Today’s Gospel gives us a window into the heart of a mother and into the sacred space of her relationship with Christ. I missed the grace of this understanding for many years because I had misinterpreted Jesus’ response to her in this reading. I had wallowed in my defense of the Canaanite woman at every reading of it with frustration and confusion brewing within.
It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs (Mt 15:26).
How could he speak to her this way?
After becoming a mother myself, I began to amass experiences that echoed the Gospel woman’s disposition. Like her, I was relentless—persisting in a call for healing and pleading for reprieve from hardships and sufferings that had befallen my children. When praying with this reading, I would ask, “Jesus, if this is how you regard this mother, how do you regard me?”
Circumstantially, I had been studying reflective listening and dialogue techniques in my master’s program in psychology. I didn’t know yet that God was about to turn those skills back on me, teaching me how to truly hear him in this particular text.
First, I acknowledged the apostles’ agitation and the manner in which they clamored for the woman’s dismissal: Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us —their hearts clearly closed and unreceptive to her need (Mt 15: 23). I noted Jesus’ reply to them, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel‘ (Mt 15: 24). She was a Canaanite—a gentile, outside the fold he names here.
I considered for the first time that since Jesus was in dialogue with his followers here, perhaps he was simply reflecting back to them the hardness of their hearts. In a dialogue, mirroring invites the receiver to restate what he or she is hearing the speaker say. Mirroring orders the dialogue to mutual understanding.
If Jesus was indeed mirroring the closed hearts of the apostles, then a clarified approach to this reading lay before me. I saw anew: Jesus was teaching. He wanted to elevate the apostles’ understanding of who he was by showing who he was not. And if his rebuke was for them, not the woman, then what remained for her wasn’t judgment. It was room to keep asking. And she does.
Lord, help me (Mt 15:25).
Jesus continues with the line that opened this reflection: ‘It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs‘ (Mt 15:26). I recognize now that the agitation this line once stirred in me wasn’t so different from the apostles’ own—both of us missing that his words were never a verdict on her. Only now do I hear it differently: Jesus is once again revealing the callousness of the apostles’ disposition toward the woman.
And still she doesn’t back down.
Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters (Mt 15:27).
The mother’s declaration of dependency and her unwavering fidelity create a culminating moment in which Christ shows the apostles who he really is—and who she is in him. O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish (Mt 15:28).
This brings me full circle to the question I asked in prayer: “Jesus, if this is how you regard this mother, how do you regard me?” I believe now that his answer to me is what it was to her—not a nuisance to be managed but a faith worth naming aloud.
Today, I humbly submit that I am a beggar-mother like the Canaanite woman in today’s Gospel. I invite you to see that for yourself as well. As beggar-mothers, we are providers and intercessors and rescuers and scavengers of grace. Consider the following:
Beggars rely completely on the generosity of others, so he says to us—Rely upon me!
Beggars often stay close to where they know food is present—Stay close to me!
Beggars often plead for goods on behalf of those they keep watch over—Intercede for your loved ones, and bring them to me!
Beggars appreciate sufficiency in the poverty of the scraps they find—’My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness‘ (2 Cor 12:9).
Great is your faith,’ he says. And to every beggar-mother who pleads for the grace of healing for someone she loves, what you are given is not meager, not only just sufficient, but lavish, sweet, and full.
