Speaker 1: The Jesus who healed everyone told this mother no, not once,
Speaker 1: three times in a row, and the third was so
Speaker 1: harsh that two thousand years of readers have been left
Speaker 1: frozen in front of those words. But this woman didn't leave,
Speaker 1: She didn't weep in silence, she didn't convince herself that
Speaker 1: she deserved nothing to every know she had an answer,
Speaker 1: And on the third she said something so brilliant that
Speaker 1: it stopped the very Son of God in his tracks.
Speaker 1: And with that single sentence, she opened the door of
Speaker 1: salvation to the whole world standing outside. You included, Stay
Speaker 1: because what you're about to understand is going to change
Speaker 1: forever what you believe on those days when you pray
Speaker 1: and pray and Heaven stays silent. Before we begin, one
Speaker 1: quick thing. If you're already part of this channel's family,
Speaker 1: leave me alike down below. That helps this grow and
Speaker 1: reach more homes that need it. And if you just
Speaker 1: got here to day, relax. You don't have to give
Speaker 1: me anything yet. Stay until the end, and if this
Speaker 1: truly touches you, then you can leave it there. With
Speaker 1: that done, let's go back to that mother and to
Speaker 1: the first time Heaven told her no. There's an experience
Speaker 1: that almost everyone who prays knows, and that almost no
Speaker 1: one talks about out loud. It's the experience of silence.
Speaker 1: You ask for something with everything you have, not out
Speaker 1: of a whim, not out of greed, but because someone
Speaker 1: you love is suffering, or because something is falling apart
Speaker 1: and you don't know how to hold it together, and
Speaker 1: you pray, and you pray again, and up above nothing happens,
Speaker 1: no voice, no sign, no door that opens, just the
Speaker 1: ceiling of your room and the sound of your own breathing.
Speaker 1: And then comes the most poisonous thought of all, the
Speaker 1: thought that maybe the silence is an answer, that maybe
Speaker 1: you're not one of the people who receive that. Maybe
Speaker 1: there's a list and your name isn't on it. If
Speaker 1: you've ever stood in that place, this story is for you,
Speaker 1: because it's about exactly that, about a mother who asked
Speaker 1: God for the only thing in the world that mattered
Speaker 1: to her and received first the most complete silence in
Speaker 1: the entire New Testament, and about what she did with it.
Speaker 1: To understand what happened, you have to understand where it happened,
Speaker 1: and that's the first detail most people overlook. Jesus came
Speaker 1: worn out. The ministry had been relentless, one crowd after another,
Speaker 1: one argument after another. And then he did something that
Speaker 1: for a Jewish teacher in the first century was almost unthinkable.
Speaker 1: He left Israel. He crossed to the northwest, toward the coast,
Speaker 1: toward the region of two cities called Tire and Sidon.
Speaker 1: Matthew tells it in chapter fifteen, and Mark confirms it
Speaker 1: in his In chapter seven. Mark adds something Matthew doesn't say,
Speaker 1: and it changes everything. He says, Jesus entered a house
Speaker 1: and didn't want anyone to know he was there. Read
Speaker 1: it again, The Son of God looking for a wall,
Speaker 1: a door, a corner where no one would find him.
Speaker 1: He wasn't going to heal, he wasn't going to preach.
Speaker 1: He was going to disappear for a moment. Now look
Speaker 1: at the place he goes to disappear in Tire and
Speaker 1: Sidon were not a neutral destination in the Hebrew scriptures.
Speaker 1: They were the most loaded place that existed. They were
Speaker 1: Phoenician land, pagan land, land of the worshippers of Baal,
Speaker 1: and for those who knew their history, that word Canaanite
Speaker 1: carried an almost unbearable weight. The Hebrew word is cana An, Canaan,
Speaker 1: and in all of Israel's memory, the Canaanites were the enemy.
Speaker 1: They were the people of idols, the people of sacrifices,
Speaker 1: the people Israel was supposed to have driven out of
Speaker 1: the Promised Land. From that very coast, centuries earlier had
Speaker 1: come a princess who nearly destroyed the faith of Israel
Speaker 1: from the throne. Her name was Jezebel. From there came
Speaker 1: the cult that confronted the prophet Elijah on Mount Carmel.
Speaker 1: The prophets of Israel had pronounced the harshest oracles against
Speaker 1: those two cities. Isiah and Ezekiel spoke of the pride
Speaker 1: of Tire, of its wealth, of its commerce that filled
Speaker 1: the sea with ships, and of the judgment that would
Speaker 1: fall upon it. In the memory of a devout Jew,
Speaker 1: Tire and Sidon were not simply a place on the map.
Speaker 1: They were a symbol, the symbol of everything that had
Speaker 1: risen up against the True God, the opulence, the idols,
Speaker 1: the foreign gods that demanded the blood of children. That's
Speaker 1: why for a first century rabbi to set foot in
Speaker 1: that land of his own free will was not merely strange.
Speaker 1: It was almost a walking contradiction. It was walking with
Speaker 1: your own body toward the territory your entire people had
Speaker 1: learned to see as the exact opposite of the sacred.
Speaker 1: And remember what Jesus had just come from doing. He
Speaker 1: had come from teaching about the clean and the unclean,
Speaker 1: from telling the Pharisees that it is not what goes
Speaker 1: into the mouth that defiles a person. And the moment
Speaker 1: he finishes tearing down that boundary with his words, he
Speaker 1: gets up and walks straight toward the most unclean place
Speaker 1: in all of known geography. That's the picture, and it
Speaker 1: isn't a slip in the story. It's the point, and
Speaker 1: it's exactly there on that ground, right after arguing with
Speaker 1: the Pharisees about who is clean and who is unclean,
Speaker 1: that Jesus decides to enter. It's no accident, it's deliberate.
Speaker 1: The one who just tore down the borders of clean
Speaker 1: and unclean walks with his own body toward the wrong
Speaker 1: side of the border, and someone was waiting for him.
Speaker 1: Mark says it with a sentence that looks like a
Speaker 1: travel detail, And isn't he says, Jesus could not remain hidden.
Speaker 1: The news of that teacher from Galilee who healed the
Speaker 1: sick and cast out demons, had already crossed the borders.
Speaker 1: It was already passing from mouth to mouth, even in
Speaker 1: pagan land, even among people who had no temple, no covenant,
Speaker 1: no right of any kind. One of those people was
Speaker 1: a mother, and that mother had a daughter. Imagine, and
Speaker 1: again I say imagine, because the text only tells us
Speaker 1: the girl was tormented by a demon, and the rest
Speaker 1: we reconstruct carefully. Imagine the nights in that house, a
Speaker 1: girl who screams and won't be calmed, who hurts herself,
Speaker 1: who suddenly doesn't recognize her own mother, who goes from
Speaker 1: stillness to fury without any warning. Imagine that woman awake
Speaker 1: night after night, try eyeing everything, the remedies of the coast,
Speaker 1: the prayers to her own gods, the pagan priests who
Speaker 1: charged and were of no use at all. Imagine the
Speaker 1: particular exhaustion that builds up when you love someone who
Speaker 1: suffers in front of you and you can do absolutely nothing.
Speaker 1: Until one day, in the middle of that bottomless weariness,
Speaker 1: a rumor reaches her that there's a man that he
Speaker 1: crossed the border that he's near by, and that wherever
Speaker 1: he passes, demons come out. It's all she has a rumor,
Speaker 1: and it's enough. We don't know her name. The Bible
Speaker 1: never tells us, and I think that too, is part
Speaker 1: of the message. Matthew calls her, quite intentionally, the Canaanite woman.
Speaker 1: Mark is even more specific. He says she was Greek
Speaker 1: and syrah Phoenician by birth. That is, in Greek, helenis
Speaker 1: a gentile and syrah Phoenician from the Phoenicia that belonged
Speaker 1: to Syria. Each word is one more layer of distance.
Speaker 1: Mark and Matthew want you to feel, one by one,
Speaker 1: every reason why this woman had no right to come near.
Speaker 1: No correct nation, no correct religion, no covenant, no priest,
Speaker 1: a woman alone in a culture that gave her no voice,
Speaker 1: pleading for a daughter, that a demon was tormenting, And
Speaker 1: even so she came, and here the first no begins.
Speaker 1: Matthew says she arrived crying out. And the word he
Speaker 1: uses is not gentle in Greek, its krazo, which means
Speaker 1: to cry out with force, loudly, with desperate urgency. It's
Speaker 1: the same word the Gospels use to describe the demon
Speaker 1: possessed the blind at the side of the road, people
Speaker 1: at the very limit of their desperation. It's not the
Speaker 1: polite voice of someone asking for an appointment. It's a
Speaker 1: shout in the middle of the street, repeated that doesn't
Speaker 1: stop and listen to what she shouts, Lord, son of David,
Speaker 1: have mercy on me. My daughter is grievously tormented by
Speaker 1: a demon. Stop on every word of that, because it's astonishing.
Speaker 1: She calls him lord, and she calls him son of David.
Speaker 1: That's no ordinary title. Son of David is a messianic title,
Speaker 1: deeply Jewish, the name of the promised king who would
Speaker 1: come to save Israel. It's the most precise theological vocabulary
Speaker 1: that existed. It is, in fact, the very language Jesus's
Speaker 1: own disciples were still processing, still debating in low voices
Speaker 1: among themselves. And it's being used by a pagan woman
Speaker 1: on pagan soil with a precision her own people were
Speaker 1: only beginning to accept. That tells you something. This mother
Speaker 1: didn't arrive by chance. She investigated, She listened to the stories,
Speaker 1: She found out who this man really was, and she
Speaker 1: arrived prepared with the right name on her lips, with
Speaker 1: the perfect confession. She did everything right, and Jesus's answer
Speaker 1: was silence. Matthew records it with a bluntness that hurts.
Speaker 1: He says simply that he answered her, not a word,
Speaker 1: not one. He doesn't say he hesitated, He doesn't say
Speaker 1: he looked at her. He doesn't say he felt compassion
Speaker 1: and held it back. He says there was no answer. Nothing.
Speaker 1: Imagine the scene for a moment. And I say imagine,
Speaker 1: because the Bible gives us the facts, but the experience
Speaker 1: we have to reconstruct. Imagine the midday heat on that coast,
Speaker 1: the dust of the road, the throat of that woman
Speaker 1: already roar from so much shouting. Imagine her voice rising
Speaker 1: and rising, And on the other side, from the side
Speaker 1: of the only man who could save her daughter, nothing,
Speaker 1: a wall of silence, as if she didn't exist, as
Speaker 1: if her pain didn't count. Anyone who has ever truly
Speaker 1: prayed knows what that feels like. And here's the question
Speaker 1: I want you to carry through the rest of this story.
Speaker 1: Why Why does the Jesus who on every other page
Speaker 1: runs toward the one who suffers here stay mute? Why
Speaker 1: does the one who touched the leper, who stopped for
Speaker 1: a woman who barely brushed his cloak. Here not open
Speaker 1: his mouth. Hold on to that question. We're going to
Speaker 1: come back to it. And the answer is not what
Speaker 1: you think, because it turns out this mother was not
Speaker 1: the first to cry out and find heaven silent. There's
Speaker 1: a man in the Psalms who cried out the same thing.
Speaker 1: In Psalm twenty two, the Psalmist says, my God, I
Speaker 1: cry out by day and you do not answer, and
Speaker 1: by night and I find no rest. It's the voice
Speaker 1: of some one who prays and prays and feels there's
Speaker 1: no one above listening. And the extraordinary thing is whose
Speaker 1: words these would become centuries later, These are the first
Speaker 1: words Jesus himself would cry out from the cross. In
Speaker 1: other words, the silence of heaven is not a sign
Speaker 1: of abandonment. Even the sun felt it. But that mother
Speaker 1: on that road doesn't yet know it. She only knows
Speaker 1: that she asked and that there was no answer. And
Speaker 1: there's something almost cruel in that kind of waiting, something
Speaker 1: only someone who has lived it truly understands. When you
Speaker 1: ask someone for something and they tell you no, at
Speaker 1: least you have an answer. It hurts, but you know
Speaker 1: where you stand, you know your footing. The lack of
Speaker 1: an answer is different. It leaves you with no ground
Speaker 1: beneath your feet. You don't know if he didn't hear you,
Speaker 1: if you don't matter to him, if you're asking wrong,
Speaker 1: or if you're simply not important enough to deserve a
Speaker 1: single word. And your mind starts to fill that emptiness,
Speaker 1: and it almost always fills it with the worst thing
Speaker 1: you think about yourself. This mother had to stand inside
Speaker 1: that emptiness. She did everything right. She shouted the correct name,
Speaker 1: she offered the correct confession, and from the other side
Speaker 1: came neither a yes nor a no, just the hot
Speaker 1: midday air. And even so, look carefully at what she
Speaker 1: did not do. She did not interpret the absence of
Speaker 1: an answer as a final verdict. She did not decide
Speaker 1: on her own that the silence meant she was ruled out.
Speaker 1: She kept treating that silent door not as a door
Speaker 1: locked forever, but as a door that simply hadn't opened yet.
Speaker 1: And that difference, that small difference in how you read
Speaker 1: what is not said, ends up being all the difference
Speaker 1: in the world. And what does she do with the silence?
Speaker 1: She doesn't leave. She keeps going and it's the disciples
Speaker 1: who can't take it because that silence is uncomfortable. Notice
Speaker 1: this detail, because it's very human. It wasn't Jesus who
Speaker 1: complained about her. It was the men who were with him.
Speaker 1: They came up to him and said, send her away,
Speaker 1: for she keeps crying out after us. Translate it to today.
Speaker 1: Get her out of here. She's making noise, she's bothering us,
Speaker 1: she's following us, and she won't be quiet. Free us
Speaker 1: from her. These are not evil men. They're tired, just
Speaker 1: like their master. They were looking for rest and instead
Speaker 1: they have a foreign woman shouting behind them in the
Speaker 1: middle of the street. And their first instinct, the instinct
Speaker 1: of those who are inside, is to protect the door,
Speaker 1: to decide who gets in and who doesn't. And this
Speaker 1: one clearly has to be sent away. And then comes
Speaker 1: the second no. And this one is worse than the
Speaker 1: lack of an answer, because it's no longer the absence
Speaker 1: of words. It's words. Jesus says, I was sent only
Speaker 1: to the lost sheep of the House of Israel. I
Speaker 1: want you to hold onto that line carefully, because we're
Speaker 1: going to come back to it. And when we do,
Speaker 1: it's going to be one of the most important sentences
Speaker 1: in the whole story. But right now, put yourself for
Speaker 1: a second in that mother's shoes and feel what that
Speaker 1: sentence means for her. It's not a no to her request.
Speaker 1: It's a no to her to what she is, to
Speaker 1: her bloodline. It's as if they told her the bread
Speaker 1: I bring is not for your kind. There's a table,
Speaker 1: and you're not invited to it. You're on the wrong
Speaker 1: side of the border. And that border wasn't put there
Speaker 1: by me, it was put there by Heaven. How many
Speaker 1: times has that happened to you? Not that they tell
Speaker 1: you no to something, but that they make you feel
Speaker 1: that you are the problem, that you don't qualify. That
Speaker 1: grace is real, yes, but for others that the table exists,
Speaker 1: but not for someone with your history, with your mistakes,
Speaker 1: with your past. Any reasonable person would have left at
Speaker 1: that point. They would have lowered their head, felt the
Speaker 1: shame rise up their face, and turned around. They told
Speaker 1: you that you don't belong end of conversation. But this
Speaker 1: woman does something different, And this is where the story
Speaker 1: stops being about a rejected person and starts being about
Speaker 1: the most courageous prayer the scriptures record. Instead of walking away,
Speaker 1: she comes closer. Instead of retreating from the know she
Speaker 1: advances toward it. Matthew says, she came and bowed down,
Speaker 1: knelt directly in front of Jesus, and she reduced everything,
Speaker 1: absolutely everything, to two words, Lord help me. That is
Speaker 1: probably the most stripped down prayer in the entire New Testament.
Speaker 1: There's no theology in it, no credentials, no argument, no resume,
Speaker 1: no merit. She already tried the perfect title son of David,
Speaker 1: and it didn't work. So she throws everything overboard and
Speaker 1: keeps the only thing she has left, a mother on
Speaker 1: her knees in the dust, saying help me, and here
Speaker 1: I stop because I want you to see something in
Speaker 1: that gesture. There are moments in life, life when the
Speaker 1: elaborate prayers no longer come out, moments when you don't
Speaker 1: have the strength to quote verses or to build pretty sentences.
Speaker 1: The only thing that comes out is that help me.
Speaker 1: And the good news this story is giving you, even
Speaker 1: though it doesn't look like it yet, is that this
Speaker 1: two word prayer spoken from the ground, is worth more
Speaker 1: than all the religious speeches in the world. But she
Speaker 1: doesn't know it yet because What comes now is the
Speaker 1: third no, and it's the harshest of all. Stay because
Speaker 1: what she answers to this is the most brilliant turn
Speaker 1: in the entire Gospel. And if you still haven't subscribed
Speaker 1: to the channel, this is the exact moment to do it,
Speaker 1: because what follows is the most extraordinary master class in
Speaker 1: faith you will ever hear. Here is the sentence in
Speaker 1: front of which two thousand years of readers have been
Speaker 1: left speechless. Jesus looks at her and says, it is
Speaker 1: not right to take the children's breath and throw it
Speaker 1: to the little dogs. Read it again. The Son of
Speaker 1: God has just compared this desperate mother to a dog.
Speaker 1: Stay a second in that blow before I explain it
Speaker 1: to you, because she received it without explanation. In that instant,
Speaker 1: she had no one beside her to translate the Greek
Speaker 1: or soften the sentence. She had a holy man in
Speaker 1: front of a crowd using the word dog in the
Speaker 1: same sentence as the image that described her. For a
Speaker 1: mother who had already swallowed the silence, and who had
Speaker 1: already swallowed the eye was sent only to the sheep
Speaker 1: of Israel. This was the third wave, and the highest one.
Speaker 1: It was the exact moment when most of us would
Speaker 1: have exploded or collapsed on the ground, or let loose
Speaker 1: a bitter sentence before turning around to never come back.
Speaker 1: What she did instead is going to challenge everything you
Speaker 1: believe about how you respond to a hue umiliation. And
Speaker 1: here is the first thing you need to understand. The
Speaker 1: thing the vast majority of people who read this in
Speaker 1: English completely miss because the Greek word Jesus uses is
Speaker 1: not the word for a wild dog. In the first century,
Speaker 1: there were two completely different words for dog. The first
Speaker 1: was chion, and chion referred to the stray dogs scavengers
Speaker 1: that roamed the streets of the ancient cities, eating garbage,
Speaker 1: dangerous animals, dirty carriers of disease. Nobody wanted them near.
Speaker 1: And when some Jewish teachers use the word kion to
Speaker 1: speak of the gentiles, it was the cruelest insult the
Speaker 1: language allowed. It was to dehumanize the other completely. Jesus
Speaker 1: does not use that word. The word he uses is kinarian,
Speaker 1: and kinarian is a diminutive in Greek, just as in English,
Speaker 1: diminutives usually carry tenderness, closeness, affection. Kinarian does not mean
Speaker 1: stray dog. It means little dog puppy, the pup of
Speaker 1: the house, the one that lives inside, under the family's care,
Speaker 1: the one that sleeps beside the children and eats under
Speaker 1: the table. To feel the weight of that, you have
Speaker 1: to imagine what a house of that time was really like.
Speaker 1: There were no high chairs around a formal table like ours.
Speaker 1: The family ate reclining or sitting on low benches and mats.
Speaker 1: The dishes within reach, the floor always close, and in
Speaker 1: many homes on that coast, especially in the Greek world,
Speaker 1: that surrounded this woman, there were small dogs that weren't
Speaker 1: from the street. They were of the house. They walked
Speaker 1: among the children's feet, waited patiently beside the food, received
Speaker 1: what fell. No one drove them off with stones. They
Speaker 1: were part of the landscape of the home. When Jesus
Speaker 1: chooses that word Canarian, he is painting exactly that picture,
Speaker 1: Not the mangy animal that flees through the alley, but
Speaker 1: the puppy resting under the family table, so hidden beneath
Speaker 1: what sounds like a door slamming, there's a tender image
Speaker 1: waiting for someone to discover it, an image of belonging,
Speaker 1: not of contempt and this woman who knew that scene
Speaker 1: as well as anyone, because she came from exactly that culture,
Speaker 1: saw it instantly. And this is not an unimportant grammatical detail.
Speaker 1: It's the key that unlocks the whole conversation, because look
Speaker 1: at what Jesus has just done, almost without it being noticed.
Speaker 1: He's not comparing her to a dangerous, sick animal of
Speaker 1: the street. He's placing her inside the house, under the table, yes,
Speaker 1: not yet eating from the plate, yes, but inside, in
Speaker 1: the home, present, at the family meal. There's an invitation
Speaker 1: hidden inside the numberday. There's a door left Ajar inside
Speaker 1: what sounds like a slamming door. The question is whether
Speaker 1: she's going to see it. And here, this nameless mother
Speaker 1: with no education, with no tool but the desperation of
Speaker 1: her heart, does something so sharp that the most brilliant
Speaker 1: minds of every century since have stopped to admire it.
Speaker 1: She doesn't flinch, she doesn't fall down crying, she doesn't
Speaker 1: turn around humiliated. She takes the exact image Jesus put
Speaker 1: in front of her, that image of the house, the table,
Speaker 1: the children, and the little dogs, and she uses it.
Speaker 1: She turns it, she converts it into her own weapon.
Speaker 1: And she answers yes, Lord, yet even the little dogs
Speaker 1: eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table. I
Speaker 1: want to show you slowly the genius of what just happened,
Speaker 1: because it's one of the great moments in all of
Speaker 1: ancient literature, and almost no one stops to see it
Speaker 1: up close. She begins by saying yes in Greek nigh.
Speaker 1: She doesn't argue with the metaphor. She doesn't claim rights,
Speaker 1: she doesn't demand a place at the table. She doesn't
Speaker 1: tell Jesus he's wrong, or that he's unfair, or that
Speaker 1: she deserves more. She accepts each and every one of
Speaker 1: the terms. Yes, there's a table, Yes, the children eat first, Yes,
Speaker 1: I am the little dog. Agreed, All conceded, And then
Speaker 1: she finds the one thing the metaphor hadn't taken into account.
Speaker 1: If the little dogs are under the table, they're not
Speaker 1: outside the house. They're inside, and in any house in
Speaker 1: the world, while the children eat, crumbs fall not because
Speaker 1: someone hands them out on purpose, not because anything has
Speaker 1: to be taken from the children, but because that's how
Speaker 1: meals work. There's abundance. There are pieces that fall, and
Speaker 1: those pieces naturally reach the floor where the little dogs
Speaker 1: are and notice the word she chooses for crumbs, because
Speaker 1: here is the finest detail of the whole exchange, the
Speaker 1: one almost no one notices. In Greek, it's psycheon, and
Speaker 1: psycheon is also a diminutive. It's the tiny crumb, the
Speaker 1: smallest piece that exists, what's left of what's left over.
Speaker 1: Do you realize what she did? Jesus spoke to her
Speaker 1: with a diminutive Canarian the little dog, and she answers
Speaker 1: him with another diminutive sacheon the tiny crumb. She follows
Speaker 1: his lead on his own ground. She tells him in essence,
Speaker 1: you're right, I'm only the little dog of the house. Well,
Speaker 1: then give me only the tiny crumb. I'm not asking
Speaker 1: you for the children's bread. I'm not asking you to
Speaker 1: leave the table. I'm not asking you to interrupt your
Speaker 1: mission with Israel for even a moment. I'm only asking
Speaker 1: for what falls on its own while you're seated feeding
Speaker 1: your own. She has taken the very argument that seemed
Speaker 1: to leave her outside and turned it into the perfect
Speaker 1: reason why she should be included. She doesn't ask Jesus
Speaker 1: to deprive Israel of anything. She asks for what overflows
Speaker 1: from the abundance. She tells him, your table is so
Speaker 1: rich that even what falls to the floor is enough
Speaker 1: to save my daughter. It's brilliant, it's humble and fierce
Speaker 1: at the same time, its faith and intelligence braided into
Speaker 1: a single sentence, and it is, without question, one of
Speaker 1: the most perfect answers any human being ever gave to God.
Speaker 1: And now comes the moment that changes everything. Because Jesus
Speaker 1: doesn't try to recover ground, he doesn't qualify it, he
Speaker 1: doesn't correct it. He concedes completely. He looks at her
Speaker 1: and says, O, woman, great is your faith? Let it
Speaker 1: be done for you as you wish, and her daughter
Speaker 1: was healed from that hour. Stop here, because there are
Speaker 1: three things in this single line, and each one deserves
Speaker 1: for you to see it. The first, that phrase, great
Speaker 1: is your faith is one of the rarest compliments in
Speaker 1: the entire Gospel of Matthew. Jesus doesn't hand it out
Speaker 1: out lightly. If you go through the whole Gospel of
Speaker 1: Matthew from beginning to end, that exact expression in Greek
Speaker 1: megalepistis great faith appears only twice, only twice in the
Speaker 1: whole book. One is here with this Canaanite mother, and
Speaker 1: the other the other is in chapter eight when a
Speaker 1: Roman centurion, another foreigner, another gentile with no covenant and
Speaker 1: no right of any kind, comes to Jesus and tells
Speaker 1: him that he's not worthy for him to enter his house,
Speaker 1: that it's enough for him to say the word. And
Speaker 1: the Master is amazed and says that he has not
Speaker 1: found such great faith, not even in Israel, do you
Speaker 1: see it. The only two people to whom Jesus acknowledges
Speaker 1: a great faith in the entire Gospel of Matthew are
Speaker 1: not Jews. They're not the experts in the law. They're
Speaker 1: not the ones who have the temple, nor the covenant,
Speaker 1: nor the credentials. They are two outsiders, a Roman soldier
Speaker 1: and a Pagan mother. Matthew is build bilding something with
Speaker 1: that quietly beneath the story, and this nameless woman is
Speaker 1: one of the two pillars that hold it up. The
Speaker 1: second thing, look at how Jesus addresses her. He calls
Speaker 1: her woman, and in Greek in his mouth, that word
Speaker 1: is not cold or contemptuous. It's the same respectful term
Speaker 1: he uses to address his own mother from the cross.
Speaker 1: It's not the tone of someone who really wanted to
Speaker 1: get rid of her it's warm. Hold on to that,
Speaker 1: because when we come back to the great question of
Speaker 1: this story, that small detail is going to matter. And
Speaker 1: the third look at when the miracle happens from that
Speaker 1: hour in Greek Apotes, horacecans, not gradually, not over time,
Speaker 1: not the next day, in the exact instant that her
Speaker 1: argument was honored. And here is the detail that breaks
Speaker 1: the heart, the one almost no commentary stops on. Her
Speaker 1: daughter wasn't there. Think about it. This mother isn't standing
Speaker 1: in front of Jesus holding her sick child. She has
Speaker 1: no want to show. She can't present the suffering as evidence.
Speaker 1: She's fighting for someone who isn't in the room, for
Speaker 1: someone who doesn't even know this battle is being waged.
Speaker 1: She's asking for a miracle at a distance, for a
Speaker 1: person she can't see, based on nothing more than her
Speaker 1: own word and her own faith. And Mark gives us
Speaker 1: the ending that Matthew doesn't tell in his chapter seven.
Speaker 1: He says, Jesus told her for this saying, go your way.
Speaker 1: The demon has gone out of your daughter for this
Speaker 1: saying notice, not for your suffering, not for your tears,
Speaker 1: for this saying, for this argument, for this faith. Go
Speaker 1: And then Imagine the journey home. Imagine that mother walking
Speaker 1: the road back to her house, still with the dust
Speaker 1: of the road on her feet, still without having seen anything,
Speaker 1: with her own eyes, holding on only to a promise.
Speaker 1: Imagine the door of her house opening, and inside her
Speaker 1: daughter lying down, quiet, at peace, the torment gone. That
Speaker 1: is exactly what Mark says. She found the child lying
Speaker 1: on the bed and the demon gone. Two people united
Speaker 1: by love, one fighting in the only place where she
Speaker 1: could fight, the other receiving without knowing it, what was
Speaker 1: being one for her, and between the road and the house,
Speaker 1: across all the distance that separated them, in the same instant,
Speaker 1: the deliverance. If you've ever prayed for someone who doesn't
Speaker 1: even know you're doing it, for a child, for a parent,
Speaker 1: for someone who has already stopped believing, this story is
Speaker 1: telling you something. It's telling you that that prayer made
Speaker 1: from far away for someone who can't ask for themselves, arrives.
Speaker 1: It crosses the distance that is, in its purest form, intercession,
Speaker 1: one person pushing toward the mercy of God on behalf
Speaker 1: of another who can't push alone. Now I have to
Speaker 1: be honest with you, because this channel is not going
Speaker 1: to hide the hard questions from you. There's a question
Speaker 1: that has divided scholars and believers for centuries in front
Speaker 1: of this story, and it's this was Jesus testing her.
Speaker 1: That is, was this whole exchange, the silence, the second no,
Speaker 1: the little dogs, a deliberate test, a kind of exam
Speaker 1: to make visible of faith he already knew she had,
Speaker 1: or was something stranger going on, something more uncomfortable. There
Speaker 1: are those who say, yes, that it was all a test,
Speaker 1: and that the real audience was the disciples. Remember that
Speaker 1: they wanted her sent away. They saw a foreign woman, loud,
Speaker 1: with no religious credentials, and their first impulse was to
Speaker 1: get her out of the way. According to this reading,
Speaker 1: Jesus let the scene unfold, not so much for her,
Speaker 1: but to show his own followers what they were about
Speaker 1: to miss, so they would see that the greatest faith
Speaker 1: of the day was in the person they wanted to
Speaker 1: send away. And in favor of this is precisely that
Speaker 1: detail we already talked about. The warm tone with which
Speaker 1: he calls her woman, the same one he would use
Speaker 1: with his mother. That's not the tone of someone who
Speaker 1: really rejects her. And there are those who read something
Speaker 1: deeper and more mysterious. This story touches the heart of
Speaker 1: one of the great mysteries of the faith, that he
Speaker 1: was fully God and at the same time fully human.
Speaker 1: Luke in his chapter two says that Jesus grew in
Speaker 1: wisdom and in stature grew and this encounter in that
Speaker 1: reading would be one of those moments when God's eternal
Speaker 1: plan and the real humanity of the Nazarene touch and
Speaker 1: a Canaanite mother with the force of her faith becomes
Speaker 1: not a student in a lesson but a participant in
Speaker 1: something that was being revealed. I'm not going to give
Speaker 1: you closed answer, because the Bible doesn't give one, and
Speaker 1: I'm not going to invent what the text doesn't say.
Speaker 1: Both readings have serious and devout people behind them. But
Speaker 1: I want you to see one thing, and this one
Speaker 1: the text does say with complete clarity. Whatever the answer
Speaker 1: is to why Jesus acted this way, what the woman
Speaker 1: did doesn't change. In the face of the silence, in
Speaker 1: the face of the border, in the face of the
Speaker 1: harshest word, she kept going. And the question that really
Speaker 1: matters is not what Jesus was thinking. It's what you
Speaker 1: are going to do. The next time, Heaven stays silent
Speaker 1: because now comes the part almost no one sees when
Speaker 1: they read this story in isolation, and it's that this
Speaker 1: story is not isolated. Matthew placed it in a very
Speaker 1: specific spot in his gospel, and he did it on purpose.
Speaker 1: Look at the sequence he arranges, and you're going to
Speaker 1: see the plan. Shortly before this encounter, in chapter fourteen,
Speaker 1: Jesus does something enormous. He feeds a crowd of five
Speaker 1: thousand people with five loaves and two fish, where in
Speaker 1: Jewish territory, among his own inside the Covenant. After that
Speaker 1: comes the argument about the clean and the unclean. After that,
Speaker 1: the Master crosses the border into pagan land. After that,
Speaker 1: this encounter with the Canaanite mother, where a gentile receives
Speaker 1: the crumbs of that bread, and what happens immediately afterward,
Speaker 1: Matthew tells it. At the end of the same chapter fifteen,
Speaker 1: the Messiah returns near the Sea of Galilee, but on
Speaker 1: the side of the nations, goes up a mountain, and
Speaker 1: great crowds come to him with the lame, the blind,
Speaker 1: the mute, and the sick, and he heals them all
Speaker 1: and the people Matthew says, glorified the God of Israel.
Speaker 1: Stop on that phrase, they glory glorified the God of Israel.
Speaker 1: If that crowd were Jewish, it would make no sense
Speaker 1: to say it that way, as if it were a discovery.
Speaker 1: You don't glorify the God of Israel as something new
Speaker 1: if he's already been your guard your whole life. That's
Speaker 1: the language of people who are finding something for the
Speaker 1: first time. And then Jesus feeds them too, them the
Speaker 1: outsiders with seven loaves and a few fish, four thousand people.
Speaker 1: Do you see it the same gesture? First the bread
Speaker 1: for Israel, then the bread for the nations. First the
Speaker 1: children at the table, then the whole house. And between
Speaker 1: those two meals, at the exact center stands this mother.
Speaker 1: Her argument about the crumbs didn't just win the healing
Speaker 1: of her daughter, it opened the door. She was the
Speaker 1: first of a multitude. Someone had to demonstrate with her
Speaker 1: own voice that someone from outside could recognize the Messiah
Speaker 1: a win an argument with his own metaphor and receive
Speaker 1: not the leftovers of contempt, but the bread of salvation.
Speaker 1: And that person was a woman to whom the scriptures
Speaker 1: don't even give a name. Think about the magnitude of
Speaker 1: that for a moment. If you weren't born in Israel,
Speaker 1: if you come from any other nation on earth, and
Speaker 1: you've ever heard in your life that the love of
Speaker 1: God is also for you, that certainty had to begin
Speaker 1: somewhere concrete in history. There had to be a first
Speaker 1: time when someone from outside came near, insisted and was
Speaker 1: not entirely rejected. And one of those first times, one
Speaker 1: of the ones that opened the crack through which the
Speaker 1: whole world would later enter, was this one, a pagan
Speaker 1: mother with no correct nation and no covenant, who simply
Speaker 1: did not accept staying on the outside of the door.
Speaker 1: We owe far far more than we imagined to her
Speaker 1: holy stubbornness. That's why I told you at the beginning
Speaker 1: that her sentence opened the door to the whole world.
Speaker 1: It wasn't an exaggeration. The border between those inside and
Speaker 1: those outside, the border that separated Israel from the nations,
Speaker 1: began to fall here on this dusty road, with a
Speaker 1: mother on her knees who would not take no for
Speaker 1: an answer. And this is where this story stops talking
Speaker 1: about her and starts talking about you. Because there's something
Speaker 1: this mother understood in the middle of the silence and
Speaker 1: the nose that completely changes the way you pray, And
Speaker 1: it's not what many people believe. The lesson is not
Speaker 1: that if you insist enough, you end up twisting God's arm.
Speaker 1: It's not that prayer is a contest of endurance and
Speaker 1: that Heaven gives in when it sees you stubborn enough
Speaker 1: that would turn God into an annoyed judge who answers
Speaker 1: only so you'll leave him alone. The lesson is another,
Speaker 1: and it's much deeper. It's that behind every apparent no,
Speaker 1: this woman kept believing that there was a goodness, that
Speaker 1: even though the door sounded closed on the other side,
Speaker 1: there was a heart that was not her enemy, that
Speaker 1: the silence didn't mean contempt, and that the border didn't
Speaker 1: mean abandonment. She didn't fight against God. She fought clinging
Speaker 1: to a conviction about who God is, even when everything
Speaker 1: on the surface seemed to say the opposite. There was
Speaker 1: another who did something similar long before her. In the
Speaker 1: Book of Genesis, in chapter thirty two, there's a man
Speaker 1: named Jacob who wrestles all night against a mystery he
Speaker 1: doesn't understand, and at dawn, exhausted wounded, he holds on
Speaker 1: and says, I will not let you go unless you
Speaker 1: bless me. I will not let you go. That's the
Speaker 1: same fiber as this mother. It's not the faith of
Speaker 1: someone who has everything figured out. It's the faith of
Speaker 1: someone who doesn't let go, even in the dark, even
Speaker 1: without answers, because deep down they believe that on the
Speaker 1: other side there is blessing and not rejection, and there's
Speaker 1: some thing more, something that lights up this whole scene
Speaker 1: from the future. Some time later, the same master who
Speaker 1: let this mother cry out without an answer would tell
Speaker 1: his disciples another story, and Luke in his chapter eighteen,
Speaker 1: tells us exactly why he told it, so that they
Speaker 1: would always pray and not lose heart, so that they
Speaker 1: would never give up. It was the story of a widow,
Speaker 1: another woman with no power, no influence, no one in
Speaker 1: the world to defend her, who went again and again
Speaker 1: before an unjust judge to ask that justice be done
Speaker 1: for her. The judge ignored her, He ignored her, just
Speaker 1: as the world ignored this Canaanite woman. And yet the
Speaker 1: widow didn't tire. She came back and came back and
Speaker 1: came back, and in the end the judge gave in,
Speaker 1: not because he was good, but because she quite simply
Speaker 1: did not stop coming. And the Master closes that para
Speaker 1: with a question that seems written for this story, and
Speaker 1: will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones
Speaker 1: who cry out to him day and night? Do you
Speaker 1: realize what that means? The Canaanite mother wasn't breaking any
Speaker 1: rule of heaven by insisting she was living ahead of time,
Speaker 1: exactly the kind of faith that Jesus would later ask
Speaker 1: of everyone, the faith that doesn't let go, the one
Speaker 1: that keeps knocking on the door even though it seems
Speaker 1: no one on the other side is moving. She wasn't
Speaker 1: the stubborn one who pested until she got her way.
Speaker 1: She was the first to show, with her own body
Speaker 1: in the dust, what her Master would later define as
Speaker 1: the very heart of prayer. And I want you to
Speaker 1: think now about where you are in this story, not
Speaker 1: as a nice device to end the video, but for real,
Speaker 1: because there are several places in this scene, and almost
Speaker 1: all of us pass through all of them at different
Speaker 1: moments of life. There's the place of the Pharisees, that
Speaker 1: logic that runs through the whole story, even though they're
Speaker 1: no longer in the scene. The ones who have built
Speaker 1: their faith around knowing who's inside and who's outside, for
Speaker 1: whom what matters is keeping the borders correct, the credentials
Speaker 1: in order, the access well guarded. There's the place of
Speaker 1: the disciples, and their failure is quiet and human and recognizable.
Speaker 1: They're not cruel. They're tired. They're managing, organizing, trying to
Speaker 1: protect something, and in protecting it, they almost missed the
Speaker 1: most extraordinary moment they were going to witness. How many times,
Speaker 1: without realizing it, have you been the disciple? How many
Speaker 1: times have you decided on the inside who deserves grace
Speaker 1: and who doesn't. How many times has it bothered you
Speaker 1: to see goodness poured out on some one who, by
Speaker 1: your count, didn't deserve it. And there's a fourth place
Speaker 1: in this scene, the most uncomfortable of all, because it's
Speaker 1: the one almost no one did to admit. It's the
Speaker 1: place of the one who already got tired, the one
Speaker 1: who prayed for years for something and saw nothing, and
Speaker 1: one day, without telling anyone, stopped praying, not out of rebellion,
Speaker 1: out of exhaustion, because it hurt too much to keep
Speaker 1: asking a heaven that seemed not to answer. If that's you,
Speaker 1: This woman doesn't have a single reproach for you, only
Speaker 1: her silent example, because she also had every reason to
Speaker 1: close her mouth and walk away, and she chose instead
Speaker 1: to take one more step toward the door. Not a
Speaker 1: heroic step with her head held high, a step on
Speaker 1: her knees, in the dust, with two words trembling on
Speaker 1: her lips. Sometimes faith is not a shout of victory.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it's just refusing to leave. And there's the place
Speaker 1: of her, the woman who had every reason in the
Speaker 1: world to leave. They ignored her, They compared her to
Speaker 1: a dog. They made her feel she was beyond the
Speaker 1: reach of everything that was being offered. She had a
Speaker 1: sick daughter at home, for whom no one else was fighting,
Speaker 1: and she stood in the rubble of every apparent rejection,
Speaker 1: and inside the very metaphor that seemed to leave her outside,
Speaker 1: she found a reason to stay. The crumbs. Even the
Speaker 1: little dogs eat the crumbs. She didn't ask for the
Speaker 1: whole table. She asked for what falls, and what she
Speaker 1: received was her daughter, healed and whole from that very hour.
Speaker 1: Maybe you too have felt like that mother, Maybe you've
Speaker 1: cried out, and heaven has been silent for so long
Speaker 1: that you've almost stopped crying out. Maybe someone at some
Speaker 1: point made you believe that your story is too complicated,
Speaker 1: that your mistakes are too many, that the bread is real,
Speaker 1: but not for someone like you. If this video reached
Speaker 1: you on one of those days, leave me something in
Speaker 1: the comments. A single word is enough right down below
Speaker 1: who you're praying for today, for that daughter, that son,
Speaker 1: that marriage, that health, that person who doesn't even know
Speaker 1: your fighting for them. Just the name or a word
Speaker 1: so that you don't carry it in silence. Because this
Speaker 1: is what the story of this nameless woman is telling you,
Speaker 1: and I want you to hear it well before you
Speaker 1: go on with your day. God doesn't measure your worth
Speaker 1: by your origin, nor by your past, nor by your position.
Speaker 1: This mother had no nation, no temple, no priest, no covenant.
Speaker 1: She had absolutely nothing to present except a real need
Speaker 1: and a conviction that the love of God was greater
Speaker 1: than all the boarders others had placed on top of her.
Speaker 1: And it turns out she was right and noticed something
Speaker 1: that's very easy to overlook. She didn't receive less for
Speaker 1: having asked only for the crumbs. She received her daughter whole, complete,
Speaker 1: entirely free, the humility of her request didn't shrink the
Speaker 1: miracle one bit. She came asking for the smallest thing
Speaker 1: that exists, what falls to the floor, what's left over,
Speaker 1: what no one misses, and what came back to her
Speaker 1: house was the greatest thing that woman could receive in
Speaker 1: all her life. That's the kind of table we're talking about,
Speaker 1: so abundant, so overflowing, that its crumbs are enough to
Speaker 1: heal what no pagan priest and no remedy of the
Speaker 1: coast could even touch. So the question in the end
Speaker 1: is not whether God has grace for you. That question
Speaker 1: already has an answer. The real question, the one only
Speaker 1: you can answer, is whether you're going to believe that
Speaker 1: you're worthy of receiving it, and whether you're going to
Speaker 1: keep standing in front of that door even when its
Speaker 1: sounds closed. Because this rejected woman foreign with not a
Speaker 1: single recognized right, heard no three times, and the fourth
Speaker 1: thing she heard was great is your faith? The video
Speaker 1: appearing on your screen right now is going to show
Speaker 1: you another story that very few dare to tell in full.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to tell you which one. I'll only
Speaker 1: tell you that if this moves something inside you, what's
Speaker 1: coming there is going to move it even more. Click
Speaker 1: and let's keep going.