Author: CCW

“O woman, great is thy faith”

The encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman is an arresting and compelling scene and yet, equally, a most disquieting and disturbing one. She “asks, knocks, and seeks,” we might say, but what does it take to receive? It means, it seems, at the very least, a remarkable kind of perseverance and depth of soul. It reveals nothing less than the power and the truth of faith.

The woman comes to Jesus with a request for the healing of her daughter “grievously vexed with a devil.” There are a number of healing stories in the Gospels but rather few about the healing of the mind or the soul. Like this story, they are about demonic influence and possession. This is not to be mocked or derided but appreciated in its power and truth. And what is that power and truth? The power and truth of what opposes the power and truth of God and the image of that power and truth in us. The point is that we can be overtaken in our very selves in various ways. This story touches upon ancient wisdom and human psychology.

What is equally remarkable is that she is a Canaanite woman, meaning one who is outside the households and tribes of Israel. The marvel of the story is that she who is from outside of Israel is in truth “an Israelite indeed,” meaning one who truly strives with God, emphasis on the word ‘with’, not ‘against’. Her question to Jesus is not for herself but for her daughter. She is, and this is key to the story, quite determined in her quest. She has a hold of a truth in Jesus which she will not relinquish. At least on one level this is a story about perseverance, about holding on in the face of adversity, about trust and faith.

What is so disturbing, and yet so profound is how she is answered in her request. First, there is no response – “he answered her not a word”- there is only silence. Secondly, there is rejection – “send her away, for she crieth after us”, say the disciples. Thirdly, there is refusal – “I am not sent”, says Jesus, “but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And fourthly, there is repudiation – “It is not right to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs.” What could be more devastating, more disparaging, more discouraging than that?

Only at this point of utter humiliation as it must seem, when we are speechless with shock at the harshness of it all, is there the beginnings of the complete turn-around of grace that leads to the ultimate exaltation – “O woman, great is thy faith: be it unto thee even as thou wilt.” It is not simply about a kind of stubborn willfulness on her part. She gets what she seeks only because of her insight into the truth of Christ. How do we know that? Only through the struggle. That is perhaps the real lesson for us. The struggle matters. The struggle is nothing less than the struggle of faith. She who is from outside of Israel symbolizes the very truth and meaning of Israel. It means striving with God.

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Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.

At first glance it reads like a debating challenge, a war of words. And in one sense it is, yet not as a contest for what most persuades but rather as a testament to what is most true. That is what is at issue in the temptations of Christ.

They are our temptations. Matthew and Luke, though ordering them differently, present three temptations which encompass the meaning and nature of all temptation. Yet they all come down to one thing really: the denial of God, on the one hand, and a picture of the truth of our humanity as found in Christ, the word and son of the Father, on the other hand. All temptations are about turning to what are partial, incomplete, and distorted forms of the truth.

The three categories of temptation vary only in the degree to which God is denied. The three temptations can be understood as the temptation to distrust, the temptation to presumption, and the temptation to defiance and denial explicitly. All the temptations common to our humanity are comprehended in these three and all belong to the Lenten project of setting our loves in order over and against the forms of the disarray of our affections and thoughts. But what is the point of this whole matter of temptation? To highlight for us and to compel us to the realization of what properly belongs to the truth of our humanity and to the redemption of our humanity in the one who overcomes the tendencies in us to lose sight of the truth of our being which is only found in the truth and goodness of God.

“If thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” The first temptation is to distrust because it suggests that God will not provide for us, therefore we must shift for ourselves by way of whatever means, even unlawful and unnatural means, such as turning stones into bread, which is to say, subverting the order of things in creation to our own immediate ends. The temptation is to distrust God’s power and goodness. It is the false fear that God will not provide. The Old Testament form of this is the temptation in the wilderness (recalled in the Venite), “the temptation of Meribah” – the hungry temptation – when the people of Israel murmured against God’s provision for them in the wilderness, the provision of manna, the proverbial ‘bread from heaven.’

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