Astronomers tell us that it’s possible to look back in time. All we need to do is look at the night sky. Because the universe is so vast, even with light traveling at its own speed, light from an object in a remote part of the universe will reach us much longer after it emanates from its source. For example, with the naked eye, we can see stars in the Big Dipper, and when we do so, most of us are looking at light from before we were born. Unaided by telescopes, we can even see 2.5 million years into the past if we look at the Andromeda Galaxy.[1]
But what astronomers haven’t been able to find is a way to see into the future. To go there, we would definitely need a time machine. Although we could imagine precognition as a way of seeing into the future, the fact of the matter is that the future is off-limits from a scientific perspective. But theologically speaking, seeing into the future sounds a lot to me like what it means to have faith.
And faith is what Jesus and his disciples see coming towards them from the region of Tyre and Sidon in Matthew’s Gospel. Significantly, the Canaanite woman is coming out of the region towards them. It’s not clear from the Greek text whether Jesus goes into that foreign country or not. But as the woman approaches them, crying for help, it’s as if Jesus and his disciples are seeing into the future.
And for us to see into the future, we need to put ourselves there with Jesus and his disciples as they move toward Tyre and Sidon, a region in the north of the Middle East around present-day Lebanon. It’s foreign territory, historically at enmity with the Jewish people. The people in Tyre and Sidon, represented by the Canaanite woman, aren’t Jewish. They’re Gentile pagans. And in terms of God’s mission at this point in the Gospels, Gentiles aren’t even in the picture. After all, God started his mission with the people of Israel, God’s chosen people.
This might begin to explain why, when the Canaanite woman approaches Jesus to ask for healing for her daughter, he ignores her. When his disciples ask him to send her away because she’s annoying them, Jesus remarks bluntly—if not, rudely—that he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. At this point in the story, Jesus is sent to the Jews, not the Gentiles. And when the woman persists in her plea for help, Jesus’s words are even more offensive to our ears. The Canaanite woman and her people are likened to dogs, who aren’t even entitled to the crumbs from the table.
This is perhaps one of the most perplexing and troubling episodes in Scripture because it doesn’t seem to cast Jesus in a favorable light. But it also doesn’t seem honest to soften his words. And so, we’re left with Jesus showing a side we don’t like and wondering how to reconcile this with the compassionate Jesus that we know and love.
And yet I wonder if attempts to understand Jesus’s behavior miss the point of the story, too, rather like trying to ascertain whether Jesus had a form of ESP. It seems to me that we’re intended to put ourselves into the story the Gospel gives us, and what’s happening is that Jesus and his disciples—and we, too—are seeing into the future.
Our attempts to explain away Jesus’s seeming rudeness are colored by the fact that we have the benefit of hindsight. We know the end of the story. We know how it all ends. We know that there will be an empty tomb on the third day. We know that Jesus will appear after he has been raised from the dead. We know the early Church will be empowered by the Holy Spirit to reach the ends of the earth, moving from out of the Jewish people to include all. We know that death is not the final word for us. We know that sin should not have to have supreme authority in our lives, because we have the 20/20 vision of Gospel hope.
But when Jesus and his disciples are moving towards Tyre and Sidon and the Canaanite woman comes out of that region pleading for her daughter’s healing, for the sake of the story, we don’t really know the end. We’re with Jesus and his disciples as they witness how everything plays out in human time. And we see the future only because of the Canaanite woman’s profound faith.
Extraordinary faith is what Jesus recognizes when he commends the woman. The Church father St. John Chrysostom suggests that Jesus’s rebukes of the woman were intended to allow her to exhibit her profound humility and faith in the face of offense.[2] I think there’s something to this rather strange argument, and our unwillingness to accept that possibility might be further evidence that we could learn a thing or two from the Canaanite woman’s faith.
Her faith is like divine light breaking into the rigid chronology of our human time. God’s mission that begins with the Jewish people moves into all corners of the earth to touch and bless them. The Gospel is for all people, and nothing we do can restrict its encompassing reach. The fulfillment of God’s mission happens in God’s time, no matter how impatient we may be and how much we may take umbrage at the way in which God accomplishes it.
When we confront this challenging story, we probably find ourselves feeling offended for the sake of the Canaanite woman. But her faith moves our vision from beyond our restrictive interpretations. She moves us beyond trying to make sense of how God works in human time when God is beyond human knowing. Here’s what the woman helps us see.
She helps us see that true faith doesn’t take offense at the order of events in human time. If God reaches the Jewish people first, it doesn’t mean God won’t ever reach the Gentiles. If your neighbor’s illness is cured while you’re still suffering, it doesn’t mean that God won’t heal you, too. If some people are eating well and others are starving, it doesn’t mean that God is the cause of food deserts. The Canaanite woman knows that your place in line is not proof that God loves you more than others. She simply knows deep down in her heart that God always provides for everyone.
This woman has enough humility not to expect to be in the front of the line. God doesn’t dole out loaves of bread to some and crumbs to others. God doesn’t keep score and then show favor based on merit points we’ve accrued. God doesn’t operate within human boundaries or according to any category into which we want to assign our neighbors. God is simply love, and love knows no order of preference or specific favor or chronological time. Love can only be what it is, and when we see what it really is, it’s like seeing beyond the distorted present into the redeemed future.
Which is precisely what the Gospel story is all about. Its end is really no end at all. It’s more of a beginning. Jesus’s resurrection allows us to see into the future, where what we think are crumbs are loaves of bread to feed the whole world. In God’s kingdom, order makes no difference, because the first are last and the last are first. Scarcity is really abundance and abundance is scarcity. Knowing is not really knowing, and knowing everything is knowing nothing at all. The lost are never lost, and those who never think they are lost really need to be found. Seeing into the future may currently be a scientific impossibility, but it’s a religious reality. Faith like that of the Canaanite woman is available to all who are willing to see into the future that God has prepared for us in Christ.
In that future, what is old is made new and what is bound is released into freedom. Death is not an end but a beginning to live fully within the triune life of God. The future, in short, is heaven, where there’s no special favor, no competition, no impatience, no anxiety, no envy, no jealousy. What is available is available to everyone. And if we allow ourselves to look into the redeemed future with the eyes of faith, the only thing we will see is pure love.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
August 20, 2023
[1] “Why Looking At The Stars Is A Look Back In Time,” Forbes (7 February 2018), https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2018/02/07/why-looking-at-the-stars-is-a-look-back-in-time/?sh=3e26ba7014ec
[2] John Chrysostom, Homily 52 on Matthew, https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/200152.htm