Today’s Gospel story (Matthew 15:21-28) is about an expanding circle of grace. What convinces Jesus that the Spirit is at work in the Canaanite woman is her deep love for her daughter and her persistent faith in his ability to heal the child. She addresses him with the messianic title “Son of David.” When he is silent, she refuses to withdraw, and even when he refers to her with the common slur Jews used to describe pagans, she turns the image back at him: “Even the dogs get the scraps that fall from the children’s table.”
Jesus cannot deny her request. Jesus has encountered deep faith and love in this Canaanite woman, as he had in the Roman Centurion, and within the religious outcasts within Israel the lepers, the sinners, and the poor. His own compassion compels him to act and grant the woman’s request that he heal her daughter.
Throughout salvation history, and even in our own lives, we see faith as a gift. The Divine Giver graced our lives by letting us be born into strong communities of believers who baptized and educated us as Christians, or be sending witnesses to draw us to the Church as adult converts. That same Giver can also bless others along different paths to come to the same relationship of love that we enjoy.
Faith is also a process. We must grow in faith, which means continually learning from the sources of faith, especially the Scriptures, but also through personal prayer and community worship (liturgy) and by expressing our faith in service. When we start to feel satisfied or think we have all the answers, that is a sure sign that we have stopped growing and are in danger of becoming closed to God’s ever-expanding revelation in our lives. Living faith is always seeking ways to adapt itself to changing circumstances and fresh challenges. Doctrine itself remains constant as it is a reflection of divinely revealed truth, but the application of faith and doctrine is open to adaptation so that it may be offered to all ---even a Canaanite woman.