Standing in Line for Salvation
August 16, 2026 • The 12th Sunday after Pentecost • Proper 15A
Isaiah 56:1, 6-8 • Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32 • Matthew 15:10-28
Word got to a bishop that one of the rectors in his diocese was leading a congregation astray. No one ever admitted to making the accusatory phone call, but apparently someone called the bishop to let him know that this new rector was undermining everything The Episcopal Church stood for. “What’s this I hear about worship at St. Mary’s?” the bishop asked after calling the offending cleric. “Is it true that you are using guitars and projectors during the service? And have you stopped wearing vestments altogether? And are you preaching twenty-five-minute sermons that focus on the Bible and Jesus and say almost nothing about social justice and radical hospitality?”
“Well, Bishop,” the rector replied. “I suppose that’s true.”
“What are you trying to accomplish?” the Bishop snapped back in a judgmental tone, not waiting for an answer. “We don’t want our church to be overrun by a bunch of simple-minded, unsophisticated, Bible-thumping Baptists, do we?” After two seconds of stunned silence from the other end of the line, the bishop continued, “What do you plan on teaching in this year’s Inquirers Class—sword drills and altar calls? If you’re going to clean up this mess, you’d better teach your people how and when to make the sign of the cross, how and when to bow and genuflect in worship, and how to properly chant the liturgy. That’s how you build a congregation full of real Episcopalians.”
“But Bishop,” the rector said meekly, “It isn’t what’s on the outside that makes someone a good Christian but what’s in the heart. It’s saying your prayers, reading the Bible, coming to church, serving others, and loving your neighbor that make someone a real Christian—not all the external gestures and ceremony.”
“Poppycock!” the bishop exclaimed in exasperation. “You sound more like a Presbyterian minister than an Episcopal priest, and, no matter what you think, I don’t mean that as a compliment.”
It’s hard for twenty-first century Episcopalians to appreciate the controversy at issue in the first half of today’s gospel reading because we’re so far removed from the ceremonial Jewish practices of Jesus’s day. The idea of Jesus’s disciples eating with unwashed hands sounds more like a hygiene issue than a religious one, but this practice struck at the heart of what it meant to be faithful to God.
Although the practice of ritually cleansing your hands before eating something isn’t specifically mentioned in the Bible, rabbis interpreted the scriptures as calling for this sacred gesture as a way both to give thanks to God for God’s goodness and to remember the uniqueness of God’s relationship with God’s people. Back then (and still today), observant Jews would wash their hands and say a blessing before any meal that included bread—the most basic form of human sustenance—as a way of living out their fundamental identity as God’s people.
Throughout history, that reminder has seemed especially important when the way of God’s people has been under threat from occupying Gentile forces like the Roman Empire’s domineering presence in first-century Palestine. As a religious teacher himself, Jesus would have been intimately familiar with the practice and its centrality to the Jewish faith. He would have known that omitting it from one’s daily life was seen as tantamount to giving into the pressure to conform to the expectations of the Empire. And to teach his followers to ignore that tradition would be like the rector of this church proclaiming that the sacrament of Holy Communion is nothing more than a mid-service snack of bread and wine.
Although it was shocking to his contemporaries, we aren’t surprised that Jesus taught his followers that that ritual impurity doesn’t stands in the way of a good and holy relationship with God. “It isn’t what goes into the mouth that makes a person unclean,” he said. “Everything you eat eventually finds its way into the sewer. It’s what comes out of your mouth that matters because what comes out of your mouth reflects what’s in your heart. Don’t pay attention to what’s on the outside. It’s what’s on the inside that counts.” That makes sense to us. God cares less about unclean hands than unclean hearts. So why, then, does Jesus say such shocking things about the Canaanite woman who only wants his help?
“It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Jesus said those words to a desperate mother because she wasn’t Jewish. It’s hard to reconcile that with the sentiment behind his dismissal of the handwashing ritual. If the ceremonial handwashing was something that Jews did to distinguish themselves from their Gentile neighbors, and Jesus dismissed that practice as a meaningless gesture that masks the truth, why did he speak to this Gentile woman as if she were a dog? Where did his compassion and humanity go? I know that arguing with the religious leaders can rob anyone of their patience and compassion, but this turnaround seems especially abrupt if not contradictory.
We don’t know what Jesus was thinking. We don’t know what his motivation was. I hate to disappoint you, but I’m not going to suggest a particularly clever way of hearing these harsh words as something less than terrible. Now, I’ve heard preachers suggest that Jesus was just proving a point—that he spoke to this woman this way because he knew she would respond with brilliant faithfulness, and he wanted his disciples to see and remember this dramatic reversal. And I’ve heard preachers argue that Jesus was merely testing her faith—that he didn’t really mean what he said and that he only called her a dog to give her the chance to prove herself worthy of a miracle. To me, those feel like cop-outs—cheap ways to sidestep a difficult passage of scripture that we’re supposed to wrestle with and that, with God’s help, we’re supposed to benefit from, even if we don’t get a satisfactory answer.
I think we need to focus on what Jesus says to the disciples when they beg him to send her away: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” The disciples are tired of her disruptive begging, and they want Jesus to snap his fingers and grant her request so that she will be satisfied and leave them alone. But Jesus can’t do that. He wasn’t sent to the earth to rescue Gentiles from the forces of evil. He was sent to save God’s people—the descendants of Abraham—from their oppressors. And those of us who are used to being first in line may have a hard time with that.
Tyre and Sidon—the region to which Jesus has withdrawn after his confrontation with the religious authorities—was the home of some of Israel’s oldest and most persistent enemies. Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Joel, Amos, and Zecheriah—when they announce God’s promised deliverance, they single out Tyre as the nation that must be defeated before God’s people can have their freedom. When Matthew describes this woman as a Canaanite, he uses for her a label that embodied everything that stood in the way of the flourishing of God’s people. What should be remarkable to us, therefore, is the reversal that results in the granting of her request and, perhaps most importantly, the means by which this woman achieves it.
We know from Jesus’s earlier encounter with the Roman centurion in Matthew 8 that he was willing to share his healing power with those who did not belong to the family of Abraham. In Luke’s version of that miracle story, the Jewish leaders approached Jesus on the centurion’s behalf because he was known to them as a respectable and honorable man—even a friend of God’s people. But Matthew doesn’t try to explain the motivation for Jesus’s decision to heal the centurion’s servant. Matthew only stresses the faith of the centurion, who, after admitting he was unworthy to have Jesus come under his roof, asked that his request be granted from a distance. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus said of that Gentile, “in no one in Israel have I found such faith.”
We should have that encounter in mind when we wrestle with today’s gospel lesson. “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus says to the Canaanite woman. But then she responds with a statement of faith just as remarkable as that of the centurion. Our translation doesn’t quite do justice to her forceful response, which sounds more like, “Yes it is, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ table.” Jesus may have been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but this woman recognizes that the salvation of God’s people means salvation for her and her people, too. And, when Jesus sees this woman’s faith—her insight that God’s love for his covenant people brings the light of salvation to all the nations of the world—he calls her faith great—the only time Jesus does so in the gospel.
I’m still not happy with the words Jesus said to this woman. I don’t understand them or why he said them. But his debate with the religious authorities about the necessity of ritual purity and the praise he reserves for this woman’s faith together show us that God’s love for the children of Abraham has not abated even if we Gentiles are now also the recipients of that love, which has overflowed and trickled down from them to us. Salvation reaches those who are willing to accept their place in line and trust that God’s love is enough for all of us. May we never presume God’s love and favor for ourselves in a way that denies them to anyone else.
© 2026 Evan D. Garner
