Over the last few months, this passage has cropped up several times. The latest being this morning's readings (I started writing this on 14 December) for Morning Prayer. Perhaps noticing it has been an artefact of a particular reading of it having got my attention and that perspective sinking in and being weighed by my unconscious thought processes. So the passage is this.

"...a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ 23 But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ 24 He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ 25 But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ 26 He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 27 She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ 28 Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly."      Matthew 15:21-28 NRSVA - The Canaanite Woman’s Faith - Jesus - Bible Gateway: 

And the perspective on reading it is as follows.
This way of understanding it proposes that we take it that Jesus learns from the woman in the course of the conversation and that we are actually seeing him in this little narrative moving from a somewhat ethnocentric mindset to one which explicitly grasps that God's Mission is bigger than that. In short, we see Jesus in the process of learning during the course of this conversation and his teacher is the Canaanite woman and, presumably, the Holy Spirit (echoes of the Nicene Creed there).

Now it seems to me that the Evangelical knee-jerk reaction to this (and maybe not just Evangelicals) is to be very suspicious of it or to reject it outright. I know this because my own first reaction was precisely to be suspicious of it and I found that I had to ask myself why I was resisting the idea. To be fair, full disclosure here, the reason I asked myself what that resistance was about was because I found the idea somehow intriguing and maybe that was because I'm interested in how learning takes place and what it means to be a wise and faithful human in the way of Christ, believing that it is in the moments of challenge that learning is forged and wisdom and orientation tested. So I was perhaps more disposed than before to thinking about the humanity of Jesus in relation to how he learnt things. And I have to say that in the moment, I felt that there was something wonderful about the possibility that we were catching Jesus in the act of learning. In fact perhaps participating in one of those wonderful conversations that I'm sure most of us have from time to time where we get caught up with others in a slightly excited thinking together as each contribution opens out further insight, learning and application of something that enthuses us. I wonder whether we are seeing a snapshot of Jesus enjoying just such learning banter.

So, I think that focus on divinity is precisely where the resistance from many roughly-orthodox Christians comes. I suspect that thinking first about his divinity (or even as a hugely gifted sage, come to that) tends to set us up for a default perspective that assumes that Jesus had got it all together, that he always saw things coming and had a ready-composed response or was meticulously inspired in the moment. But that is almost-certainly some kind of Docetism (see this article for more theological background). It is worth asking ourselves, too, whether for some of us there could be an inner resistance formed by the idea that it is unworthy for Jesus to learn from a gentile woman. However, I think that part of the marvellousness of the episode lies just there: that someone whom religious teachers of the day would have placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of likeliness -even worthiness- to have valuable spiritual insight, that person is just the one whose insight is affirmed and built on by the embodiment of Divine Lore.

So we are duty bound to question our Docetic tendencies by returning to value the humanity of Jesus and the logic of incarnation. In this case doing that means recognising a bunch of probable facts about Jesus, most of them to do with him being a baby, then a child and growing up in a human household and small town, perhaps even being apprenticed to a trade. I want to pose this in the form of some questions and musings. So, for example, how do we think Jesus learnt Aramaic, Hebrew and (probably) Greek? It seems to me that it probably happened in the regular sort of way: hearing them spoken, making sense, trying things out and noting responses, and eventually working on letters in scrolls. I don't really think that he was born knowing the languages or that God downloaded them Joe 90 style into his brain. In fact, let's put that more theologically still, by providence and Spirit the means God used for Jesus to become eloquent was interaction with parents, relatives, friends and wider community. Or, do we think that Jesus picked up carpentry or sailing (or whatever it was he did for 20 years before his preaching ministry) by sudden divine transformation or do we think his neurons, muscles and sensorium grew and developed through usage and relationship to others: teachers, customers, colleagues and the like?

But perhaps we are comfortable with the idea that Jesus learnt everyday common-place ordinary-life things in the same way as the rest of us. But are we comfortable with thinking that was the way it was with spiritual learning? And perhaps this is where a spasm of Docetism lurks more fully for us. And perhaps with some reason (even if misaligned reason): when the things of God are less obvious and more contentious, we feel that a more 'direct' learning from God is wanted to help guarantee the purity of the message. We feel we need Jesus to have the kind of hotline to God we sometimes wish we had. But I want to suggest that this too is Docetic and undervalues the fully human processes of spiritual formation -that is learning to think and act in godly ways and to cultivate a positive relationship with God.

Let's ask ourselves, then, how Jesus learnt religion and spirituality. I think that perhaps we should prepare ourselves to think about this in continuity with the other learnings we considered just a few sentences ago. I would rate as a high probability that in the household Jesus grew up in, he was socialised into religious practice and viewpoints pretty much as any other child of that day and place. In fact, given that the Hebrew scriptures have instructions for such things, perhaps we should recognise a Christ-centred divine intention in those instructions being in place: in part they were there to help to form the spirituality and upbringing of the Messiah in the midst of God's people. In other words, it's highly likely that the divine intention was for Jesus' growth in spiritual awareness to be achieved in part at least by the processes of learning, ritual and religious practice witnessed to by the Hebrew scriptures.

So Jesus would have heard and learnt to memorise scripture and to ask questions about it and weigh opinions regarding interpretation. He would have accompanied his family and friends in reciting prayers, going on pilgrimage, participating in festivals and fasts and generally be/com/ing Jewish. And in God's providence this was an appointed means for the Messiah to learn from and about God and God's mission. This involved the sculpting of neuronal pathways and patterns and bodily responses which is apposite to be/com/ing human. So, the fact that Jesus could deftly quote scripture and make insightful remarks about religious matters and ethical issues is built on that human training and personal time spent learning and reflecting on the inherited traditions of his people. This was a significant means of God's teaching of him.

But ... but ... You may want to interject: that's still not quite the same as the incident with the Canaanite women, is it? By the time he starts his ministry, and having starting with that baptism and the Spirit descending and all that, surely that means he's got it all down by this point? And doesn't the idea that perhaps Jesus didn't know something like this imperil the reliability of his teaching? That is, if there was stuff he didn't know at this point then that could mean he might miss something or fail to pass on something that we really need to have there in the corpus of his teaching. And there is some merit in that concern because ignorance can be the means of things going astray. However, I think I would want to suggest a couple of things in response to that. One is to do with Jesus' relationship to God and the other is to do with God's providence.

Jesus's relationship to God, mediated by the Spirit, would be such that Jesus would be receptive to God's leading and so in an encounter like this one with the Canaanite woman we also see by implication the work of the Spirit 'quickening' the incident to Jesus's imagination or conscience or just 'tingling his spidey senses' so that he paid attention in the right kind of way to be led through what unfolded in a God-revealing way. And the incarnational take-home from that is that the same Spirit is at work in us so that, in principle, we too could learn-in-the-moment from God. It also indicates to us that there is something important about the fact that we are teachable -to be teachable in this way is to be and become like Christ -as we are called to become.

In fact it seems to indicate that whatever crap stuff our culture and upbringing might bequeath to us can be challenged and put aside and we can step into new insight and new relating. The background we inherit is not in itself sin; it's what we do with it that can become sin. It is the resistance to the Spirit moving us on that is the problem and the definition of sin. So here, Jesus' background had a streak of theologically bolstered ethnocentric pride in it which at this point for Jesus he became aware of through and in the interaction with the Canaanite woman. That he allowed the challenge she posed to stand and is able to affirm the larger vision and implications contained in that challenge is the point and the thing we need to learn from. We don't need to have it all sewn up, we need to be teachable and humble enough to learn and affirm the insights of others.

The providential element in all this is to take seriously that Jesus is the One for whom everything that exists, is made (this I take to be an implication of  Colossians 1:16ff ... all things have been created through him and for him. ... in him all things hold together.) In which case Jesus' experiences are part of the ordering of things towards making sure that God is personally present in human flesh, blood and soul in the life of the one we call Jesus of Nazareth (among other things). The implication of this is that the learning experiences are part of incarnation and so the incident with the Canaanite woman is about God sharing what it means to be a learning, growing human and in such a way as to be for us and our salvation. Through this incident we can see the trajectory of imagination that leads to the inclusion of gentiles in the people of God. We should let the actual life of the incarnate Christ inform our thinking about what it is for God to become flesh rather than let our never-fully-understood doctrines try to (mis)inform us unchallenged about what Jesus must have been like.