On a woman at the door, and the ones I was tempted to wave away
July 28, 2026
by Richard Yung Chung
So … I want to tell you about the time Jesus was rude. Genuinely, unmistakably rude. It’s right there in the Bible, and most of us would rather turn the page quickly.
A woman comes to him. Her daughter is desperately sick, no cure in sight. She’s heard this man can heal. So she does what any mother alive would do: she finds him, she pushes in, she begs.
And Jesus, worn out, hiding at the far edge of the country, trying to get a little rest away from the crowds, snaps at her. He as good as calls her a dog. “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Meaning: you’re not my kind, you’re not worth my time, who let this one in?
I’ll be honest, I understand the mood, even if I can’t defend the words. I get short with people when I’m tired. I get genuinely rude when I’m hungry. And when I need to disappear, I have my own hiding place: a corner of a coffee shop where nobody expects anything of me. Jesus had gone to the edge of the map for exactly that kind of rest, and this woman walked straight past his Do Not Disturb sign.
But still. He’s Jesus. And he called a frightened mother a dog.
Here’s what she did, and after all these years it’s still one of my favourite moments in scripture.
She didn’t flinch. She didn’t storm off wounded. She didn’t fire back. She took his own insult and turned it, gently, into a key: “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs under the table get the crumbs that fall.”
Even the dogs get the crumbs.
She knew who he was better than he was behaving in that moment. She knew, somehow, that his mercy was wider than the line he’d just drawn, wider than one nation, one people, one respectable circle. And with a single humble, clever sentence, she said so.
And Jesus changed his mind. He healed her daughter. And more than that, scholars will tell you this was a hinge in his whole ministry. From here on he keeps pushing past the old boundaries. Insiders and outsiders both. A foreign woman he had just called a dog was the one who nudged him out past the wall.
She didn’t only save her daughter. In a strange way she saved him, from a smaller version of himself.
I have to tell you my own version of this, because I have been the one who needed the nudge, and I was not gracious about it.
Many years ago now, I was young, newly trained, quite sure of myself, I was sent to serve on a First Nations reserve. And I arrived, I’m ashamed to say, arrogant. I had the education. I had the theology. I had the answers. I had come to help these people. Underneath, though I’d never have said it out loud, sat an uglier thought: that a community like this was fortunate to get someone as capable as me.
Me, arrogant. Hard to believe, I know.
And here is what that community did with my arrogance. Nothing. They were patient with me. They took their time. They didn’t argue with the young minister who thought he’d come to rescue anybody. They simply let me stay, and watch, and be wrong often enough and long enough to finally learn something.
And what I learned there changed my ministry permanently. I had come to save. They taught me that ministry isn’t saving anyone at all. It’s being present. It’s sitting down inside the struggle with people instead of hovering above it dispensing solutions. The people I had quietly condescended to were the ones who reached up and pulled me down into something real. They did it with more grace than I deserved.
They were my woman at the door. My voice from the margin. The people I’d misjudged, who turned out to be the ones who stretched me past my own small boundary.
Exactly what she did for him.
Richard
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Prior Newsletters from Slow Wisdom :
My Fifty Dollar Titanic … July 21st
I Shouted At The Prime Minister … July 15th
I Told My Church I Ate Grasshoppers … July 7th
Thankful For The Hospital Food … July 1st
My Goal Was To Finish and Not Die … June 24th
The Wedding Afro … June 17th