At Presbytery a number of years ago we shared in communion. Worship is always a great part of meetings of the Presbytery. Yeah, sometimes the preacher says something I disagree with, and maybe I’ll pout over that. But often I manage to consider that there’s an insight there that I resist hearing, and so I pray that I’ll get that kernel better than I’ve gotten it before, in spite of disagreeing with part of what the preacher has offered. And the singing is usually strong. Preachers and elders like to sing out whole-heartedly. It’s great. And then we often celebrate the Lord’s Supper. I love it when we do that.

On this occasion, they had a round loaf for the officiant to break. As she held the loaf up in front of her, we could all see how pretty it was, a dark rich brown in color. I knew that it had to have been baked a little long to get that color, and that would mean the crust was thicker and stronger than usual. When she said, “This is my body, broken for you: do this in remembrance of me,” she broke the loaf in half. Well, she tried to. The loaf didn’t break. She gripped it harder, flexing her forearms, pulling with one arm and pushing with the other, and nothing happened: and then it tore, all at once, and a shower of golden crumbs from that shattered crust cascaded up in the air and over the table and onto the floor and onto the front of her Geneva gown. It was an impressive moment. I wish we had gotten video of that moment.

We went on with the service, with the words spoken over the cup, and then everyone came to the front of the sanctuary, taking a pre-cut square of bread and dipping it in the cup. I wanted to push forward to the table and pull a chunk from that beautiful loaf, a chunk that included some of that marvelous crust, but I behaved myself and took one of the pre-cut squares and dipped it. “The bread of life, broken for you. The cup of salvation, poured out for you.” The presence of Jesus, in his death for me and in his resurrection life for me, received into my inmost being.

But I also saw that as we received the elements, we were walking over the crumbs, and we were grinding them into the carpet. I saw that I was not alone in noticing that. I thought, “The custodian won’t be too pleased with this. I hope that it all vacuums out okay.”

It was on the drive home that I realized that that shower of bread fragments served as a reminder of another time when there were crumbs under the table. The gospel of Matthew tells the story like this:

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their lords’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment (Matthew 15:21-28).

So there’s this woman, pleading with Jesus for help. Who is this woman? First of all, she’s a woman, and from ancient times to today there have been men who are quite comfortable dismissing the concerns of women. Moreover, she is an outsider woman, from outsider territory: she is not an Israelite. Matthew calls her a Canaanite, which is a general Jewish term for people from “the nations” from the geographical Promised Land and its surrounding area. Mark also reports on this incident, but he identifies her as a Syro-phoenician, which probably means that her family came from Syria, but came to live in Phoenicia. Do you remember your world geography lessons about Phoenicia from back in school? It’s the territory that is now the land of Lebanon.

Jesus and the disciples had gone north from Galilee into Lebanon. They no longer had a cultural home field advantage; the people they would encounter would not be Jews. Why were they there? The text does not say why. We can say that the disciples were there because Jesus decided to go there, and so they went with him. But why did Jesus go there?

We can find some hints in the material leading up to this event. Matthew 14 tells us how King Herod executed John the Baptist. This must have been troubling for Jesus: If Herod had decided to start executing religious leaders, it could turn out that Jesus would be next. Even so, for the rest of the chapter Jesus continued his ministry. He did his ordinary stuff, feeding the multitude, walking on water, healing the sick. Lots of people were enthusiastic about Jesus doing miracles, but as exciting as that would be, I suppose putting in a twelve hour day healing everybody and their cousin would be tiring. That’s immediately followed in chapter 15 by a harsh confrontation with the scribes and Pharisees, who had decided to take a special trip from Jerusalem to Galilee just to get in Jesus’ face to whine and complain about how the disciples weren’t doing the ceremonial hand-washing ritual that the scribes and Pharisees did.

And after that, Jesus left town. He didn’t travel south to Jerusalem, where it would be convenient for the scribes and Pharisees to pester him even more: they wouldn’t have to take a field trip to Galilee to do it, in Judea they could bother him all afternoon and still make it home for supper that night. Instead he went north, crossing the border to Lebanon.

Why did Jesus decide to go to Lebanon? The reports on his ministry, in chapters 14 and 15, sound pretty stressful. It makes me wonder whether Jesus wanted to take a few days off. The crew of disciples could set up a camp site on a pleasant hillside outside some little village. They could sleep late in the morning and take a nap in the afternoon. They could send someone in to town to buy some bread and fish for supper, then sit around the fire in the evening singing all their favorite camp songs: Kumbaya and Pass It On and maybe I’m an Old Cowhand from the Rio Grande. The advantage of taking a road trip to Lebanon was, nobody would know them there. Nobody would bother them. It’d be great.

But by this time Jesus had become pretty famous. Jesus and his disciples walked through a village, and someone, a merchant who had gone to Galilee to buy and sell goods, or some old cowhand who had been part of a cattle drive to Galilee, someone like that must have recognized him and said, “Oh look, that’s Jesus, the prophet from Galilee,” and quickly the buzz would be all over town. And this woman heard that buzz, and thought, “He could heal my daughter.”

Our reading told us that Jesus said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” which I think is not quite the right way to read that sentence. A lot of the meaning of the passage as a whole depends on the meaning of that specific line; so we need to take a moment to make sure we understand what that line says. It’s a little complicated, so work with me on this.

One detail you need to know about the manuscripts of the Greek New Testament is, when they were writing and copying manuscripts in the first five centuries or so, they just wrote down the letters: there was no punctuation. (In the second and third centuries, there weren’t even spaces between words. Eventually someone figured out it would be easier to read if you added spaces to make it easy to see the individual words. I’m glad they made that change.)

The way we write in English today, if the sentence ends with a period, it’s a statement; if it ends with a question mark, it’s a question. That’s pretty easy. But because the punctuation marks in the New Testament were added later, it’s up to us, based on context and on our interpretation of what’s happening, to decide whether the author intended a given sentence as a statement or a question. Sometimes it’s straightforward, like when the previous line says “Someone came up to Jesus and asked him this question.” You’re pretty sure that the next thing you read is going to be a question. But sometimes it’s quite a challenge. You think, “This could be a statement, or it could be a question. How can I tell?”

The short answer is, sometimes you can’t tell.

Consider these three sentences:

1. That’s Jesus.
2. That’s Jesus?
3. That’s Jesus!

At the risk of stating the obvious, the words in all three sentences are the same, but the meaning of these sentences is not the same. Yet you can’t tell the difference just by reading the words. You need the punctuation to be sure of what you’re looking at. So if you’re looking at a Bible passage with punctuation in it, you need to realize that that punctuation was added many centuries after that passage was originally written. That punctuation is not part of the original document the New Testament author wrote down; instead, it represents the best guess of someone hundreds of years later as to how that author wanted that sentence to be understood. Most of the time that assessment seems obvious and right. But every once in a while, it’s debatable: the way that interpreter guessed could well be correct, but possibly another way of punctuating the passage would be better.

You might object that, on example 2, you wouldn’t ask the question that way. You propose that you’d say “Is that Jesus,” so we could tell it’s a question even if there were no question mark. And I’d agree that the most common way in English of turning a statement into a question does it by switching the order from ‘subject then verb’ to ‘verb then subject.’ That’s Jesus becomes Is thatJesus. But that isn’t the only way we could ask about whether the person we’re looking at is Jesus. Suppose we’re conversing out on your front porch, and we’re deep into the discussion, and then a bunch of people come walking down the street, You say, “Hey, look, it’s Jesus and his disciples.” And I turn and look and say, “That’s Jesus?” You would understand that that’s a question, even though I didn’t express it in the most common order.

I think one of the lines in this morning’s reading is a question, rather than a statement. In our pew Bible it is punctuated as a statement, with a period at the end of the sentence, and that could well be correct, as far as the words and the grammar are concerned. Yet it could equally well be a question, as far as the words and the grammar are concerned. The decision to read it as a statement rather than a question is a choice. Just like the decision to read it as a question rather than a statement is a choice. The grammar of the Greek text won’t resolve the issue.

If we were right there listening to Jesus, we’d know. We could tell by the sound of his voice if he were asking a question or making a statement. I tell people this fairly often, and here I am saying it again: your voice tones when you say something will often affect the meaning of a sentence. You can’t always tell, just by looking at words on the page, what someone’s voice tones are. So you have to read the passage out loud, trying out one voice tone, trying out a different voice tone, and you have to listen to the sound of those words when you say them one way or the other, listening for the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking to you through those words.

Let me tell the story again, and you decide what you think. The narrative starts with Jesus outside the borders of the land of Israel, up north near the Mediterranean seacoast, in Lebanon. Maybe no one would recognize him there, so Jesus and his disciples could take a few days off before he headed back to Galilee.

But it seemed Jesus had become famous beyond Judea and Galilee, so that in some little village in Phoenicia, not far from the city of Tyre, someone recognized him: “That’s Jesus, the prophet from Galilee.” Someone else said, “That’s Jesus?” And the word passed from house to house in the village, and the whole place began to buzz. Then this woman came near, and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David. My daughter is tormented by a demon.”

Jesus did not answer, not a single word.

But the disciples had an answer, and they were not shy about saying so. They wanted nothing to do with this woman and her problems, so they urged Jesus to send her away. They didn’t like the way she was shouting at them, raising a ruckus. The disciples showed no awareness of the likelihood that they were following the all-too-common pattern of men dismissing the concerns of women. They were thinking about their own agenda: they were after having a few days off from ministry, too. Everybody needs a little time away.

But Jesus still hadn’t said anything: not to the woman, not to the disciples. In just a moment Jesus is going to say this line we have to understand. But so far he hasn’t said anything. What was he doing, while he wasn’t saying anything? I suggest that Jesus was pondering. He was not blurting some rushed answer just to fill the silence; he was taking a moment to try to understand what he should do in this situation, because he didn’t yet know what to say.

And then he spoke.

Our pew Bible translates his line as, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” You heard that as a statement because of my voice tones as I quoted it. If you were looking at it in the pew Bible, you’d read it as a statement because you saw the period at the end of the sentence.

To get at the sense of this sentence, let’s ask, when Jesus said these words, who was he talking to? Was he instructing the disciples? Was he mansplaining to the woman why she wasn’t going to get what she wanted? Was he talking to himself? Was he conferring with his heavenly Father?

And let’s also ask, how loud was Jesus’ voice when he said that line? Loud enough that at least one of the disciples heard it, Matthew perhaps. He remembered that line, and wrote it down, eventually. But perhaps Jesus didn’t say it loud enough for all of the others to hear. Perhaps he didn’t say it loud enough for the woman to hear.

So we see that it’s possible that Jesus was speaking to the disciples, or to the woman, or to himself, or to his Father. And it’s possible that he spoke loud enough that everyone in the town square heard him, or only loud enough that all the disciples heard him, or really rather softly, so that only one or two people heard him. We’ve got all of those possible combinations, and we can’t prove that any of them is the irrefutably right answer. All we can do is try saying those different combinations out loud, and discover which one seems to resonate in our souls, as we sense the prompting of the Holy Spirit.

When I try out those possibilities, I find I sense the prompting of the Holy Spirit suggesting that this line is a question, rather than a statement: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel?” If you thought it was odd for the sentence “That’s Jesus?” to be a question, then you have to think it’s very odd indeed when I say that the sentence should be read as a question: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel?” I’m doing my best to make my voice tones reflect that this is a question, but it still feels odd. In English we would expect to add some interrogative wording to clarify that it’s a question: “Wasn’t I sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel?” Or perhaps, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, wasn’t I?” But Greek is different. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel?” is a perfectly acceptable sentence in Greek.

Still, that odd feeling to the sentence tells us, I think, that Jesus was not loudly proclaiming to everyone in town that his mission did not include them. I think Jesus was asking a question, but he did not expect the disciples to answer. He was not looking for their input. Nor was he asking the woman this question. Either he was asking himself this question, or he was asking his Father this question. And either way, he was calling into question what he had previously thought was an established fact: namely that the mission God had called him to fulfill was to the people of Israel. He had been sure of that. Yet suddenly in this moment he was questioning that: mentally reviewing his homework and asking himself whether he had this answer correct, or prayerfully asking his Father if he had this answer correct. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, wasn’t I?”

What happens when you’ve been sure in your heart and soul about the facts in a certain matter, and suddenly that sense of assurance gets called into question? Let’s say you know that your candidate is the best candidate, and suddenly we all find out that he has been caught in some scandalous behavior. Or you have written your term paper based on certain facts, and it feels like an excellent piece of analysis to you, and then the day before it is due you find out that you have misunderstood some critical detail. Maybe you’re serving on a jury and you feel confident that the prosecution’s case has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and then the defense presents several pieces of evidence that seem to indicate that the accused could not have committed this crime. What happens when you’ve been certain that you understood the truth of things, and then further information arises that makes you no longer so sure?

Almost always, one of two things happens. You might dig in your heels and insist, quietly in your soul or out loud to whoever is listening, “I was right about this before, and I’m still right about this. I don’t care what anyone says, I’m sticking with what I’ve said all along.” Or you might be self-critical enough to say, “I was really sure I was right. But maybe I missed something important. Maybe it’s not the way I thought, because I didn’t yet have all the facts.”

I think Jesus was asking himself, or asking his Father, whether he had missed something important. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, wasn’t I?” I was really sure that my mission was to the people of Israel, but now I’m not so sure about that limit. He was practicing the discipline that we call “prayerful consideration” in the preacher biz.

The woman had not been addressed by this question, and possibly she hadn’t even heard the question: but she moved closer and knelt and said, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus responded by quoting a proverb. It’s not a proverb from the book of Proverbs in the Bible: it’s one of those proverbs that people toss around like it’s obvious. Perhaps he said it directly to the woman, as a way of shooing her away, like the disciples wanted: “It’s not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” It sounds a little rough in our ears, maybe, but it means the same thing as our modern proverb: “You’ve got to take care of your own family first.”

(By the way, I don’t think “You’ve got to take care of your own family first” is intended to mean “You’ve got to take care of your own family, so you don’t need to care about what happens to anyone else’s family.” Jesus taught us not only to love our neighbor, but also to love our enemy. So along with taking care of our own family, we need to be attentive to what it means to care for our neighbor and our enemy, and their families, too.)

So Jesus quoted this proverb, but once again we need to ask who this proverb was addressed to. I think he didn’t say it specifically to her, to explain that he was not going to answer her plea for help. I think he was saying it to himself and his Father, as he was giving prayerful consideration to this situation, testing whether he had been right in thinking his mission was just to the house of Israel, or whether he was supposed to understand what he had not previously understood: his mission was actually bigger than that.

There had been hints of this before, when Jesus had healed the servant of a Roman centurion, commenting that not even in Israel had had he seen such faith. What does it mean if a Gentile has so much faith? Jesus wants to give that some prayerful consideration. What does it mean if the prophet Isaiah proclaims the word of the Lord that it is too light a thing for the Messiah to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” Jesus wants to give that passage some prayerful consideration, too.

And when you know that the name Jesus is really the Hebrew word Yeshua, which means Salvation, then when you read Isaiah 49:6 in Hebrew it says, “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my Jesus may reach to the ends of the earth.” The Messiah will be the light of the world, and he will be the Salvation that reaches to the most distant places on earth. That verse in Isaiah had been there all along. And Jesus knew that verse: he had read it, but he had not yet given it the prayerful consideration that it needed. So now, as this woman persisted in calling out for help and healing for her daughter, she was prodding him to grapple with that text.

Maybe this whole line of thought makes some of us nervous, to consider that Jesus would have second thoughts, that there were things he didn’t know, that he might think something was true and then find out that he didn’t have all the information, so that he learned something he hadn’t known before. But learning things you didn’t know before is part of the essence of being human. There was a time in Jesus’ earthly life when he did not know how to talk: he had to learn that. There was a time when he didn’t know how to read: he had to learn that. Just like for you and me, for everything that Jesus knew, there was a time he didn’t know that, before he learned it. So there is no reason for us to be distressed at the thought that Jesus at one time thought his mission was limited to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and then he learned that that God had something bigger than that in mind: Jesus’ mission was to bring salvation to the whole world.

At any rate, the woman did not go off in a huff because Jesus said something that might have sounded kind of mean. If Jesus was a man on a mission, suddenly not so sure about the extent of his mission, she was a woman on a mission, and she was entirely sure about the extent of her mission: the goal was to get help from Jesus. So if Jesus could quote a proverb, she could match it. “Yes, Lord,” she says – that’s always a good thing to say to Jesus. In this case it is “Yes, Lord, but … ” because she’s got more to say. “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their lords’ table.”

In Matthew 15 there are crumbs under the Lord’s table. They are proverbial crumbs under a proverbial table: they are the crumbs in the reply of this Canaanite woman’s proverb in response to Jesus’ proverb. This interaction between Jesus and this woman is a real event, but it also becomes an enacted parable, one that neither Jesus nor the woman had planned in advance, since they were both figuring things out as they went along. The crumbs under the table are a parable of the inclusion of the Gentiles within the kingdom of God. There are parables everywhere, and once you learn to look for them, you’ll see them most every day.

Jesus sees this parable, and he gets it, and he speaks out decisively. That’s Jesus! He had questioned his previous understanding. He had sensed the Father’s answer to the question he had raised, and after prayerful consideration he had come to a different conclusion than the one he had had previously. And so Jesus speaks up, with a strong declaration, “Woman, you have great faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed from that moment.

This outsider woman, a Canaanite, a Syro-Phoenician, pleading for her daughter, is a symbol of the world’s need for salvation. The disciples follow the easy path by dismissing her situation: she’s only a woman, and a foreign woman at that. Yet this foreign woman’s plea for her daughter prompts Jesus to give prayerful consideration to his understanding of his calling. Her parable of the crumbs under the table becomes the moment when Jesus learns that his mission is to save not just the lost sheep of Israel, but to save the world.