This past Sunday, in visiting one of our Indiana District congregations that follows the historic one-year lectionary, I was pleased to hear the reading and preaching of a favorite Holy Gospel, that of the Canaanite woman who approaches the Lord Jesus with pleas and intercessions for her cruelly demon-possessed daughter (St. Matthew 15:21-28). As often as I’ve heard and studied this particular account, it still has a real poignancy to it, offering profound encouragement.
Like our Lord’s Parable of the Persistent Widow (St. Luke 18:1-8), the example of the Canaanite woman catechizes the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ to pray at all times and not to lose heart. With confident faith in Jesus, and with a mother’s love for her little girl, the Canaanite woman perseveres even in the face of the Lord’s apparent rejection, dismissal, and insult. In this regard she has often reminded me of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine, who persisted in praying for her son’s repentance and conversion over nine long years, with great tears and pleading. The comparison is all the more pronounced for me, because one of my own daughters is named for St. Monica, and as an infant, less than a year old, she had to undergo major surgery. Few things prompt us to fervent prayer and intercession like the dangers and illnesses that face our children!
It was for her daughter, and not for herself, that the woman in this Gospel was driven to call upon the Lord for mercy and help. As Luther points out in one of his sermons, from St. Mark’s account, the woman sought Jesus out “after hearing of Him” (St. Mark 7:25). Our need by itself does not teach us to pray as we should, but the Word of Christ which calls us to faith and points us to Him. So she came to the Lord and made her request, and if we did not already know how the story goes, we might assume that Jesus will simply hear and answer her prayer right away. But instead, He first of all ignores her without a word, and then He appears to reject her request by implying that He is for others but not for the likes of her, and then, the coup de grâce, He calls her a dog and suggests that it would be wrong to give her the children’s bread.
In this account there is the silence that sometimes confronts each of us, when it seems as though the Lord were ignoring us and refusing even to acknowledge our existence, to say nothing of our desperate need. There is the thunder of His Law, which exposes how far we have fallen from the glory of God, and how little we deserve the blessings of His mercy and His providential care. It is simply a fact that we are not worthy of even the least of all His benefits, but have merited only punishment for our many sins. And in recognition of and response to all of this, the temptation is to rail away at God in anger, or else to run away and futilely attempt to hide from His presence.
The woman, though, persists in asking. She is not dissuaded by the silence, but keeps on crying out, calling on the Name of the Lord. The disciples also intervene on her behalf, even if they do so in large part out of irritation and embarrassment. This, too, is instructive, that Christians ought to intercede on behalf of their neighbors, as we do implicitly every time we pray the Our Father. And for the woman’s part, she owns her unworthiness, even agrees that she is a “dog” under the Master’s Table, but perseveres in seeking the crumbs that would fall from His open hand. All of this because she has heard about Him, and by the working of the Holy Spirit through that Word she believes that He can and will help. She clings to the Word and promise of Christ Jesus, and she ignores every contradiction, no matter how real and in her face it may feel.
This is what faith does: It clings to the Word of Christ and refuses to hear or heed any other voice that would deny who He is or what He has promised. It trusts what God has spoken to us by His Son, and it prays and confesses accordingly. And when the Lord has exercised that faith and allowed it the time and opportunity to persevere and trust in the face of apparent opposition, He hears and He answers the prayer, even as He honors the faith that He Himself has granted.