15:24
The way Jesus deals with this is quite amazing. Drawing out the disciples’s attitudes seems entirely reasonable, we can all sit there and think “yes, their attitudes needed drawing out and dealing with”, but the woman? She is putting her hope in Jesus, she has a demon-possessed daughter, why doesn’t Jesus just throw His arms around her and heal the daughter? Instead He says “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”! There is a strong implication here that Israel needed to hear. They were lost sheep. They considered themselves superior to Samaritans, and definitely superior to the Gentiles, but they needed to see themselves as the lost sheep that they truly were.
15:25-28
But the woman is not to be deterred. Jesus is drawing faith out of her, and faith isn’t always quiet and reserved. We must also note that the belief that as a Gentile she had no part in what the Jews had would be deeply rooted. So Jesus is dealing with deeper things than the immediate problem, serious though that was. And He may do the same in our lives. We may have a serious problem, and it seems to be the most important and critical thing in our lives, and God seems so slow in doing anything about it. What He may be doing is dealing with an even deeper problem, bringing about an even deeper healing.
So the woman asks Jesus for help, and gets what seems to be an amazingly cruel and heartless answer. Yet it draws out an incredible answer from the woman. “Even the dogs ...”, and “dogs” was a term the Jews sometimes used to refer to Gentiles. Jesus commends the woman on her faith, and her daughter is healed immediately.
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