Jesus and the life-changing encounter
Text: Matthew 15:10-28 One time my son came home from a youth group event with a t-shirt that read “Be Like Jesus” across the chest. I liked that shirt, which seems appropriate, I guess. However, today we experience a Jesus whose behavior might cause me to put that shirt back in the drawer — when he encounters a Gentile woman in her own homeland. While theologians across the centuries have mightily tried to explain away the words that come out of Jesus’s mouth — just one paragraph after he has declared that it is what comes out of your heart and your mouth that defile you — the fact is that Jesus first ignores a woman coming to him in faith asking for mercy, then he announces to the disciples that his mission does not include her kind, presumably so she would overhear and retreat, and when she does not, he insults her, saying that her kind (people who live in Gentile territory, which is where this story takes place, who the Jews called “dogs” because they were considered t...
