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“Even the Crumbs” 

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.  

This month I’ve been reading a biography of Abigail Adams, wife of our second president, John Adams. One of the things that has struck me about Abigail is that she was paying very close attention to the revolution unfolding around her.  

While John was in Philadelphia debating independence and helping imagine what this new nation might become, Abigail was home in Massachusetts managing their farm, raising their children, worrying about disease and war, and writing letter after letter to her husband.  

In March of 1776, she wrote one of the most famous of those letters. As John and the other delegates considered what laws might govern the new nation, Abigail urged him to “remember the ladies.”  

She understood the language being used to describe the American Revolution. Words like Liberty. Freedom. Rights. A government that could not simply exercise power over people without giving them a voice.  

And Abigail seems to have recognized something that many of the men declaring those principles had not yet fully reckoned with.  

If these things are really true, then they should be true for women too, right? 

If liberty is really worth fighting a revolution for, shouldn’t women have some claim to it? 

Now, John Adams did not immediately respond by rushing into the Continental Congress and demanding equal rights for women. Not even close. But Abigail had named a contradiction. She had listened carefully to what these men said they believed, and then she had the audacity to ask whether they believed it enough to extend its implications to someone like her.  

And, nearly eighteen hundred years earlier, another woman had the audacity to do something remarkably similar.  

We don’t know her name. Matthew simply calls her a Canaanite woman. She is a foreigner. An outsider. A woman who, according to every boundary that mattered in that time and place, had no particular reason to believe that the Jewish Messiah had come for her.  

But apparently she has been paying attention.  

Because when Jesus enters the region of Tyre and Sidon, she comes shouting after him: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 

She knows who Jesus is. She knows something about the mercy he represents. And she believes- perhaps before the disciples themselves are ready to believe it- that if God’s mercy is really as abundant as Jesus says it is, then surely there must be enough mercy for her daughter, too.  

Even if all she gets are the crumbs.  

This is precisely where the story gets uncomfortable. Because Jesus does not respond the way we expect Jesus to respond.  

The Canaanite woman comes to Jesus desperate for his help. Her daughter is suffering. She cries out Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David. 

And Matthew tells us that Jesus says nothing. Not a word. 

She keeps crying out to him until eventually the disciples have had enough. Send her away, they tell Jesus, for she keeps shouting after us. 

There is something painfully familiar about that response. Here is a woman in desperate need, and the disciples are mostly concerned that she is making too much noise.  

She is disrupting things.  

She is making them uncomfortable.  

She will not go away quietly.  

And so the people closest to Jesus- the people who have traveled with him, listened to him teach, watched him heal, and just witnessed him feed thousands of hungry people- want Jesus to make her leave.  

But then the story becomes even more difficult.  

Because when Jesus finally speaks, he says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In other words: My mission is to Israel. And you are not Israel. But even after that, she still doesn’t leave.  

She comes closer. She kneels before him. And she says perhaps the simplest prayer anyone can pray.  

Lord, help me. 

To which Jesus answers It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.  

There really isn’t a comfortable way around that sentence.  

We can talk about the historical context. We can point out that the word Jesus uses could refer to a household dog rather than a wild dog. We can debate whether Jesus is testing her, testing the disciples, or doing something else entirely.  

And biblical scholars have been debating those questions for a very long time. But whatever explanation we choose, Matthew doesn’t seem particularly interested in making this encounter comfortable for us.  

There is a table. There are children sitting at that table. And this woman has just been told that the food on the table belongs to somebody else.  

Which is ironic given what happened only one chapter earlier in Matthew’s gospel. Recall that Jesus stood before thousands of hungry people with five loaves and two fish. Jesus took what the disciples had, blessed it, broke it, and gave it away. And everyone ate. Not only did everyone eat- Matthew tells us that there were 12 baskets left over. More than enough.  

And now, just a short time later, the disciples are standing in front of another person who is hungry for the mercy of God. And once again, they seem convinced there isn’t enough for her. But this woman sees something they don’t. She hears Jesus talk about children and bread and dogs under the table, and she doesn’t argue about whether she deserves to be one of the children.  

Instead, she says, Yes Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.  

Even the crumbs.  

She seems to understand what the disciples have forgotten. 

When the table belongs to Jesus, even the crumbs are enough.  

And maybe that is the question at the heart of this story. What does this woman see that the disciples cannot? Because Matthew has placed this encounter in a very particular place in his Gospel. Just before Jesus travels to Tyre and Sidon, he has been arguing with the Pharisees about what makes someone clean or unclean. After that, Jesus travels into Gentile territory and a Canaanite woman appears.  

The Canaanites were the ancient enemies of Israel. These were the people Israel had been taught for generations were different from them. Other. Outside.  

So Matthew has just given us a conversation about what makes someone clean or unclean, Jesus has just told the disciples that what defiles a person doesn't come from the outside. And almost immediately, Matthew introduces someone they have spent their whole lives learning to regard as an outsider. It is one thing to rethink a boundary in theory. It is another thing when someone from the other side of that boundary is standing in front of you asking for mercy. 

It is remarkable that the person who is supposedly on the outside seems to understand Jesus better than the people standing right beside him. She calls him Lord, Son of David, and kneels before him. She trusts his mercy so completely that even when everything about the encounter seems to tell her there is nothing here for her, she still believes there must be something. She doesn’t seem to believe that God’s mercy is a scarce resource that has to be carefully rationed. She believes that there is so much mercy in Jesus that she doesn’t need to take anything away from anyone else in order for her daughter to receive it. 

The children can have their bread.  

She believes there will still be enough.  

And that leaves a question for the church. Where have we mistaken our boundaries for God's boundaries? Because churches are remarkably good at building tables. 

We build traditions around them. We develop customs around them. We learn where everybody sits and how everything is supposed to work. And sometimes, without ever intending to, we begin to believe that because we have been sitting at the table for a long time, the table belongs to us. 

And when someone comes along who doesn't fit our expectations, it can be remarkably easy to sound like the disciples. 

Send them away. 

Maybe we don't actually say those words. We Presbyterians are usually much more polite than that. But there are plenty of ways to communicate the message. 

This is how we've always done it. 

That's not really how things work here. 

People like us don't do things that way. 

Maybe another church would be a better fit. 

And all the while, Jesus may be standing in our midst asking us whether we have confused our preferences with the boundaries of the kingdom of God. 

Because the table does not belong to us. It belongs to Jesus. And if it belongs to Jesus, then we don't get to decide how far his mercy reaches. 

The Canaanite woman understood that. She had every reason to walk away. And still she believed there was mercy for her. “Yes, Lord,” she said, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table.” 

And Jesus answered: “Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed. The boundary everyone assumed was solid suddenly wasn't quite so solid anymore. Maybe that is why stories like this matter. 

Because every once in a while, someone standing outside the boundaries we have created forces us to ask whether those boundaries were ever God's boundaries in the first place. 

Abigail Adams did that when she listened to men proclaim liberty and dared to ask whether they might “remember the ladies.” 

The Canaanite woman does something even more remarkable. 

She hears about the mercy of God revealed in Jesus Christ, and she dares to believe that mercy might reach all the way to her. And perhaps the church needs people like her. People who remind us what we say we believe. People who take the grace of God so seriously that they refuse to let us make it smaller. People whom we have pushed toward the edges who remind us accustomed to sitting comfortably at the table... 

You told us there was grace here. 

You told us there was mercy here. 

You told us Jesus came for sinners and outsiders and people who desperately need help. 

Did you really mean it? 

I hope we do. 

Because the disciples should have known better. They had just watched Jesus feed thousands of people with five loaves and two fish. And when everyone had eaten their fill, they themselves gathered what remained.  

12 baskets.  

More than enough.  

And now this woman stands before the same Jesus and somehow understands what they have forgotten. There is enough.  

Enough mercy for the people who have always had a seat at the table. 

Enough mercy for the people we have pushed toward the edges.  

Enough mercy for the people who challenge everything we thought we knew about who belongs. 

And enough mercy for you.  

She looked at Jesus and somehow knew: 

If this really is the Son of David, if this really is the mercy of God standing before me, if God’s grace really is as abundant as he says it is... 

Then even the crumbs will be enough. 

And she was right.  

Thanks be to God. 

In Jesus’ name, 

Amen.