Many churches only want positive confessions and testimonies of all the good things God has done. But sometimes we need to cry from the miry clay because some needs are noisy and ugly, punctuating our programs with opportunities to let the light of Jesus shine through us. Sometimes we try to quietly usher the need out of the sanctuary lest it disrupt our preplanned church service. But these are needs on display—a broken heart, a broken home, a broken spirit, a broken mind—and they must not be ignored.
The Great Faith of a Desperate Mother
In our text we see a Gentile mother going to a man from Galilee named Jesus—a man some were saying was the Jewish Messiah. Only a mother desperate for her daughter’s deliverance would presume to go to person from an ethnic group who considered her to be an unclean dog. Yet, before this encounter was over, Jesus said this Canaanite woman had “great faith.” This is significant, because only two times in the Bible does Jesus call someone’s faith “great,” and in both cases they are Gentile.