How Not to Read the Story of the Syrophoenician Woman

Summary

A Canaanite woman begs Jesus to free her daughter from a demon, and Jesus appears to rebuff her three times: first by saying nothing at all, then by saying he was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, and finally with the hard line about not throwing the children’s food to the dogs. She answers with one of the great replies in literature — that even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table — and Jesus heals her daughter. The popular modern reading treats this as a tired, irritable Jesus being talked round by a quick-witted woman, and Bishop Barron rejects it: that reading makes Jesus a sinner, and a Jesus who needs a savior cannot be one. The Church Fathers read it as a testing of faith, and Barron argues their reading is both more coherent and far more useful. Powers grow by meeting resistance. Jesus is not being corrected; he is drawing a small faith out into a great one — which is exactly what he names at the end.

Key Points

The Reading to Avoid

• The familiar interpretation: Jesus is worn out from ministry, the woman is persistent to the point of annoyance, he snaps at her, and her clever comeback shames him into changing his mind — leaving him a better person for the encounter.
• Barron grants the human experience behind it. Anyone in pastoral work knows what it is to be short with someone at the end of a long day.
• But the reading cannot be applied to Jesus. Being tired is not a sin; being aggressive and dismissive toward a desperate mother is. A sinful Jesus needs a savior, and then he is not the savior — and the structure of Christianity gives way.
• Its appeal is that it matches our psychological experience. That is not the same as being true to the text.

Powers Grow Through Resistance

• The principle the Fathers read the story by: our capacities deepen in the measure that they are opposed. We grow by pushing against something.
• Barron illustrates it from his own life — a Little League coach who threw him his first real curveball and then taught him to wait on a pitch; a high school English teacher who read out his essay as the worst in the class and made him a writer; a philosophy professor who told him “make your case” instead of simply answering, and turned a student asking questions into someone actually philosophizing.
• In each case the obstacle was the gift. Without the resistance, the capacity would have stayed where it was.

Faith Is a Power Too

• Faith is trust in God — and like any power, it is drawn out by being met with resistance.
• God’s delay is not capricious, and not a display of power. He resists us precisely to draw our trust out further.
• Barron recalls Augustine on unanswered petitionary prayer: the delay is there because the soul has to expand in order to receive what God means to give.
• The same logic runs through the monastic tradition of leaving a would-be novice waiting at the gate — not cruelty, but a test of whether the desire can grow into something equal to the life.

Reading the Story Again

• The three rebuffs are three levels of resistance — being ignored, being put off, being insulted — and at each level a deeper faith is being drawn out of her.
• She is not changing the mind of a sinful Jesus. She is being made great by the Lord who is testing her.
• The proof is in what Jesus actually says once she answers: he praises the very thing the encounter produced. Her faith did not merely survive the resistance; it grew by it.

Notable Quotes

“You can’t turn Jesus into a sinner. If he’s a sinner, he needs a savior. If he’s a sinner, he’s not the savior himself, and the whole structure of Christianity falls apart.”

“Our powers grow through resistance.”

“He resists us precisely to draw out our trust more and more.”

“Her faith became great precisely in the process of being resisted.”