Sermon Notes — August 16, 2026
“She Persisted”
Matthew 15:21-28
Rev. Dr. Mary Beth Bernheisel
August 16, 2026
I spent a lot of time with the Canaanite woman this week. For the last six days I’ve been asking her all sorts of questions: where did she get her moxy? How she was able to think so quickly on her feet? How did she manage to beat Jesus at his own game? I wanted to know if she was surprised when Jesus called her a dog and if it hurt her feelings.
I wanted her to tell me what it felt like when Jesus told her that she was a woman of great faith.
For as long as I can remember I’ve thought of myself as a woman of faith – a person of faith. When I was little, being a person of faith meant that I asked Jesus to live in my heart. As I grew in faith, it meant something more like offering my heart to Jesus and trusting that he could do more with my life than I could on my own. More recently, faith has been trusting that God is always at work in the world, and then finding places to work alongside God and other people of goodwill.
But I wondered this week, What would it have been like for this woman – who didn’t even share Jesus’ faith – to hear him say to her
Woman, you have great faith. It will be just as you wish (Matthew 15:28)
Just for fun, take your Bible, or a pew Bible, and turn to Matthew chapter 14. We’re going to do a little exercise in compare and contrast. So two stories prior to this one – the story of the Canaanite woman – is a story that is probably familiar to most of us. It’s the story where Jesus sends the disciples across the Sea of Galilee and a huge storm comes up and Jesus walks out to them – walks on top of the water – and of course they are terrified. And then Peter decides that he wants to walk on water, too, and so he asks Jesus to call him out on the water, and Jesus does, and then Peter gets scared and he hollers at Jesus to save him and Jesus does.
And what does Jesus say to Peter in Matthew 14:31? What does it say in your translation?
(Wait for it)
You man of weak faith / You of little faith / You have so little faith / you get the point.
Now, turn to Matthew chapter 16.
The disciples are arguing with each other because no one brought bread. (Imagine what that sounds like) And once again, look at what Jesus says in Matthew 16:8. What does he say?
You have so little faith / You people of weak faith / You of little faith
So now he’s saying to the whole group what he said before to Peter. Now the whole lot of them are people of weak faith. In fact, I once read – and I can’t find it again – I once read that because the Greek sentence contains no verb, Jesus might actually be calling Peter a “little faith.” Peter, you’re a “little faith” Like a “little guy,” but a “little faith.” And likewise in chapter 16 he could be calling them all “little faiths.” You all are a bunch of “little faiths.”
Context matters. In chapters 14 and 16 Jesus calls Peter and then all of the disciples “little faiths.” In chapter 15, he tells the Canaanite woman that her faith is great. But the conversation doesn’t start that way.
Will you pray with me and for me?
Jesus and his disciples are traveling from Galilee to the region Tyre and Sidon. Tyre and Sidon were pagan territories, not Jewish territories, and so it’s quite curious that Jesus and his disciples would choose to travel there. Some scholars speculate that Jesus is trying to get away from the Pharisees. In the story immediately prior to this one, the Pharisees have traveled all the way to Galilee from Jerusalem to ask Jesus why his disciples don’t wash their hands before they eat, which is what the law commands. Honestly, Jesus is probably worn out with the Pharisees tracking him down just to give him a hard time.
Here’s a map just so you can see why some scholars think that at least part of Jesus’s motivation for traveling north is to get away from the Pharisees.
(Explain the map)
Regardless of his motivation, he is surely not expecting anyone to recognize him as he travels further and further away from Jewish territory
But as they’re walking toward the region a woman meets them and shouts
Have mercy on me Lord, Son of David.
Son of David is a specifically Jewish title, which wouldn’t be completely out of the ordinary except that this woman isn’t Jewish. She is a Canaanite.
I will confess that I have been a little preoccupied ever since I found out that I would be preaching on this text this Sunday. I guess I’ve mostly been a little put off that this story appears in our Bible at all. If Jesus really treated someone like this, I would rather not know about it. The disciples I can understand. They had their moments. But Jesus knows better.
There’s really no way to soft pedal Jesus’ interaction with the Canaanite woman. Her daughter is suffering and the woman has the unbelievably good luck of spotting the man she has heard can make her daughter whole again. And so she begs him for help.
At first he ignores her, and when his disciples complain to Jesus that she’s bothering them, he explains to the disciples that his job – his mission – is to preach the good news only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel – his own Jewish brothers and sisters. And finally, when she falls on her knees in front of him and asks him again to help her he draws a parallel between her and her people–and dogs.
It is not good to take the children’s bread
Children being the Jewish people
and toss it to dogs
Dogs being Gentiles, anyone who isn’t Jewish. He’s not just joking around. He’s not testing the disciples to see what they’ll do. He’s not testing her to see what she’ll do.
And here’s the thing: He’s not wrong. If you flip back to Matthew chapter 10, verse 5, you see that Jesus sends out the twelve disciples and this is what he tells them
Don’t go among the Gentiles or into a Samaritan city. Go instead to the lost sheep, the house of Israel. (Matthew 10:5)
So, really, Jesus is practicing what he preaches. He’s being consistent. Jesus’s Jewish brothers and sisters are the priority recipients of the good news of God’s kingdom. That’s going to change after Jesus’s resurrection. In Matthew 28 he is going to give the Great Commission. He is going to tell the disciples to
Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I’ve commanded you.
But that’s after the resurrection. Now – in this moment – Jesus is quite clear. He is only preaching the good news to the Jewish people. They are the priority, and rightly so.
But did he have to be so dismissive to a woman who is clearly in agony?
You know the old story about the preacher who was leading the children’s time in worship and he asked the kids what’s brown and has a bushy tail and stores up nuts for winter? And the answer is obviously a squirrel, but the one kid, because he’s in church and he knows that the answer is always Jesus, yells out, Jesus?
There’s a little bit of wisdom in that. God is the main character of the Bible. Period. In the case of the gospels, Jesus is the main character, and Jesus is here to show us what God is like.
I’ve struggled with how to make Jesus the main character of this story when he is not the best-behaved character in it. He becomes the hero of the story – eventually. But even he admits that the Canaanite woman’s faith is what compels him to heal her daughter. It wasn’t his idea.
What is it about her faith that is exemplary – that moves Jesus to call her a woman of great faith in between two stories in which he calls his disciples “little faiths”?
Her faith is exemplary because she believes that the good news of God’s kingdom has come near, and she refuses to leave Jesus alone until he shares it with her.
What if Jesus ignores the woman and then refuses her request to heal her daughter because – for a moment, in that moment – his faith is too small? He is laser focused on his mission – good for him. But the Canaanite woman brings him back to himself. She reminds him who he is, and calls him to live like God’s kingdom has actually come near, which is the good news that he is preaching.
He is the Lord, the Son of David, the promised Messiah for whom the Jewish people have waited. He has come to
heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those with skin diseases, and throw out demons (Matthew 10:8)
She knows that his priority is the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but she also knows that he is bigger than that priority. And she is quick-witted enough to turn his own metaphor – the metaphor of giving the children’s bread to the dogs – to turn his own metaphor back on him and she says, “You’re the Son of God. You can do this one thing for me.”
As a friend put it this week, She out-Jesused Jesus.
The Old Testament lectionary text for today comes from Isaiah 56:1; 6-8. It’s short so I’m just going to read it to you. But I want you to pay attention to what God says about people like the Canaanite woman, and about their place in God’s kingdom.
The Lord says:
Act justly and do what is righteous, because my salvation is coming soon, and my righteousness will be revealed.
The foreigners who have joined me, serving me and loving my name, becoming my servants, everyone who keeps the Sabbath without making it impure, and those who hold fast to my covenant: I will bring them to this holy mountain, and bring them joy in my house of prayer. I will accept their entirely burned offerings and sacrifices on my altar. My house will be known as a house of prayer for all peoples, says the Lord God, who gathers Israel’s outcasts. I will gather still others to those I have already gathered.
(Isaiah 56:1, 6-8)
Jesus’s priority is rightly the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but God has already welcomed the outsiders into the Kingdom. God has already welcomed the foreigners into the Kingdom. The Canaanite woman just wants Jesus to acknowledge what she already knows is true – that God’s kingdom is near to her, too.
When Jesus realizes what she has done – that she has called him to remember just how big and radical and miraculous and expansive and hospitable God is – things that he has always known but somehow slipped below his sightline for a moment–when he realizes what she has done he commends her faith. For just a second, it seems, she has a better grasp on the kingdom that he does.
And to Jesus’s credit, he concedes. For just a moment, his faith was just a little too small. Someone said this week that this story helps us to appreciate Jesus’s humanity just a little bit more. And when the Canaanite woman challenged his faith, he rose to the occasion.
I hear in this story a call for the church to be more like Jesus. Not by calling people names or pushing them aside when they ask for help. I hear in this story a call for the church to be more like Jesus by remembering who we are and who we are called to be, and then – like Jesus – rising to the occasion.
Rev. Benjamin Cremer wrote a great commentary on this text this week, and I’m going to paraphrase it a bit.
We are called to be a church that listens to voices we have historically ignored, or been taught to ignore. (have we been conditioned to believe that we don’t have to listen to some people’s voices, questions, and demands?) We are called to be a church that learns from people whose experiences are different from our own experiences. (Have we been taught that some people’s experiences are more valuable than others, that some people’s lived experiences somehow don’t count, or aren’t worthy of our attention?) We are called to be a church that understands that defending human dignity is not a distraction from the gospel but one of its most visible fruits.
That Jesus had to check his own assumptions and biases means that we – the body of Christ – we are going to have to do the same.
Where we have failed, we seek forgiveness, where we have not seen the people we were supposed to see, we ask for God to open our eyes and the eyes of our heart; where we have not paid attention to the voices who call out for justice, may we hear with God’s compassion.
May we, too, be women and men of great faith.