The Word Matthew Wants You to Trip Over

Rev. Bobby Musengwa

Transitional General Presbyter

Limbourg brothers, fifteen century Dutch painters

A Canaanite woman is screaming at Jesus. 

His own disciples want her gone. They feel embarrassed by her screams to Jesus. And for one uncomfortable line, it sounds like Jesus might agree with them. 

Stop right there. Ask yourself a question: why does Matthew call her "Canaanite"? 

That word was old even in Jesus' day. The Canaanites were Israel's ancient enemies, the people God supposedly cleared out of the land centuries earlier. In the other Gospel version of this story, she is just called Syrophoenician. That is her actual ethnic label at the time. 

Matthew reaches back into the history books for a word loaded with conquest and bloodshed. He wants you to flinch. He wants you to remember every sermon you ever heard about "us" and "them." 

Then he has Jesus heal her daughter anyway. 

That is Matthew in one story. Let's dig in. 

Written for people who had just lost everything 

Matthew's Gospel was written after the year 70, after Rome flattened the Second Temple. Picture your own building gone. Picture the place where your grandparents were baptized, gone. That is the world Matthew's community woke up into. 

A community in that kind of grief asks hard questions. Who are we now? Who counts as one of us? Is God still keeping promises? 

Matthew answers those questions by widening the circle every chance he gets. A community that just lost its center needs to hear who still belongs. This whole Gospel is Matthew's answer to that need. It is not a side theme. It is the engine running under the whole book.

A community that just lost its center needs to hear who still belongs. Matthew tells them. 

Four names nobody expected in a family tree 

Matthew opens with a genealogy. Most people skip it. Don't. 

Tucked into that list of fathers are four women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and "the wife of Uriah," meaning Bathsheba. Every one of them is a foreigner or connected to one. Rahab was Canaanite. Ruth was Moabite. Tamar's story involves her tricking Judah, her father-in-law, into fathering her children. Bathsheba's story involves David's abuse of power. 

Matthew could have opened with a clean, respectable line of Jewish patriarchs. He chose scandal and foreignness instead, and put it on page one. 

His first readers would have caught every one of those names immediately, the way you catch a familiar face in an old photo. This was not an accident. This was Matthew announcing, before Jesus even says a word, that God's story has always run through people the respectable crowd wanted to leave out. 

Your church's family tree has some Tamars and Rahabs in it too. Name them. Don't sand them down. 

Free food, no exceptions 

Later in Matthew, Jesus feeds thousands of people with a few loaves and fish. Nobody pays. Nobody proves they belong first. 

Think about how differently your town runs. The coffee shop needs your card. The grocery store needs your cash. Even church potlucks sometimes run on an unspoken rule that you bring a dish if you want a plate. 

Jesus skips all of that. Hungry is the only qualification.

If your ministry has a hidden cover charge, a hoop people quietly have to jump before they feel welcome, find it and remove it this month. 

What actually makes you unclean 

Right before our passage, in Matthew 15:10-20, Jesus tells the crowd plainly: it is not what goes into your mouth that defiles you, it is what comes out of your heart. Slander, evil thoughts, false witness. That is the list. Not shellfish. Not unwashed hands. 

This is Jesus taking a wrecking ball to the purity boundary lines his culture used to sort people into clean and unclean, in and out. 

And then, two verses later, he walks straight into Gentile territory. That is not a coincidence. That is Matthew building his argument in real time. He does not just say boundaries are about the heart. He goes and crosses one. 

The woman who would not take no for an answer 

Then she shows up. A Canaanite mother, begging Jesus to heal her daughter. 

His first response is rough. He says he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. When she keeps pushing, he says it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs. 

Read that again. That is a hard line for Jesus to say. 

She does not walk away. She takes his own metaphor and turns it back on him: even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table. 

And Jesus changes course. "Woman, great is your faith." Her daughter is healed, right then.

I can’t help pointing out the irony here. Earlier, Jesus had walked on water. Peter had tried to walk on water but began to drown. Jesus helped him, saying, “You of little faith. Why did you doubt.” 

Juxtaposing Jesus’ words to Peter and his words of praise for the Canaanite woman’s faith, there’s a big chasm on who society would have preferred Jesus’s praise would go to. But the gospel is filled with upside down stories such as these. 

People have read this moment in different ways over the years, and honestly, they should. Some hear it as Matthew forcing readers to reckon with old scripts of who is "in" and who is the enemy, and then showing those scripts breaking down in real time. 

Others read it as a rare moment where Jesus himself grows, taught by a woman with nothing to lose and everything to fight for. However you land on that question, the outcome is not in doubt: a foreign woman, written off  twice by the categories of her day, moves Jesus to act, and Matthew hands her the same words of praise he gives almost no one else in this Gospel. 

Somebody in your congregation has been arguing for their place at the table longer than they should have had to. Stop making them argue. Set the plate. 

Our own church knew this story too 

Here is a number that should stop you cold: 122 years. 

That is how long American Presbyterians stayed split, North from South, starting in 1861. The split was not a quiet disagreement over church furniture. It was a fight over slavery, and over whether human beings could be owned as property. Some Presbyterians in that era built entire theological arguments defending human chattel. They used scripture to do it. 

Read that again. People stood in pulpits, in our own tradition, and used the Bible to defend owning other people.

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It took 122 years for the North and South branches of the church to reunite. That reunion did not happen until June 10, 1983. Think about that timeline. That is not ancient history. That is a split that lasted into living memory, into the working life of people some of us know. 

Today it is hard to believe any Presbyterian was ever that far off the path of God, no matter what reasoning they used to get there. But they were. And it took over a century to walk it back. 

That is what happens when a church protects a boundary instead of crossing one. Matthew's Jesus did not wait 122 years to reach across the line to a Canaanite woman. He did it on the spot, in one conversation, because a mother would not stop asking. 

You’ve heard me infinitely quote my friend Walter Brueggemann, whose prophetic vision for the church animates me: 

"The prophetic tasks of the church are to tell the truth in a society that lives in illusion, grieve in a society that practices denial, and express hope in a society that lives in despair." 

Matthew was doing exactly that for a grieving, post-Temple community. Our own denomination is still learning to do it, generations after 1983. The question in front of us is whether we will do it here, now, for whoever our culture has quietly written off. 

The last word is "all" 

Matthew ends with the Great Commission: go and make disciples of all nations. 

All. Not the respectable ones. Not the ones who look like us or vote like us or already belong.

All. 

That word closes the loop Matthew opened with four foreign women in a genealogy. This is a Gospel that starts wide and ends wider.

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We repeat without fail the big task of the church. Mission Presbytery's own Matthew 25 invitation asks us to build congregational vitality, dismantle structural racism, and address systemic poverty. Read next to Matthew 15, that is not a program bolted onto the gospel. That is the gospel, the same one Matthew was writing in the first place. 

This week, name one boundary your congregation has quietly kept in place. Then do what Jesus did. Cross it. 

Grace and peace, dear friends, 

Rev. Bobby Musengwa 

Transitional General Presbyter 

Mission Presbytery