Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God, our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Our text is the Gospel reading which has already been read.

The Canaanite woman had searched long and hard for help, but to no avail. Living in Galilee of the Gentiles, she had searched out every Gentile remedy she could find. Witches and witch doctors had failed to perform as they had promised. She had prayed to the gods for mercy but they had done nothing but drain her coffers from the cost of her sacrifices at the temple of Zeus. She was running out of options. Her heart ached and her stomach drew up in knots as she looked upon her daughter's suffering at the hands of a demon.

She always kept her ear to the ground for new sources of help, and one day she got word of a new miracle-worker in the area. "His name is Jesus," a friend told her. "He's not a Gentile like us; He's one of those Jews. His followers call Him 'Lord, Son of David.' I've heard that He can drive out demons. Maybe He can help you, too."

The Canaanite woman carefully rehearsed what she would say. "Okay, if I see Him, I'll cry out, 'Great Master, heal my daughter!' Wait a minute, what was it that His followers called Him? Oh, that's right, they call Him 'Lord, Son of David.' If I call Him by that name, maybe He'll think I'm one of His followers, too. Maybe then He'll listen to me."

She kept her eyes out for Jesus, and one day He came to her town. The woman found Him and threw herself on the ground in front of Jesus' feet. "Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely demon-possessed."

And Jesus answered her not a word. He barely glanced at her, stepped around her, and kept right on walking. He left her in the dust, her prayer unanswered.

What could this be all about? This is not the Jesus we are used to hearing about, is it? Ignoring the pleas of a woman whose daughter was suffering!?!

The key to understanding Jesus' silence is to look at the way the woman had approached Him: this Gentile woman had passed herself off as a Jew, a child of Israel. No one else would call Jesus "Lord, Son of David" other than a Jew. "Son of David" was the title for the Messiah, and a Gentile did not believe in the Messiah and would not be expecting Him. So this woman was a phony, a fraud, she was just trying to use the right words to cozy up to Jesus and get a miracle out of Him. No doubt her compassion for her daughter was sincere, but her manner of asking was duplicitous. And of course Jesus sees right through her plan to get a miracle out of Him by putting up a false front, so He ignores her and walks on by.

Therefore, the first thing we can learn from the story is this: if we approach Jesus with false claims on Him, then we are not approaching Him with complete trust in His mercy, but rather we are approaching Him based on our plans and expectations for what we want out of Jesus. The Canaanite woman and us need to know Deuteronomy 10:17, "For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe." He is impartial and takes no bribes—we cannot bargain with Him; we cannot put up a false front and get Him to overlook our sinfulness and unworthiness before Him. We are beggars, and beggars can't be bargainers. For example, if we pray, "Lord, I've really done my best to obey Your 10 Commandments. I've gone to church, giving money, volunteering time. Therefore, grant this or that request for me." You might call this transactional prayer, where we pop the dimes and quarters of our own merits into the Divine Vending Machine and expect a specific blessing to drop out.

Likewise, we commit the same sin when we approach the Lord on the basis of what we think is fair or right. "Lord, I've suffered enough. It wouldn't be fair to let such and such happen to me." Or perhaps, "Lord, I've done nothing to deserve this. It's not right that you let this happen to my kids or wife or husband." When we pray like this, we will be met with nothing but silence from Jesus. As Dr. Luther reminds us in the Small Catechism, when we pray, we must remember that we are not worthy of the things for which we pray, nor have we deserved anything, but we ask that He would give everything to us by grace—not by partiality. When we try to bring something to the table and bargain with the Lord, our prayers will certainly fall on deaf ears.

Don't get me wrong, we should pray for things that we need and even want. The woman's prayer for her daughter was a noble one, done out of compassion for her daughter's plight. But if we base our prayer even partially on our efforts and merits rather than basing it completely on the Lord's mercy, then it is a prayer made in unbelief and self-righteousness rather than in faith. And so Jesus, by His silence, showed the woman—and all of us—that He will not even listen to that sort of prayer.

However, the woman was persistent; she was undeterred by Jesus' brush-off and thought, "Perhaps I can get His disciples to convince Him to help me. Or maybe if I just nag long enough He'll give in and help." So she followed the disciples and Jesus around, begging at their heels like a stray dog. The disciples did not know what to do with her. They were perplexed about why Jesus hadn't helped her. "Isn't this out of character?" they thought. "This isn't the Jesus we know. He's helped so many; why not this woman?" So they came to Jesus and urged Him, "Send her away! This is embarrassing! She keeps following us around, shrieking at the top of her lungs, and we can't do anything for her. You're the only one who is able to help her. Do something, Jesus!"

And Jesus responded, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." In effect He said, "I was sent to help the Jews, not this Gentile woman." And that statement is consistent with the New Testament, which teaches that Jesus was sent by His Father to be the Good Shepherd of the lost sheep of Israel by calling them to repentance and faith in Him. Israel was the chosen people of God and Jesus was their promised Messiah. As Jesus said in John's Gospel, "Salvation is from the Jews." So that was Jesus' specific mission while He walked the earth—to proclaim the kingdom of heaven to the Jews. Sure, He healed and saved some Gentiles along the way, but during his visible ministry He primarily came to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

Not that they deserved it, by any means. Most of the Jews time and again rejected their Lord, and they would do the same to Jesus. As St. John says, Jesus "came to His own, and His own people did not receive Him". In fact, they eventually executed Him as a blasphemer because of His opposition to their self-righteous notion of being entitled to God's blessing. But in executing Him, they unwittingly brought about the death that would redeem and transform Israel into a new people, bought with the blood of Jesus Christ. His death was not just for Israel but for all people—including you and me—not just for Jews but for all nations. "He died for all," St. Paul wrote, and so now "The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek [or Gentile]". Before His death, Jesus had been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but after His resurrection He told His disciples to go out unto all nations, to baptize and teach and make disciples of everyone everywhere.

But in the setting of today's Gospel, Jesus had not yet expanded His ministry outside of the house of Israel. And the Canaanite woman was within earshot of the answer Jesus gave and she was certainly deflated by His remark. She knew that as a Gentile, she was not one of the chosen people. Oh, she had done her best to pretend like she was a Jew, but we saw where that got her. Even the pleading of the disciples on her behalf did no good. So now she knew that she had no claims or advocates before Jesus. Now all that was left to do was to beg for mercy. So she cast herself before Jesus' feet and this time cried out, "Lord, help me!"

Here we do see a change in the woman's attitude from the beginning of the story. At first, she tried to get Jesus' help based on the false pretense that she was a Jew. But now she recognized that she was completely helpless and undeserving before Jesus. She had no claims on Him, and she was out of options. She was truly pitiful. The disciples must have been thinking, "Surely Jesus will help her now!" And that is what we would expect.

Yet to her plaintive cry, "Lord, help me!" Jesus answered with some of the most brutal words He ever uttered: "It is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the little dogs." In other words, He said, "You're not a child of Israel, but a dog Gentile. I came to be the bread of life for the children of Israel, not for the dog Gentiles, so it would not be good to give of Myself to you."

What an apparent lack of compassion Jesus shows! But listen more closely to the text. The woman begged for help from the Lord and in His words He did have mercy on her, even if the response strikes our ears as harsh. In His words, Jesus left a nugget of pure Gospel for the helpless woman to cling to. He called her a dog, a Gentile, which was undeniably true. And so the woman, faced with the truth, embraces the truth of Jesus' words and holds Jesus to it. She says, "Yes, yes, I'm a dog, Lord! I am nothing but a dog Gentile, completely unworthy to sit at the Lord's table with the children. But Lord, even the little dogs that pester underfoot are allowed to eat the scraps. Just a crumb from your table, O Lord. Surely you will not deny that to me!"

"O woman, great is your faith!" Jesus exclaimed.

Jesus had brought the woman all the way from unbelief, to faith. You see, in His silence toward her and then in His verbal rejection of her, Jesus drew the woman from the unfaithful point of making false claims on Him to the faithful point of being completely wiped out and utterly dependent on Him. The woman hadn't done anything to come to faith—it was the actions and words of Jesus that had brought her to trust in Him. The reason this woman's faith was great was that she simply believed what Jesus had said to her. She now realized that He is the master and she is not even an unworthy servant; she's a dog under the table. She now comes with no claims, no expectations; just pure receptiveness to whatever He would give her. She was a beggar, and as we heard a couple weeks ago, beggars know that the Lord loves to show mercy.

So Jesus answered her faithful prayer, "Let it be to you as you desire." And her daughter was healed from that very hour. When she returned to her house, she found the demon gone out, and her daughter lying on the bed. And this all came to her completely as a gift, not with any merit or worthiness on the woman's part.

But that's not all Jesus gave her on that day. If He had only granted the woman's request and had released her daughter from demon possession, she would have been enormously grateful. But now, though the words of Jesus had at first wiped her out, they later fed her a crumb of the Bread of Life. Dog Gentile though she was, she had come to the point of realizing that Jesus Christ is LORD and Jesus Christ is her Lord. "Lord, even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table," she said. Jesus is now not just the Lord of the Jews, but the Lord of this Gentile dog of a woman. She has become a true child of Israel through faith in the Christ, the Son of God. She is a preview of all of us Gentiles who would become part of the new Israel through faith in the Messiah.

So the woman leaves Jesus to go home and take care of her daughter who is now healed, but now she goes on her way knowing that Jesus is her Lord, her Redeemer from sin, death, the devil, and all evil. She knows that Jesus is the One who will provide every crumb of food that she eats from that day forward. And she knows that when her last hour comes, her Lord Jesus will carry her to Abram's bosom to wait for the great Resurrection on the Last Day when that same Lord returns to judge the living and the dead. That is the faith which she now confesses.

"Oh woman, great is your faith!" Jesus exclaimed. It is truly a great faith, not because of anything she had done—faith is not a work—her faith is great only because of the great Jesus who is now her Lord; only because she no longer approached Jesus on the basis of claims or merits, but only as a beggar for His mercy.

We, too, are sinful Gentile dogs who don't deserve a crumb from the Lord's table. Yet like the woman, we have received the Lord's undeserved mercy. In your Baptism, you became a true child of Israel, an heir of all of the Lord's promises to His people. In your Baptism, you were given the Holy Spirit by whom you confess that "Jesus Christ is Lord." In your Baptism, you were crucified with Christ and you received His resurrected eternal life. In your Baptism, the Lord saved you. And in that Baptism, you can have complete confidence that the Lord is always with you, always for you, always showing mercy to you.

Yet even though we are baptized, the Old Adam in us rears his ugly head, and so the Lord sends His words of Law to wipe us out just like He wiped out the claims of the Canaanite woman. He says, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." So today we confess that because of our sins we are dogs unworthy of the Lord's mercy. In confession we say, "I a poor miserable sinner." We admit that the Lord's word of judgment against us is true: "I have justly deserved Thy temporal and eternal punishment." Completely wiped out by God's judgment, we pray the faithful prayer, "Lord, help me!"

And like the Canaanite woman, we take Jesus at His Word, believing His promise to forgive and show mercy. And so He has commanded His ministers to answer your confession with Absolution, "I forgive you all your sins in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit," and since those are the Lord's words, they do what they say. They forgive your sins, cleansing your guilt with the blood of Jesus.

And as if that weren't enough, our Lord invites us little dogs to gather around His table to eat His true body and drink His true blood under the crumbs of bread and wine. Like little dogs—and like the Canaanite woman—we eagerly receive the crumbs that our Lord gives us, for they aren't just scraps, they are saving, life-giving food for body and soul.

Are we sinful, unworthy Gentile dogs? Yes. "Yes, Lord, that is what we are," we confess. But His mercy is so great that it turns dogs into children. In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And the peace of God which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus unto life everlasting. Amen.