year after year, for the chance to be with them again.
In 2022, that chance came. She flew to Los Angeles, and at the airport she wrapped her arms around daughters who had grown up without her – one no longer a toddler, one no longer a little girl.
Maria did not win her family back because someone finally found a better reason to let her through. She won them back because five years and a border were not enough to defeat her love.
Like the Canaanite woman, neither John nor Maria set out to change the world. They were not reforming a hospital system or rewriting immigration law. They were simply refusing to let a door close on the people they loved.
Somewhere in your life there is, or will be, someone who needs that kind of love from you – the kind that keeps showing up for a troubled sibling, that keeps visiting a grieving friend long after the funeral is over and everyone else has gone home, that sits with a neighbor through yet another round of chemotherapy, that keeps insisting on the dignity of a parent whose mind has been lost to Alzheimer’s, even though the people paid to care for them seem indifferent. That kind of love may cost you something. But love that will not quit is exactly the love that heals, and reunites, and makes whole.
When Jesus finally looked at this Canaanite mother and said, “Woman, great is your faith,” he was not commending her theology. He had just watched her refuse, again and again, to take no for an answer, and he called that love by its truest name: faith. That is still the faith our Lord is looking for – not certainty, not the right words, but a love that will not quit until it is answered. May it be said of us, as it was said of her: great is your faith. Amen.