16th August 2026 All Saints Southport Holy Communion
Matthew 15: 10-28 Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
Eleven days ago I took the mid week communion service and by a quirk of the lectionary that Wednesday and this Sunday have the same gospel reading so if you were at the midweek communion ten days ago I’m afraid you will already have heard most of this sermon - if you are in that rather limited group my apologies.
The last part of our reading where Jesus is speaking to the Canaanite woman is a passage I’ve never much liked and so have always tended to skip over. Jesus seems so abrupt with the woman, so apparently uncaring, so unlike the him we see elsewhere in the gospels.
I don’t buy the suggestion - which I have heard - that he was testing her faith, and that what seems so hurtful on the page was actually said with a twinkle in his eye.
If your child is so tormented that you are prepared to go into the midst of a people who despise you, because the person who is at the centre of that crowd just might be the one person who can help her, if you are courageous enough to do this, what sterner test of your faith do you need. What good would a further humiliation do for you?
When I looked again at the passage it struck me what the problem was. Simply put I was never intended to hear this. Matthew was not writing for me.
I read this as a 21st Century Christian Gentile. Matthew was writing 2000 years ago for his Jewish contemporaries.
What did he want to say to his readers?
Why did he think this particular healing was worth recording?
And what might he be saying to us?
A little context - two earlier sections in the chapter have been about Jesus dealing with the misuse of Jewish law and how the scribes and Pharisees have found ways of weasling round it - so if you say your money is given over to God it means you are let off the commandment to honour your parents and as we heard in the reading - people concentrated on the purity of their diet much more than the purity of their heart. It’s very human to try and bend rules to our own best interest, we will recognise it in ourselves. This world of the law would have been very familiar to Jesus. He grew up in it and he knew how misleading it could be.
When we come to the story of the Canaanite woman Jesus and his disciples have moved out of the Jewish heartland and are being assailed by an intensely irritating and demanding Gentile woman who wants Jesus to heal her daughter. She is inconvenient in every possible way and the disciples want Jesus to get rid of her and Matthew makes it clear to us in the way he reports the meeting that she is absolutely the last person that the religious authorities would imagine that God’s prophet, let alone the Messiah, should have anything to do with. It’s obvious Jesus should tell her to go away and leave him alone - but he doesn’t.
‘Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly.’
Matthew shows Jesus redefining what it means to live by the law 1) Don’t try and wriggle round the plain commandments, 2) don’t use dietary purity as a substitute for a clean heart - those were theological arguments but here - more controversially - Jesus breaks a behavioural code 3) He does not accept the boundaries that have been set up to deny this woman and her child the grace of God, and so though she seems utterly unsuitable to the disciples this is what this woman and her child are given. He is saying to the disciples, ‘you are not the gatekeeper’s of God’s grace.’ It’s a very easy trap to fall into - someone is not our kind of person - we judge them - we persuade ourselves that God will feel just the same as we do. Thankfully God doesn’t.
Jesus declared that the way the Jewish authorities were dealing with the law concealed God’s intentions for his people rather than illuminating them.
The Pharisees and scribes saw the fundamental purpose of the law as preventing wrongdoing.
Whilst Jesus saw it as more than that.
Listen again to Jesus summary of the law -
The first commandment is this:
‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’
The second is this: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’
There is no other commandment greater than these.
On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
Jesus sees the fundamental purpose of the law as promoting what is good, illuminating the purposes of God.
And this is what I think Matthew would have wanted us to take from this passage
These two great commandments are good in themselves, but what happens if we keep them?
A couple of weeks ago Pete Spiers preached and said the heart of Jesus ministry and preaching was the kingdom of God and I think he was right
What happens when a group of people take these commandments seriously?
They begin to look a little bit like the kingdom of God - how we behave says a great deal about what we believe God is like and these two commandments can be our approach to ordinary life.
The trouble with some hymns, some images of heaven is that they are not ordinary enough - think of those things that give us our simplest deepest truest pleasures, those times when we are most aware of being close to God’s grace - often it won’t be in a service but in the goodness of the everyday when it is working in line with the two commandments
I remember being surprised by how enthusiastic the psalmists are about the law in general - something I thought narrow and dour -until one day the penny dropped - the psalmists knew the law ws not to exclude them - on the contrary it was God reaching out to them in welcome, God explaining to them the etiquette of his Kingdom
So in our passage we see Jesus explaining and demonstrating the law so it is fit for the life we are supposed to be living. For us learning what it means for us will be a lifetime project, but Matthew has given us a direction of travel, and our communion service gives us food for the journey.
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