It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way

Christian Community Presbyterian Church
Bowie, Maryland
August 16, 2026

It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way Matthew 15:21-28

Video may be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UHXwxKetuU

It’s a story of promise and hope. You know it, but let me recount a few details.

In Haran, the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. … [A]nd in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Genesis 12:1-3). 

When Abram lamented the lack of an heir, the word of the Lord came to him: “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be” (Genesis 15:5).

Abraham’s grandson, Jacob, had a dream in which God spoke to him saying, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; … your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring” (Genesis 28:13-14).

Jacob’s family sought relief from famine and moved as immigrants to Egypt where their long-thought-dead brother Joseph had become Pharaoh’s prime minister. A subsequent Pharaoh enslaved Jacob’s multitudinous descendants. After trials and plagues they escaped, fled through the Reed Sea, camped in Sinai, complained, misbehaved, and repented numerous times as God tried to form them into the long-promised people.

With the promised land on the horizon, Moses told them: “[T]he Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:17-19). 

Levitical law reaffirmed that concept:  “When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Leviticus 19:33-34).

But love for the stranger quickly passed out of thought. The Israelites tried to exterminate the indigenous peoples of Canaan—the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. Those not killed were enslaved. Later generations intermarried with them. Following warfare, defeat, exile, and return to the land, an ideology of purity arose. Mixed marriages were banned. Strangers were suspect. Some people who had lived away from Jerusalem and had avoided exile languished without spiritual leadership during the exile decades. They were shunned, despised, treated as strangers by those returning from exile.. 

For nearly half a millennium an ethic of demeaning strangers, foreigners, aliens, and immigrants was baked into the mental and religious DNA of the people who took part in the worship rituals at the Temple in Jerusalem. That was the world Jesus was born into. That was the social order to which he was called to preach Good News.

Listen now for the Good News which comes to us in Matthew 15:21-28.

Jesus … went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment. 

This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

In these times of discordant social and cultural views, words of Jesus which were once accepted as “gospel” are questioned. Our Lord is disparaged as weak and out of touch with reality. An ersatz “Christianity” touts him as a member of the deep state seeking to destroy the way things are, the way things are said that they are supposed to be. 

The overarching question is: How are things supposed to be? There never has been agreement on that concept but there have been a set of generally accepted tenets that if graphed would form a bell curve, high concurrence of agreement in the middle and low on the ends. Now the graph of current attitudes looks like a bell turned upside down to form a massive trough of low agreement in the center, meaning that most people are caught in a war zone between narrow extremes of high agreement.

Today’s scripture passage straddles a chasm of thought on how things are supposed to be. Our initial reaction is one of shock at Jesus’ attitude and language. The gentle Jesus, meek and mild, that we were raised on doesn’t talk to people in that way. It goes against nearly every story about Jesus. Jesus doesn’t dis people; he creates cogent images to cause people to think about themselves. As this scene opens he appears insensitive, even abusive. Our Jesus wouldn’t slough off the woman’s request.

What can we say? She’s a woman. She’s a Gentile, a Canaanite, a foreign immigrant, a stranger. Local gossipers probably posited that she was a slave or a widow or an unmarried mother or, heaven forbid, a prostitute. It was obvious that she wasn’t a sheep of Israel. She has no standing. She’s supposed to be invisible and silent doing whatever she does for a living (tasks which the people were too good to do themselves).

Matthew keeps the focus on the woman and Jesus. The disciples are annoyed with her and her persistence: “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” The crowd was probably thinking the same thing, maybe even saying it aloud. “Be quiet.” “You don’t belong here.” “Go home, foreigner!” “Get back to your work!” “You tell her, Jesus.”

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Our first unfiltered thoughts echo Jesus’ response. That was the community standard. Everyone thought that way. That’s how generations had been taught to think. Jesus said what everyone believed. He was representing the people. Jesus was also keeping on task. When he sent the disciples out earlier he told them not to go to the Gentiles. He reaffirms that task as he rebuffs the woman’s persistent request. 

This is not a story that sets up a missionary campaign to the Gentiles. It is a story about a Gentile woman taking the initiative to encounter Jesus, much like the woman with the hemorrhage who sought healing through touching his coattails (Mark 5:25) or the woman in the parable who pesters the unjust judge for justice (Luke 18:1-8).

The Canaanite woman violates every boundary that was forced upon her in those days⏤her gender, her ethnicity, her heritage, her religion, her imagined lifestyle. The woman rises above all that. She comes as a prophet confronting the hypocrisy of the culture and times, the disjuncture of the promise of blessing to everyone and the reality that the promise is for a select few. Jesus states the community’s take on the way things are supposed to be: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She does not back down: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 

In the grand scheme of Matthew’s approach to telling the good news of Jesus Christ, the woman⏤immigrant, foreigner, Gentile, stranger⏤believes that she and her daughter are people who should benefit from the in-breaking of God’s ruling activity announced in and through the personal presence of Jesus. She is willing to ignore social protocol, and in doing so, she dramatically reveals the depth of her faith. 

The woman believes that she and her daughter should receive mercy from the active engagement of God with creation. She dares to rise up against the way everyone says  things are supposed to be. She calls out falsehoods long held to be true faith. She asserts that grace demands love and respect, not neglect and abuse. She will not be a three-fifths person. She asserts that the verbal, social, and religious violence perpetrated by self-proclaimed good people is not the way things are supposed to be. That’s why Jesus calls her faith great. Her faith wipes out all traces of being a stranger. 

Stephanie Saldaña writes in the August issue of The Christian Century, “There is a narrative violence to forever relegating anyone to the category of ‘stranger.’ It is to seal their otherness as fact, to forever exile them from our intimate circle. It is a failure of imagination. At best, we might assist them, but so long as they are strangers, we can never truly know them.”  (“Strangers No More,” Stephanie Saldaña in the August 2026 issue of The Christian Century, published on July 21, 2026)

Jesus knows the Canaanite woman. She is not “other.” She is a God-created, God-loved person with all the rights and responsibilities that come with personhood.

Jesus is the consummate teacher. Echoing the community’s ethic he elicits from the woman a word of truth. He could have spoken the truth himself, but few would have listened. Instead he lets her speak the wisdom which will detonate in the thinking of everyone around her. Jesus allows the woman to demonstrate true humanity to the crowd. In doing so Jesus plants a thought seed in the people’s minds that any one of them could be experiencing what she has experienced. They are invited to think: I could be that person, I could be the outcast because I am lefthanded or redheaded or short or dark-skinned or green-eyed or a resident of the wrong street or a graduate of the wrong school. The list of possible stigmatizing conditions is endless. The reality is I could be the outcast, I could be the stranger, I could be denied my God-affirmed humanity.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, "The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie." The Canaanite woman would not accept the lie that everyone wanted her to live. That was not the way it was supposed to be. God had made her equal to everyone who debased her. 

Jesus leaves us with several challenges: 

• What are the attitudes, the beliefs, the falsehoods that permeate our lives and the communities we live in but are not supposed to be that way? 

• What are the lies in church and culture that must be unmasked? 

• Who will continue the work of the Canaanite woman to make sure that the real way things are supposed to be is the way things are?

May your faith be great. 

Let us pray.

God of the exile, help your people to disrupt systems of supremacy so they can be replaced by structures that reflect the way you intend things to be. Amen.