Even the crumbs

She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ (Matthew 15:27-28b)

When I ask, Grandson Ben tells me what he is seeing and doing in the hospital. Sometimes, his father needs to leave the room when the tale grows graphic, but the rest of us stay to marvel at what he’s learning and the verve with which he throws himself into it.

Me? I’m entranced by the energy of what it means to be 18, like Ben, daily meeting a kaleidoscopic parade of cultures, languages, personalities, needs, suffering, triumphs, failures, squalid seediness and immense dignity as it passes through the halls, all the while robing up and putting on an extra pair (or two) of latex gloves (just in case) to offer care because that is why you are there.

“It’s never the same. You don’t know what’s going to happen next,” Ben tells us. “That’s why I like it,” and I understand him because that gene runs in the family. Today, he mentions a young man with syphilis, who is also HIV positive. Across the table, my mother looks at me and shakes her head. “And we’re supposed to consider him a child of God,” she says. “It’s hard.”

“No, it isn’t,” I say softly, though I wonder if she heard me. It is not hard to imagine a series of terrible choices driven by unruly passions and normal human needs that might lead someone to disaster as they vainly tried to comfort their sorrows, assuage their loneliness or fill an inner emptiness they little understand.

It is not hard to imagine a childhood of pain or abuse or neglect leading to a life of addiction, dissipation and disaster. Nor is it hard to imagine Ben’s patient suffers bitter pains and recoils in fear from what lies before him … because all of us have and will know pain and fear, along with all the beauties of being human souls made in the image of Infinite Love, longing to feel that Love filling every empty place of our conflicted and complicated hearts.

Children of God, we are, all of us, including the woman who came to Jesus asking him to heal her daughter from the demon or disease or whatever it was that tormented her day and night. She and her daughter were outsiders, Canaanites, and Jesus didn’t jump to the task and heal her, instead referring to her as a ‘dog,’ an ethnic slur.

I don’t know why he did that (and there’s no end to the speculation), but I am certain this story is true because early Christians would never have made up a tale that seems to put Jesus in a bad light.

The bright light, however, is not on Jesus but on the Canaanite woman who intuitively knew the good things in this life, like blessing, healing and care, are not just for the good, the privileged, the lucky and those who have done everything right, but also for those like her whom some deem unworthy.

And why? Because in this life (and the next) we eat from the Master’s table, who unlike us is infinitely generous. The woman knew what the good, the privileged, the lucky and those who have done everything right often fail to understand. It’s all grace, this life, even the crumbs. To say nothing of the life to come.

David L. Miller