Lessons from a Canaanite woman

The world now seems to be crying out all at once.

Wars continue to destroy lives and communities. Families struggle with rising costs and uncertain economies. Extreme heat, drought, wildfires, earthquakes, and floods are disrupting the lives of ordinary people.

We hear the stories and express outrage, sympathy, and solidarity. Rightly so. Yet there is an uncomfortable question worth asking: are we sometimes better at recognising suffering when it is far away than when it is standing beside us?

This Sunday’s Gospel (Mt 15:21–28) offers an unexpectedly powerful lens through which to consider that question.

A Canaanite woman approaches Jesus because her daughter is suffering. She is an outsider—a woman from a people who stood beyond the religious and social boundaries of Jesus’ Jewish community. She cries out for mercy.

At first, there is silence. The disciples want her sent away. But the woman persists.

She will not allow herself, or the suffering of her daughter, to be made invisible. She refuses to accept that because she is regarded as an outsider, her pain is somehow less deserving of attention. She keeps believing that mercy can reach beyond the boundaries human beings construct. And Jesus ultimately commends her faith.

There is something relevant in that encounter for Trinidad and Tobago today.

We have become increasingly comfortable with the language of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Sometimes the dividing line is race; sometimes it is political affiliation (often the two are linked). Sometimes it is nationality, class, geography, or social standing. Sometimes it is simply whether someone belongs to the group with which we identify. The ‘other’ becomes easier to blame, ridicule, stereotype or dismiss.

There is a peculiar contradiction here.

Her persistence

Many of us can be deeply moved by the suffering of people thousands of kilometres away across an ocean. We can speak passionately about injustice in another country, condemn discrimination abroad and demand compassion for displaced or marginalised people elsewhere.

But what happens to that compassion when suffering has a familiar accent?

What happens when the person asking to be heard lives in the community we have learned to distrust? When the struggling family supports the political party we oppose? When the victim belongs to another race or social group? When the migrant at our doorstep is Venezuelan? When poverty, crime or desperation affects a community we have already decided is somehow responsible for its own condition?

Compassion cannot depend upon distance. Nor can human dignity depend upon whether we like, understand or identify with the person who is suffering.

The Canaanite woman reminds us precisely because she refuses to disappear. Her persistence challenges the comfortable boundaries around compassion.

Perhaps Trinidad and Tobago needs something of her persistence.

We must resist becoming resigned to the divisions being hardened around us. We must continue insisting that another person’s humanity matters even when that person belongs to a different race, political party, neighbourhood, nationality, or economic class.

We must also be willing to recognise ‘othering’ when it comes from our own side. That may be the harder test. Mercy cannot stop at the boundaries we create.