Overcoming the Myth of the "Foreigner"
Mark 7:24-37
Rev. Frank Schaefer

It starts out just like so many other miracle stories in the Gospels, somebody needs help, and comes to Jesus. Now, ordinarily, we expect Jesus to respond, to demonstrate God's great love for us, by healing the person or providing for their needs. Isn't that what he usually does? But this time, he doesn't. First, he ignores this woman, tells her he can't help her, then he refuses to help her because of her ethnicity. Is this the Jesus we know? The One who came to show us God's love? What's going on here?

First of all, she was a woman, and women did not address men in public in 1st century Judea. It just wasn't done.

Second, this woman was a Canaanite. Canaanites were pagans. They were unclean in the eyes of Jewish people. So this Canaanite woman came to Jesus with two strikes against her.

But still, this is Jesus, we're talking about. The one who usually empowered the oppressed, including women. We expect more of Jesus than to conform to the expectations of his society.

“Lord, help me, please heal my daughter!” the woman pleads.
And Jesus looks down at her, kneeling before him in the dirt, and he answers, “It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs.”

What is going on here? Is Jesus testing the woman? Or is he teaching his disciples a lesson? Or is it that Jesus learned a lesson here?

In the end Jesus responds to her request and gives her what she asked for. He heals her daughter. And he even says to her, “Woman great is your faith!” The important part is that Jesus was able to overcome the biases and discrimination built into his society.

And that is not an easy feat. Overcoming the biases of one's time/society is one of the hardest things. Only very few people have actually accomplished that. Of these people we say that they were ahead of their time.

Often we are not even aware of the biases we have, exactly because they are built into our society. Jesus overcomes the biases of his time and in doing so he shows us new heights of God's love: an unconditional love!

Unconditional of our... appearance, sin, weaknesses, mistakes, ethnicity, gender, persuasions, or anything else about us.

Thank God for sending this determined Canaanite woman Jesus' way. Thank God for sending the Canaanite woman our way too--many a times!

God wants us to reach out in unconditional love to our neighbors, no matter who they are, what they look like. When we gather, God wants us to do so in love, with care and compassion and in harmony and unity.

One theologian once wrote that every church should have a picture or statue of the Canaanite woman to remind the disciples of Jesus that God reaches out beyond their limitations of love and acceptance, that those we would reject are those God accepts too.

When Jesus paid attention to the Canaanite woman, he broke down all the boundaries that separate us from one another. Today, he says to his church, "Go, therefore, and make disciples of ALL nations . . . ." As you leave here today, Jesus sends you out beyond the boundaries of race, economic status, age, gender or other barriers. He sends you out to high school drop-outs, the “foreigners,” including undocumented immigrants, the homeless, those who are considered outcasts of society. Only in God's eyes, these are God's beloved children and God wants us to get that message. That's why Jesus said what he said in Matthew 25:40 “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me ”

Amen.