It’s election season, so naturally immigration is among the hot-topic issues taking center stage in public discourse—from discussions about the border crisis to comments about Haitian immigrants in Ohio. But it has also become a subject of conversation among Christians on both sides of the aisle, especially as recent studies show that more evangelicals see immigrants as a threat and an economic drain.
As a Bible scholar, one thing that gets my attention is how believers interpret (or misinterpret) Scripture to support their political views. And lately, I’ve noticed several posts on social media arguing that Jesus himself encourages his followers to focus on caring for “their own” (i.e., fellow Christians) instead of marginalized groups like the poor and immigrants.
One particular claim references the passage where Jesus tells a Canaanite woman, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs” (Matt. 15:26), alleging that Jesus is prioritizing the “house of Israel” (v. 24) over foreign nations. This becomes the basis for the claim that US federal resources should be spent on helping “our own” at the expense of immigrants.
But is this a faithful way to understand Jesus’ words? Was Jesus as ethnocentric as these arguments makes him sound? The short answer is no, of course not. But to better understand this verse in its context, we’ll explore the background of the Matthew passage and consider the longer version of this story from another Gospel (Mark 7).
To state the obvious, Jesus was a Middle Eastern Jew. His people had suffered for centuries under oppressive Greek and Roman rule. His mission was to help the Jews recognize the reign of God despite their less-than-ideal political situation.
Growing up in Galilee put Jesus on the margins of Jewish life. Far from Jerusalem, his family had to travel quite a distance for religious festivals. He lived at the confluence of Jewish, Greek, Samaritan, and Roman cultures along with their languages: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin.
During his earthly ministry, Jesus focused primarily on his own people—the Jews. Yet his prioritization of the Jews served a wider purpose. The Jews were the descendants of Abraham, through whom God intended to bless the whole world. God had promised Abraham, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Gen. 12:1–3). And in many ways, Jesus prepared his followers to bring that blessing to non-Jews.
But if we see this plan for vicarious blessing as the Jewish “elite” offering handouts to their non-Jewish marginalized neighbors, we have it backward. The Jews were the oppressed minority in this equation. In fact, for the Jews to eventually reach non-Jewish people with the gospel, the Jews would have to forgive their oppressors, who made it difficult for them to make ends meet.
On one occasion, Jesus traveled with his disciples outside Israel into bordering Gentile regions, offering a rare glimpse of his posture toward outsiders to the Jewish faith. It’s no accident that Mark writes about this trip right after relaying a discussion with Jewish leaders about defilement (7:1–23). Jesus had just insisted, “Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them” (v. 15).
Back then, food was often an obvious delineator between ethnic groups. Jewish food laws that designated between clean and unclean foods (including pork, shrimp, and other meat with blood) led Jewish people to consider anyone who ate “unclean” foods to be “unclean.” By insisting that eating could not defile a person, Jesus undermined the assumption that Gentiles were unclean and effectively tore down the cultural barrier between Jew and Gentile.
Then, as if to prove his point, Jesus brought his disciples straight into Gentile territory, where he would undoubtedly encounter people who ate nonkosher food. He started in “the vicinity of Tyre” (v. 24), then headed “through Sidon” and “into the region of the Decapolis” (v. 31). Now, Jesus wasn’t ordering bacon cheeseburgers for his disciples at this point—the kosher laws hadn’t expired yet—but he clearly wanted them to start rethinking their relationship with food because it had implications for their relationship with Gentiles.
Tyre was the capital of Phoenicia, a coastal region devoted to the worship of Baal, Melqart, and other gods. While Jesus was there, a second-generation immigrant approached him. The woman was Greek by ethnicity but “born in Syrian Phoenicia” (v. 26). Word had spread even outside Israel about the miracle worker from Galilee (3:7–8). This woman in Tyre “came and fell at his feet. … She begged Jesus to drive the demon out of her daughter” (7:25–26). Mark calls the demon “an impure spirit,” connecting this incident to Jesus’ previous teaching on impurity (v. 25).
But what happened next is jarring. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was awfully harsh with her: “‘First let the children eat all they want,’ he told her, ‘for it is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to the dogs’” (v. 27).
As readers, we rightly cringe at this interaction because Jesus seems to insult the woman, comparing her to a dog. In New Testament times, Jews commonly used the dog epithet for Gentiles, who were stigmatized because they did not follow Jewish law and were thus “impure.” This is why we must not lose sight of the literary context. Jesus had just challenged the notion of Jewish purity, which was at the heart of their ethnocentrism and which set up firm boundaries around sacred space to protect “us”from “them.” Jesus seemed intent on demonstrating to his disciples that he was not afraid to go outside the land of Israel or to engage with Gentiles.
WikiMedia CommonsHowever, traveling to Gentile territory did not mean Jesus was attempting to launch a Gentile-focused ministry—it wasn’t time yet. Later, he would commission his disciples to take the news far and wide, but first, he needed to lay the groundwork by helping his own people rethink who’s in and who’s out. After all, we cannot effectively reach those we despise or consider unclean.
Jesus’ seemingly callous response to the woman served a dual purpose: He was voicing what his disciples surely believed. Matthew 15:23 reports the disciples’ dismissive attitude: “Send her away!” At the same time, he was presenting the woman with an opportunity to test her faith.
Would she recognize his identity and press past the apparent insult that an ethnocentric and prejudiced Jew would have delivered? Would she agree with him that her access to God’s blessing would need to come through the Jews, who were themselves a marginalized people? In essence, Jesus engaged in a form of street theater to drive his point home.
Yet the Syrophoenician woman spotted the loophole right away, perceiving his invitation to persist—as Jesus likely knew she would. After all, Jesus used the word first to imply there would come a day when Gentiles could directly benefit from his ministry. So why not now?
“‘Lord,’ she replied, ‘even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs’” (Mark 7:28).
This woman passed Jesus’ test with flying colors! She cleverly exploited his parable to reiterate her request. She discerned what his disciples could not at the time—that Gentiles had a place even now in Jesus’ kingdom.
In his version of the story, Matthew calls the woman a “Canaanite” to highlight how Jesus’ interaction with her resurrects the age-old prejudicial animosity between the Israelites and the Canaanites before putting it to death (Matt. 15:22). For attentive readers, this is not the first mention of a Canaanite woman. Two others appear in Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus—Tamar and Rahab—an early hint about how we should regard this living Canaanite woman (1:3, 5).
Of course, the disciples didn’t have Matthew’s or Mark’s Gospels yet. They were watching Jesus’ actions and words unfold in real time. But I’m willing to bet Matthew’s experience with Jesus in Tyre influenced his decision to mention Canaanite women in his genealogy—he wants us to know in no uncertain terms that these women belong in the story of Jesus.
We must keep in mind that this tour of Gentile territory was meant as a teaching illustration for Jesus’ disciples, who failed to understand his teaching on impurity (Mark 7:17–18). He took them on a field trip to trace out the implications of what he had said and to expose the ill-informed thinking in his disciples that must change.
In his book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, Kenneth Bailey summarizes the point of this story powerfully:
Jesus is irritated by the disciples’ attitudes regarding women and Gentiles. The woman’s love for her daughter and her confidence in him impress Jesus. He decides to use the occasion to help her and challenge the deeply rooted prejudices in the hearts of his disciples. In the process he gives the woman a chance to expose the depth of her courage and faith.
A refugee and Galilean, Jesus modeled for his disciples how to think about other outsiders moving forward. By engaging this Greek immigrant in conversation, he offered her something no Jewish rabbi would have: the dignity of debate. Rabbis loved to debate the finer points of theology, but Jewish men did not interact at this level with women, least of all foreign women.
By making a provocative statement, he invited her to speak rather than silencing her. And what may have seemed like an insult was in fact a respectful offer to engage in meaningful conversation. Together, they negotiated a solution that honored Jesus’ calling to the house of Israel while meeting her request. Having made his point to the disciples, Jesus healed the woman’s daughter, setting her free from the demon (7:29–30).
In short, it doesn’t work to generalize Jesus’ statement about his calling to the house of Israel as a charge to “care for our own.” To do so is to miss his irony and ignore the rest of the story. Likewise, if we use this story to advocate for open borders, we have misunderstood the story of the Canaanite woman in the other direction.
In any case, the United States is not the kingdom of God. So, whatever our policies, we should be careful not to co-opt biblical stories uncritically to support our political agendas.
But if there’s one thing we can learn from this seemingly confusing passage, it’s that Jesus’ kingdom is one in which all who trust in him are ultimately seated together at the same table to share bread. Everyone who places their faith in him is welcomed as equal—for “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).
Carmen Joy Imes is associate professor of Old Testament at Biola University and author of Bearing God’s Name, Being God’s Image, and the forthcoming Becoming God’s Family (IVP).
