The opening verses of Isaiah 56 and the 11th chapter of Romans celebrate the incorporation of the Gentiles into the blessings bestowed on the Jewish people by God. Both of these passages make the integration sound as easy as pie but most other portions of scripture suggest that the matter is far from easy, so perhaps the pie is in the sky, well out of reach. The Jewish people had a lot of bad history with Gentile nations, both from being aggressors in the conquest of Canaan and from being oppressed by Egypt, Assyria and Babylon. In Romans, Paul struggles, not with Gentiles, but with his fellow Jews who have, for the most part, failed to accept Jesus as the Risen Lord. We know from this epistle as well as several others, that Paul also struggled with fellow Jews who did accept Jesus but had trouble accepting the Gentiles if they would not accept the Torah.

We can see this tension in the Gospel. Jesus treats the Canaanite woman harshly when she asks him desperately to heal her daughter of a demon. (Mt. 15: 21-28) It is possible, as many scholars suggest, that Jesus was testing the woman to provoke her to her strong act of faith. I’m inclined, however, to think that Jesus himself struggled with the request from an enemy people. Significantly, Matthew’s designation “Canaanite woman” is anachronistic; Mark is more contemporary by calling her a Syro-Phoenician woman. The Syro-Phoenicians tended to collaborate with the Roman rulers, so the bad blood is both current and historical. As a human person, Jesus would have been born in a social milieu where these tensions would have been absorbed from an early age.

Curiously, Jesus does seem to be a little more patient, or at least less impatient, than the disciples. While Jesus is silently letting the woman pester him, as if at some level he is willing to put up with her, the disciples are urging Jesus to send her away, Jesus finally says to the woman that he was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. When the woman persists in crying out for help, Jesus shockingly tells her that it is not right to toss the children’s bread to the dogs. One might think this sort of insult would cause the woman to give up and turn away, but she persists with the retort: “Even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.” This plea converted Jesus, convincing him that she had great faith and her faith had healed her child. How might these words have changed Jesus, assuming he needed to be changed in relation to the woman? The woman’s words are quite disarming in the way they absorb the insult without reprimanding Jesus–or do they in a way? As I continuously reflect on the dynamics of race relations in our country, one of the things I am beginning to notice is how black people have to be very careful about what they say to whites who have the power. I am beginning to see that those of us who are white don’t pick up on this sort of dynamic very well. We take our superiority so for granted we don’t see it and can’t hear it.

But Jesus did hear the undertone. As a Jew living in an Empire run by the Romans, Jesus would have known very well the fine art of speaking truth to power. Usually, he would have been in the same subordinate position in relation to a Syro-Phoenician. But this woman was desperately in need and had come to Jesus only to be trashed on account of her ethnicity. The role-reversal would have been startling to Jesus. Suddenly, he was being treated as the oppressor–which he was at the moment. Jesus, who had come to serve, not to be served by oppressed people, would suddenly have been awakened to the truth of his attitude to the Canaanite woman and to the rest of her people, He wastes no time in commending the woman’s faith and proclaiming the healing of the woman’s daughter.

There is much else in this narrative to suggest that Matthew places it in a process leading to the mercy of God to the Gentiles through Jesus. For example, this narrative takes place between the two feedings in the wilderness which are often taken to refer to feeding the lost sheep of Israel and then feeding the Gentiles. The “dogs” get quite a few crumbs from the table after all and so they receive the mercy the woman asked for.

But what is important about this story is that it leads us into our own struggles with racism and other ethnic prejudices. Many of us think we have done the job by denouncing prejudice and racism but we overlook the instinctive reactions we absorbed before we were conscious of what we were absorbing. Jesus heard the voice of the oppressed in the Canaanite woman that we often fail to hear. Just as Jesus, in his humanity, struggled with accepting the cup of his passion in Gethsemane, Jesus here struggled with his own teaching to love his enemy. Just before this incident with the Canaanite woman, Jesus has said that it is what comes out of a person that defiles, not what comes in. We might say that prejudice does defile us to a certain extent as it enters us, but it is when it comes out of us that it seriously defiles us. In the end, love and compassion rather than prejudice came out of Jesus.In his own conversion. Jesus gives us a powerful example of the need to be converted by hearing and seeing and then casting out the demons of prejudice that hold all of us in bondage.