“He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

— Matthew 15:26

Are you going to say it? Are you really? I mean, we know things about this pericope but we don’t always say them.

In response to criticism from a group of Pharisees and scribes, Jesus tells the gathered crowd that it’s not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person but what comes out. He just said that. And then he walks about a two day journey to Tyre and Sidon where he encounters the Canaanite woman.

He says “do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach and goes out into the sewer?” And then, I don’t know, maybe he’s tired, maybe he’s irritable. Maybe the day arguing with critics and the walk from Geseneret to Tyre and Sidon was hot and his clothes felt weird. I don’t know, but I believe that Matthew’s writer juxtaposed these two pericopes together and the drafters of the revised common lectionary certainly juxtaposed them just as deliberately.

The woman asks for mercy. In my sacred imagination he tries to keep walking by. He tries to smile politely, maybe wave, like we do at the beggars on the street corner. But then the beggar follows him, keeps at him. “my daughter is tormented by a demon.” The disciples try to make it better. They run interference like the best church secretaries do. Let’s send her away, Lord. But she is persistent. She came and knelt before him; “Lord, help me.”

And then it happens. Two days ago he warned about what comes out of our mouths and what comes out of his? At best I’ve heard this described as a rebuke. More honestly it’s an epithet, a slur. There’s a lot to unpack about comparing someone to a dog in Jesus’ culture, and none of it is good.

Are we prepared to talk about our savior defiling himself with an insult to one for whom he was sent and being redeemed by the faith of this foreigner? It’s remarkable how the weak and vulnerable find us when we are, ourselves weak and vulnerable to our worst selves. It’s remarkable how those on the margins show us the worst about ourselves. It’s remarkable that even when we fail at faith, fail at love, fail at justice, those whom God sends to us, still find God’s grace, still pull God’s love and mercy from us. Often in spite of us.

Beloved, may God send you those through whom grace and mercy become impossible to withhold, so that God’s grace and mercy may abound.