The Message
Preachers tend to avoid this passage when possible -- it's a hard one to explain. Depending on how you read it, it might be easy to read it as Jesus lacking compassion. Jesus is telling this woman that any food on the table goes to the children at the table, and only afterwards to the dogs. It's never good to compare people to dogs. At the end of the story, the woman's child is healed.
What the passage is reminding us is that God first made a covenant with the Jewish people. God came to Abraham, and the idea was that the Israelites would be a light on a hill, and that other communities would come to know God through their relationship with God. Jesus then comes as a Jew, but while he is rooted in that community, the Gospel is not contained there -- it spreads, eventually to every country on earth. What started with Abraham and the very specific Israelite community has spread to us all.
So we stand as having inherited the faith from those who have come before us, and so our responsibility is to think about others who haven't heard the Good News, those who might standing at the edge of the table, and to invite them to taste and see that the Lord is good.
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