Hi everyone. Welcome back to daily gospel exegesis. In this podcast, we're all about taking a look at the literal sense of scripture.

What does it mean on the most fundamental literary level?

What is the gospel author trying to say? What do the words mean? And of course, if we can look at

scripture in this way, it actually brings us closer to God because we see the intensity of Jesus.

We see the true sense of what he was trying to communicate to his audience.

It has a lot of richness in it in studying scripture this way. So we're currently looking at the gospel of Matthew,

and today we're going to look at Matthew chapter 15 versus 21 to 28. And this is one of these

passages where we see Jesus in a way that some people would consider to be quite out of character, so it needs a bit of unpacking.

Here's today's text.

Jesus left Ganesaret and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon.

Then out came a Canaanite woman from that district and started shouting,

Sir, son of David, take pity on me, my daughter is tormented by a devil.

But he answered her not a word.

And his disciples went and pleaded with him, give her what she wants, they said, because she is shouting after us.

He said in reply, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

But the woman had come up and was kneeling at his feet.

Lord, she said, help me. He replied, it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the

house dogs she replied ah yes sir but even house dogs can eat the scraps that fall from

their master's table then Jesus answered her woman you have great faith. Let your wish be granted.

And from that moment, her daughter was well again.

Okay, so let's dive into the text here and see what we can learn. The context is actually quite

important. What has just happened? Just prior to this in Matthew's Gospel, Jesus has declared that nothing external can defile

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