A Canaanite woman comes out into a road and asks Israel's King for a mercy she has no claim to. What she meets first is silence. Then a wall. Then a saying so hard that the Church has spent two thousand years trying to soften it.

And then she says something that may be the most remarkable sentence anyone speaks in the Gospels.

Matthew reaches back centuries for the word he uses to name her — Canaanite, the old word for the peoples Israel was commanded to drive out, a word nobody in the first century used of a living person. That is what he wants us to see standing in the road: the ancient enemy, asking for mercy. And she is not standing there as a representative of anything. She is a mother with a daughter she cannot help.

This sermon does not try to make the passage easier than it is. It asks what Jesus is doing in the silence, why he says what he says about the children's bread, and what exactly the woman understood that a great many people inside the covenant had forgotten. Along the way it goes to Isaiah 56 and the promise of a house of prayer for all peoples — and to a court in the Jerusalem temple where that promise was quietly built over with market stalls.

Preached at Eternal Hope Anglican Church, Carleton Place, Ontario, on the Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, as part of our summer series Now and Not Yet: A Summer in Matthew — following the King who has come and is coming.

📖 Readings: Isaiah 56:1–8 · Psalm 67 · Matthew 15:21–28
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About Eternal Hope Anglican Church
We are a congregation of ordinary people in Carleton Place, Ontario — drawn together by the resurrection of Jesus and the hope it sets loose in the world (Phil. 3:10). We belong to the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), serving Carleton Place and the wider Ottawa Valley. Here you'll find biblically faithful preaching, historic Anglican liturgy, and a community learning — slowly and together — what it means to follow Jesus.

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Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible, copyright © 2001 by Crossway.

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