Hey everybody, I'm Tim McEy and this is my podcast Exploring My Strange Bible.

I am a card carrying Bible history and language nerd who thinks that Jesus of Nazareth is

utterly amazing and worth following with everything that you have.

On this podcast I'm putting together the last ten years worth of lectures and sermons

where I've been exploring the strange and wonderful story of the Bible and how it invites

us into the mission of Jesus and the journey of faith.

And I hope this can be helpful for you too.

I also help start this thing called the Bible Project.

We make animated videos and podcasts about all kinds of topics in Bible and theology.

You can find those resources at thebibelproject.com.

With all that said, let's dive into the episode for this week.

Alright, well in this episode we're going to keep exploring the gospel according to Matthew.

These are teachings that I gave a number of years ago when I was a pastor at Doer of Hope Church in Portland.

And we worked through Matthew and at this point we were at Matthew chapter 15.

And we're going to explore a story that I still remember the first time I read it in my 20s

when I was reading the Bible for the first time.

And this story about Jesus puzzled me for years.

It's a story about a woman who approaches Jesus, asks him to heal her child, and Jesus hesitates,

which is really bizarre because it doesn't fit the portrait of how he's treated people up to this point.

And I remember it really bothered me like why is he hesitates to provide healing and help for this woman

when he seems so eager to do so for everybody else?

However, who this woman is, what she represents, the backstory of her and her people,

...