11th Sunday after Trinity
Matthew 15:10–20, 21–28
Conversations That Change Us
I wonder when you last had a conversation with someone whose life, beliefs or experiences were very different from your own? Not a debate to be won, but a genuine conversation. One where, by the end, you found yourself seeing the world a little differently.
Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus challenging the religious assumptions of his day. People were deeply concerned about what made someone clean or unclean, worthy or unworthy, inside or outside God’s favour. Jesus turns those assumptions upside down. Holiness, he says, is not about what enters our mouths but about what comes from our hearts. Anger, cruelty, dishonesty and hatred are far more damaging than failing to observe ritual customs.
Having dismantled one boundary, Matthew immediately takes us to another.
Jesus leaves Jewish territory and enters the region of Tyre and Sidon. There he meets a Canaanite woman. Matthew deliberately calls her a Canaanite, reminding his readers that she belongs to a people long regarded as Israel’s enemies. She is a foreigner, a woman, someone outside the religious community, and someone carrying the pain of a suffering daughter.
The encounter is uncomfortable.
The woman cries out for mercy, yet Jesus remains silent. Even the disciples seem more concerned with getting rid of her than listening to her. “Send her away,” they say, “for she keeps shouting after us.”
Many Christians have struggled with this passage because Jesus’ words seem so unlike the compassionate figure we meet elsewhere in the Gospels. Rather than explaining away the tension, many contemporary theologians invite us to remain with it. The Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine observes that difficult conversations across ethnic and religious boundaries are rarely tidy. Real encounters often expose prejudice, misunderstanding and deeply held assumptions before they open the possibility of something new.
Perhaps that is exactly what Matthew wants us to notice.
The remarkable thing is not simply that the woman’s daughter is healed. It is that neither Jesus nor the woman walks away. She refuses to accept exclusion, yet she does so not with anger but with extraordinary courage, humility and persistence. She remains in the conversation. By the end, Jesus publicly praises her faith—one of the highest compliments he gives anyone in Matthew’s Gospel.
The boundary has shifted.
This story reminds us that some of the most important conversations we ever have are those that initially make us uncomfortable. They ask us to listen before we judge, to remain present when it would be easier to withdraw, and to discover that God is often already at work in people we had assumed were “other.”
Franciscans have long understood this.
Eight hundred years ago, in the middle of the Fifth Crusade, when Christians and Muslims were at war, Francis of Assisi crossed the battle lines to meet Sultan al-Kamil. It was an astonishing act of courage. Francis did not go armed with arguments or threats. Nor did he go simply to win a debate. He went prepared to meet another human being face to face.
Their encounter did not end the Crusades. History remained painfully complicated. Yet something deeply significant happened. Two people, representing communities divided by fear and violence, chose conversation instead of hatred. They listened. They spoke honestly. They recognised one another’s humanity. For Franciscans, that meeting has become a lasting symbol of peace-making—not because every disagreement disappeared, but because relationship became possible where hostility had once ruled.
That same spirit is being lived out in our own day.
Across Britain this summer, a Franciscan Peace Pilgrimage is making its way on foot between the Anglican Franciscan houses. For eighty days, pilgrims are walking through cities, towns, villages and countryside, praying for peace as they go. They are deliberately avoiding many of the main roads, choosing instead quieter paths that invite a different pace and a different way of seeing.
Walking slows us down.
It teaches us to notice landscapes we would otherwise rush past, to meet people we had never expected to encounter, to hear stories that would never emerge from behind a car windscreen. There are conversations in churches and village halls, on pavements and footpaths, over cups of tea and shared meals. There is worship, singing, silence and prayer. There is laughter and tiredness, hospitality freely given and gratefully received.
Above all, there is listening.
For peace is rarely created by speaking more loudly than someone else. More often it begins when we become willing to hear another person’s story.
Perhaps that is what Jesus models, even in this difficult Gospel. The conversation begins with separation but ends with recognition. The woman is no longer simply a foreigner. She becomes a person of remarkable faith. The encounter changes everything.
Our own country is wonderfully diverse. Different cultures, faiths, languages and life experiences meet every day. Sometimes those differences enrich us; sometimes they frighten us. It can be tempting to retreat into communities that think as we do or believe as we do.
Yet the Gospel gently invites us to take another path.
Perhaps holiness is discovered not by protecting ourselves from those who are different, but by meeting them with open hearts. Perhaps the kingdom of God grows whenever strangers become neighbours, whenever listening replaces suspicion, whenever compassion proves stronger than fear.
As Francis discovered before the Sultan, and as today’s pilgrims are discovering on Britain’s footpaths, peace is not usually built in dramatic moments. It is built one conversation at a time. One shared meal. One act of hospitality. One willingness to keep listening when it would be easier to walk away.
So perhaps the question this Gospel leaves with us is not simply, Who is included at God’s table?
Perhaps it is this:
Who might God be waiting for us to meet, to listen to, and even to be changed by, as together we discover that God’s table has always been larger than we imagined?
Image: Getty Images, Unsplash.com
