1.     In her hour of desperation, a woman comes calling out to Jesus, asking for a healing miracle for the daughter she loves. But she is a Canaanite, whom the Jews considered to be a cursed race (Genesis 9:25), rightly despised and displaced from the land. At first Jesus says nothing.

·       Have you ever prayed and felt you were encountering only the silence of God?

·       How did it make you feel?

2.     Katia Adams said, “Sometimes the silence of God doesn’t mean what we think it means. The silence of Jesus was intended to bless her – to provoke audacity in her.”

·       How do you think you would have responded to Jesus’ silence? Would you give up, or press on in?

·       Why do you think we sometimes give up?

3.     Jesus is silent, which leaves room for the disciples to fill the gap. They step in to reinforce the silence with their own opinion, which is pretty much the conventional religious nationalist position, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us” Why? Because to them she is an inconvenient unclean foreigner. Jesus is motivated by compassion, the disciples by convenience. They fill the gap with their own careless callousness.

·       What opportunity have you missed because somebody seemed inconvenient?

·       What motivates you to pursue miracles? Is it compassion or something else? (ouch!)

4.     When Jesus speaks, he seems to echo the disciples’ piously racist misogyny, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” She is having none of it. She has pursued him, but now she kneels, speaking the simplest of prayers, “Lord, help me.” Then it seems to get worse. Jesus replies, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” As a Canaanite, she would have been used to this typical Jewish insult. But she has an answer to his apparent rebuff. Refusing to take offence, she responds, “Yes, Lord,” she says, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 

·       Why do you think Jesus says things which seem so obviously offensive?

·       What do you think the disciples were thinking when all this was going on?

·       We live in a time when everyone seems to get offended at just about anything. This story suggests that, “An essential key to living and walking in great faith is a refusal to allow yourself to be personally offended by anything.” How do you feel about that statement? Do you feel resistance to that?

5.     Jesus was doing something deeply counter-cultural in his encounter with this woman. Katia points out that this is the only sparring partner Jesus has in the whole of the Gospels who has the final word. The Canaanite woman concludes the conversation. This is the most radically feminist and anti-nationalist event in the whole of the Bible! Why? Because the Rabbi Jesus, whom she has addressed as ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of David’ (that is, ‘King’), gives her the supreme dignity of winning the argument! And the reason… Because she has understood that the heart of God, the heart of Jesus, is a heart of love. And knowing God’s love gives her audacious faith! “Woman,” Jesus says, “great is your faith!”

·       Have you given up pursuing a desire that you believe is God-given, because you have been offended by the silence of God or the callousness of religious people with prejudiced opinions?

·       What will you do now?