“Truth, Lord; yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”
“Little dogs,” an intriguing term. Dogs are rarely mentioned in the Scriptures and rarely in a positive light. Sinners are said to be like dogs returning to their vomit, an image of our besetting sins; dogs lick the blood of Jezebel, another unattractive yet compelling image. To call someone a dog in the Old Testament was to suggest that they were worthless; in short, an insult. In Revelation or as in Philippians we are told: “Look out for the dogs … for the evil-workers.” Dogs, it seems, are evil. Don’t ask about cats. None here!
Isaiah speaks of “dumb dogs [that] cannot bark” (Is. 56.10), criticizing the watchmen, the leaders of Israel. More than a thousand years later that phrase was turned on its head to become an image for dogs as preachers, meaning dogs that do bark and, indeed, bark incessantly against “foxes and wolves,” the heretics that threaten “the sheep,” the faithful, as Gregory the Great imagines. Preaching as barking?! Just saying.
Several centuries later after him, it became an image for the Ordo Praedicatorum, St. Dominic’s Order of Preachers, later known as Dominicans, sometimes wrongly punned as the Domini Canes, the dogs of the Lord. But that is just bad Latin, a mistaken translation, and not historical except as an insult; in short, another myth. There is, however, nothing mythical about the dog with the flaming torch as the symbol of the Dominican order. And scripturally, at least in terms of the Old Testament Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Book of Tobias or Tobit, Tobias’ dog is mentioned twice as accompanying him.
It is the sole biblical instance of dogs viewed as faithful and loyal companions much like Odysseus’s dog, Argos, in the Odyssey. He alone recognises his master, though disguised as a beggar in his return to reclaim Ithaca, and then dies but without betraying him. Seeing Argos brings tears to Odysseus’ eyes. It is a touching scene. As Homer beautifully puts it, “Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more after twenty years”.
In the New Testament, there are the dogs that are the companions of Lazarus who lies at the gate of Dives, the rich man, “full of sores, and desiring to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table”. The dogs “came and licked his sores”. A moving image of compassion and care. No doubt, they, too, desired to be fed with the crumbs which fell from the rich man’s table which is the insight of this most powerful and yet disturbing story. Silence and rebuke and finally insult give way to mercy and grace. But how hard, how disturbing this must seem! The breakthrough moment is this remarkable woman’s last statement to Jesus: “Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table”. Little dogs.
Vittore Carpaccio’s magnificent 1502 painting known as St. Augustine in His Study, portrays in the foreground a little shaggy white dog. Identified as a curly-topped Maltese, what we would now call a Maltese terrier, the dog plays an important symbolic and prophetic role in the understanding of the painting. The fifth century theologian and preacher, St. Augustine, is here portrayed in a wonderful late fifteenth century Venetian study, filled with books, codices, and clutter (not unlike my study though much grander) as well as reading devices such as a rotating lectern, which, I must confess, I envy. The scene is completely anachronistic – out of time, unhistorical – which would not have troubled Carpaccio in the least.
Carpaccio was commissioned by the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, a school founded by Slavs from Dalmatia for their immigrant community in Venice, to paint three scenes from the life of Jerome, one of their patron saints, and one of the greatest translators of all time. Jerome’s Vulgate version of the Scriptures, translated from the Hebrew and the Greek into Latin, was the lingua franca of Europe for more than a thousand years. Its influence is seen in the Psalms in the Prayer Book which have, mirabile dictu, the Latin titles derived from the incipit, the opening words of each psalm.
Carpaccio’s scenes depict, first, Jerome with his legendary lion as companion; second, Jerome’s death and funeral; and third, a painting of St. Augustine in His Study which captures a later legend in the life of Jerome. Augustine is depicted pen in hand looking up at the window through which rays of light shine. The light symbolizes St. Augustine’s vision of the death of Jerome even as he was writing to him. They were fifth century contemporaries. He is looking into things transcendent.
The little dog is looking exactly along the same plane as Augustine, seeing and looking attentively at what Augustine is seeing, looking into things transcendent. Such is prophetic insight or intellectus, we might say, perceiving what is invisible. This stands in complete contrast to our unfortunate fixation with a kind of ratio, which for our culture means the unending accumulation of facts without understanding, without meaning.
“He who is now called a prophet was formerly called a seer”, we are told parenthetically in 1st Samuel (1 Sam.9.9). A seer is one who sees into the meaning of things, one who perceives the invisible in and through the visible. The little dog belongs to that idea as the symbol of prognostication, of prophetic insight. “Dogs”, Colin Dayan observes, “bear the burden of revelation” (Dogs on the Edge of Life). They are the bridge between man and nature, between man and God. Carpaccio’s dog was in an initial sketch not a dog, but an ermine or a weasel. Symbolically, in terms of late medieval and renaissance iconography about animals, it represents prophetic insight.
So with the woman of Canaan. She has a hold of a deep truth about God in Christ. She sees the transcendent in the visible. And what she knows, she holds onto with great tenacity and perseverance. She will not let go. She is the perfect figure of what it means to strive with God, with what it means to be a true Israelite, namely, one who strives with God; not unlike Jacob wrestling with “a man”, with God and being renamed Israel “for you have striven with God and with men and have prevailed”. She exemplifies perfectly the spirit of the Lenten discipline of paying full attention to the things of God in the struggles of our lives.
Yet she is not a Jew, not an Hebrew, not an Israelite, but as Matthew simply says, “a woman of Canaan,” who meets Jesus, it seems, in the wilderness, coming out of the coasts of Tyre and Sidon. She is, in short, a Gentile and yet in contrast to the epistle reading from 1st Thessalonians, she is a Gentile who knows God! An echo, perhaps, of the last chapter of Tobit: “then all the Gentiles will turn to fear the Lord God in truth.”
The whole exchange between her, the disciples of Jesus and Jesus himself is an explicit critique of all and every form of exclusiveness, a critique of Israel’s holding God to be their God exclusively, God as a possession. That is a betrayal of vocation and mission. God is the God of all. She brings out what is universal in the soul of our humanity, the desire for God, for the good and not only for ourselves but for one another. She comes to Jesus seeking the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil,” a kind of possession not altogether unlike the obsessive disorders in our own culture that contribute to so much depression and despair.
What this woman has a hold of is grace. She has an insight into the truth of God in Christ and its meaning for human life which she holds onto tenaciously and actively. She “strives to strive” (T.S. Eliot, Ash Wednesday) towards the things that belong to our good in God. In other words, faith is totally God and totally us, a kind of Chalcedonian logic, as it were, where the distinction of the human and divine natures united in the person of Christ has to do with the whole of our life and especially as sacramentally understood. Word and Sacrament, Intellect and Sense, God and Man, each in their integrity and unity, their harmony and truth; the balance and interrelation is crucial.
But why “little dogs?” For that is not what Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel. He says “it is not right to take the children’s food and to cast it to dogs”. And in the King James version, she says, “yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.” Why, then, “little dogs,” in our reading? It is an interesting question about translation.
Most translations speak of “dogs” as does the King James’ Version which since 1662 was the English translation used in the classical Books of Common Prayer throughout the Anglican Communion. But in the Canadian 1962 Book of Common Prayer, we have “little dogs,” for the last words of the woman. The Greek (κυναρια) and the Latin (catelli) are very clear and unambiguous. Both are the diminutive of dogs, hence “little dogs” for what Christ and the woman say here. Wycliffe in the earliest English translation has Christ say “hounds” while the woman speaks of “whelps” or puppies. But Tyndale, the linguistic genius upon which so much of the King James’ Version draws, uses “whelps” too, for what both say. Rather strangely, the KJV simply says “dogs.”
The woman’s response to what appears to be a complete insult by Jesus is a rhetorical masterstroke. He calls her a dog implicitly but in our Canadian version she does him one better, likening herself to a “little dog”. These small matters help to highlight something greater. The attentive gaze of Carpaccio’s little dog complements Augustine’s vision just as the woman’s attention to Christ brings out the deeper truth of our humanity in our striving with God. We are all like little dogs. Her complete attention to Christ gets his attention and response: “O woman, great is thy faith” is a resounding critique of the disciples and us in all and every form of presumption about entitlement and privilege. Her striving makes her a true Israelite, one who strives with God.
The little dogs are the dogs of the Lord, too. They participate in the goodness of the Creator’s will for the whole of his creation. As symbols of faithfulness and loyalty, of prophetic insight and attentiveness, of companionship with us, they speak to the desire of our souls illustrated in this strong, strong woman. She is the very emblem of faith and perseverance. Like her, we need to “strive to strive” towards the things of God in which we find grace and joy, healing and delight. Her striving breaks into the heart of Christ but only because he wills and wants that from her and us.
Like the little dogs, the crumbs which fall from our master’s table are more than enough to sustain and nourish us especially in the awareness of our unworthiness such as we pray in the Prayer of Humble Access, an echo of this story. We shall see, too, on The Fourth Sunday in Lent, that the gathering up of the fragments from Jesus’ feeding of the multitude in the wilderness, is more than enough for the Apostolic Church grounded upon Apostolic Faith. But it requires our constant attention to Christ. Such is the striving of Lent shown to us here in the witness of the woman of Canaan. We, like her, are “little dogs” who also “eat of the crumbs which fall from our master’s table.” Such is healing and grace. Her striving is the humility that breaks into the heart of God.
“Truth, Lord, yet the little dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table.”
Fr. David Curry
Lent II, 2026
(a reworking of a 2019 sermon preached at All Saints, Wynnewood, Philadelphia)