Lectionary Reflection for Proper 15A on Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28
MISGUIDED CERTAINTY
In my late teens, I joined my family and a group from our church on a tour of Israel. In my naïvete and ignorance, I found much of the trip frustrating and disappointing, but there was one thing that consistently amused my friends and me every day. One of the older women in the group had been to Israel a few times before, and many times, as we got off the bus to see some historic or beautiful site, she would say, “Follow me! I know the way!” At first it seemed a little rebellious and fun to follow her, but we soon realised that she would inevitably get lost. And so after the first few days, we stopped following her and just waved her off as she set out on her path. Looking back now, I wonder how the tour guides managed to keep track of her and ensure she returned to our party after every stop.
Sometimes I feel like the Christian Church is a bit like that lady. We arrogantly believe that we have the solution to every problem—be it personal struggles or global catastrophes—and we boldly proclaim to our neighbours, “Follow us! We know the way!”. But we seldom consider that people outside of our Christian bubble might have wisdom, insights, experiences, and resources that are equally helpful for addressing our individual and collective challenges. And often the way we think we know turns out to be a dead end or a path of misguided certainty in a complex and unpredictable world. A significant part of the problem is that we have come to define faith in terms of certainty, rather than as a journey of learning, growing, and discovering how to live fully, freely, and lovingly.
One tragic example of the Christian tendency to believe that we know what is best for everyone else and for the world is the strident, white Christian Nationalism that has worked so hard to install authoritarian governments in as many countries as possible, and to have a strong and vocal political presence in others. The fundamental message of those who support this distortion of Christ’s way is that they alone hold the keys to solve the world’s problems (according to their exclusive, self-serving vision) and that they do not need to listen to scientists, medical experts, educational leaders, or anyone who does not look or live like them. But in their quest to recreate an idealised, uniform, monocultural world of some glorious past that never actually existed, they are inflicting untold harm on millions of people across the world, and creating far more problems than they solve. And all in the name of a “Perfect Jesus” who is the antithesis of the “Real Jesus” of the Gospels.1
The “Perfect Jesus” that many of us were introduced to when we came to faith is the embodiment of certainty and is presented as the single, all-encompassing solution to every personal or public problem we could ever face. But to fit this perspective, we have to squeeze Jesus into our own, exclusive vision of perfection. This means we can talk about compassion, but only extend it to those like us. We can preach love, but convince ourselves that it is loving to condemn and even bomb those who live and believe differently than we do. And we can practice inclusivity, but only for those who are willing to change to conform to our ideal vision of faith and life.2
You won’t find this “Perfect Jesus” anywhere in the Bible. On the contrary, as Debie Thomas puts it:
As it turns out, even Jesus, the Son of God, struggled with this radical calling. Even Jesus had to grow his way into a comprehensive, all-inclusive understanding of God’s generosity.3
It is this struggling, learning, growing, human Jesus that Matthew’s Gospel presents to us in one of the most challenging and controversial stories in Scripture. It is found in the Lectionary Gospel reading for Proper 15A from Matthew 15:[10–20] 21–28, and it is the only account we have of Jesus discovering that he, too, needed to repent for God’s reign to be real-ised.
WHAT REALLY DEFILES
Matthew 15 begins with a group of Pharisees and scribes coming from Jerusalem to investigate Jesus’ teachings and works. Out of everything they could have challenged Jesus on, they chose the tradition of hand washing, which would have been one of the “little tell-tale signs” that they would have used to check whether Jesus was staying true to their traditional teachings or not.4 Jesus’ lack of concern for a small detail like this would have been a troubling indication that he was departing from some of the more important practices too. When questioned about this, Jesus turned the challenge around and pointed out how the religious had created traditions that contradicted God’s law (Matt. 15:1–9).
This confrontation was the catalyst for Jesus’ parable about what really defiles us. His point was simple: what comes from outside of us cannot defile us. It is what comes from within us, from our hearts, and what is expressed in our words and actions that defiles us. It is significant that this simple, direct teaching of Jesus, which he explains quite clearly to his disciples in 15:17–20, has often been ignored in the history of the church. Since Jesus’ own times, believers have found it far easier and more personally beneficial to focus on what comes from outside and condemn those things for their defiling powers, rather than turn inward to work on removing the defilement from their own hearts and minds.
In our time, purity culture is a clear example of Jesus’ principle. Books have been written, sermons have been preached, and seminars have been held to teach women that how they dress, act, and look has the power to defile a man, and so men need to control women’s bodies, sexuality, and appearances to stop them “tempting” men and “causing them to stumble”. But this contradicts Jesus’ teaching. Whatever a woman may do, this is outside of the men who witness it, and therefore cannot defile them. The only thing that can defile these men is their own minds and hearts, their own thoughts and desires. But of course, no one in purity culture wants to address that issue, and so the judgment that should be directed at the hearts of these cruel and self-righteous men gets projected onto women who have done nothing to deserve it.
To return to the Lectionary reading, what we see Jesus doing in his parable about what defiles us is consistent with all of his teaching: he moves everything to the heart. And to get our hearts right with God, to follow Jesus’ way of love and justice, requires us to change, to repent. That’s why Jesus’ first sermon was, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near” (Matt.4:17). In other words, the way to understand, experience, and real-ise God’s reign in our own lives and world is to change from the values, priorities, and practices of our society and embrace those of Jesus. The surprising thing in Matthew’s narrative, though, is that it turns out that even Jesus needed to do this work of repentance before he could fully grasp the reign of God that he preached!
It is important at this point to remember that, as we saw in last week’s Lectionary reading (14:22-33), Matthew presents Jesus not just as a new Moses, but as the human incarnation of Moses’ God.5 Now, as Jesus encounters a desperate mother begging for her daughter’s healing, Matthew echoes the Hebrew Scriptures to give divine authority to what would have been a shocking new understanding of Jesus’ message and mission and of God’s call for Israel to be a light to the nations.
WHEN JESUS REPENTED
Matthew introduces this mother in a very specific and significant way. Firstly, she is identified as a Canaanite, bringing to mind for readers of the Gospel the centuries of enmity between the Israelites and the Canaanites.6 This woman is not just a Gentile. She is one of the most hated Gentiles that could ever cross Jesus’ path. This is strike one. Then, of course, she is a woman, which in that patriarchal culture was strike two. Finally, she comes to Jesus unaccompanied by a man, shrieking her request in a way that was not socially acceptable and that clearly irritated the disciples. This is strike three. But she was not playing by those rules. Three times in their conversation she addressed Jesus as Lord, and began her plea with the Messianic title, “Son of David”.7 Right at the outset, Matthew wants his readers to see that this woman already has faith and insight that even the disciples had not yet attained—Peter will only make his declaration about Jesus as the Son of the Living God in 16:16.
We would expect Jesus to respond immediately and do what the woman asked, but he ignored her. When the disciples pushed him to send her away, he repeated his conviction, spoken to the apostles he sent out in 10:5–6, that his mission was for “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24). But when the woman knelt at his feet and begged for his help, his response echoed the age-old contempt between Jews and Canaanites: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (15:26).
At this point, we are tempted to turn to commentators who try to turn this interaction into a word play, or an object lesson for the disciples. But to do that is to miss Matthew’s point, and forget Jesus’ humanity.8 What we need is not to explain Jesus’ callous rudeness away, but to grapple with it, and what Matthew wants us to hear: Jesus is the human manifestation of Moses’ God, but he is still fully human, and this moment is a turning point in Matthew’s argument that the way of Jesus is the fulfilment of Israel’s purpose and calling.
At this moment, Jesus’ response revealed that he had still not fully grasped the radically inclusive nature of the Gospel he had been preaching. But the woman’s brave and clever reply changed everything: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table” (15:27). If we think of Jesus as “Perfect Jesus” we won’t even consider that he, like all humans, needed to develop spiritually, emotionally, physically, and psychologically.9 But if he was “Real Jesus”—fully human—then he did need to change and grow, and the words of this desperate mother were the catalyst for a significant moment of transformation in Jesus’ own life.
In her words, which must have stopped Jesus for a moment and got his brain spinning, Jesus suddenly saw God’s reign in a whole new way. As Peter S. Hawkins puts it, “Not only does he change his mind, but does so in a breathtaking 180-degree turn”.10 This is where Matthew invites his readers to remember how, in the Hebrew Scriptures, God changed God’s mind in response to human pleading.11 For his Jewish readers, Matthew needed to give a strong justification for including Gentiles in the new, Jesus-following community. And this was it. The human being who was Moses’ God incarnate was challenged by a hated Gentile woman to realise that God’s reign was radically, unashamedly, shockingly all-inclusive, and she convinced him. She won the argument and forced him to face his blind spots and prejudices, to repent, and to allow God’s reign to come even nearer to all people than he had imagined up to that point.12 And the result of her impact on Jesus? As Matt Woodley puts it:
As soon as Jesus lets the Canaanite woman in the door, his kingdom community starts to become a beautiful mosaic of men and women from every ethnicity.13
Now Jesus’ words about what defiles us take on a whole new meaning. Race, gender, ethnicity, disability, class, sexual orientation, economic situation, political affiliation, religion, and any other category or trait we may wish to use to divide ourselves cannot defile us. And even Jesus needed to confront the one thing that can defile us—our judgmental, unloving hearts. Following Jesus, then, means to follow him into repentance, turning away from the hatred, self-righteousness, arrogance, divisiveness, judgement, and exclusion that stain our hearts and that break the heart of God.
REPENTANCE AS A WAY OF BEING
Following Jesus means embracing a life of repentance—of constantly and consciously evolving to become ever more active participants in the interconnected, interdependent, radically diverse, and wondrously creative life of the cosmos. It means choosing to be open to change, to new insights and discoveries, and to new ways of being. It means being willing to be stretched and challenged for the sake of growth, truth, and love. And it means being wholeheartedly committed to living fully, freely, and fearlessly—and helping others to do the same.
The way of Christ is not about what happens on the outside alone, or even primarily. It is about having our hearts transformed such that acts of compassion, generosity, kindness, understanding, acceptance, inclusion, justice, and love become second nature. It is about doing more than believing in God’s reign. It is about embodying the radically inclusive hospitality of God in our own lives and relationships. Here is a simple sacred practice—a quick Ignatian examen—to help you make repentance and embodying God’s reign a constant feature of your life.
Each morning, consider the people, places, and situations you expect to experience in your day. Identify any possible points of stress, any ways you may be tempted to prejudge or exclude someone else, or any ways you may feel excluded by others. Ask yourself how you can best embody God’s reign in those moments, and then spend a few minutes in silence opening yourself to the Spirit’s wisdom and guidance.
Each evening, review your day, spending time specifically on the people, places, and situations you identified in the morning. Reflect on any ways in which you felt that God’s reign was present in your day and how you were able to embody it in the stress and exclusion points. Note also any times when you missed opportunities to embody God’s reign. End by spending a few minutes in silence as you invite the Spirit to teach you how to be more consistent and wholehearted in following the way of Christ.
Debie Thomas, “Is It Good News Yet?” Journey With Jesus, August 9, 2020; https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2716-is-it-good-news-yet.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Tom Wright. Matthew for Everyone Part 1. (SPCK, 2004), Kindle, 192.
See John van de Laar, “Lectionary Reflection for Proper 14A on Matthew 14:22-33,” Sacredise Your Life on Substack, July 30, 2026; https://sacredise.substack.com/p/lectionary-reflection-for-proper-af9.
Eunyung Lim, “Commentary on Matthew 15:[10-20] 21-28,” Working Preacher, August 16, 2026; https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-20/commentary-on-matthew-1510-20-21-28-7.
Wright. Matthew for Everyone. 200.
Rev. Dr. Janet H. Hunt, “Holy Surprise: Great Faith and the Canaanite Woman,” Dancing with the Word, August 13, 2017; https://dancingwiththeword.com/holy-surprise-great-faith-and-the-canaanite-woman/.
Peter S. Hawkins, “Dogging Jesus (Matthew 15:21-28),” The Christian Century, August 9, 2005, p. 18. Reproduced on Religion Online; https://www.religion-online.org/article/dogging-jesus-matthew-1521-28/.
Ibid.
Some examples are Abraham pleading for Sodom (Gen. 18:16–33), Jacob wrestling with God for a blessing (Gen. 32:22–32), and Hannah pleading for a child (1 Samuel 1). See Hunt, “Holy Surprise: Great Faith and the Canaanite Woman.”
Thomas, “Is It Good News Yet?”
Matt Woodley. The Gospel of Matthew: God with Us. (InterVarsity Press, 2011), Kindle, 165.