Did Jesus Exclude Gentiles?

There’s a story from Jesus’ life that is very hard for Gentile followers of Jesus (like me) to understand. It’s the story of Jesus and a non-Jewish mother from north of Israel who came seeking help from the “Son of David.” Jesus tells her that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” and then says it’s not right to “take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

Ouch. What could he possibly mean by that? Did Jesus hold prejudiced views of non-Jewish peoples and intentionally exclude them?

I’m very confident that he did not. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus displays the best of Jewish moral values in line with the Torah, including the admonition to be welcoming to “sojourners”—non-Jewish people who came looking for refuge in the land of Israel.¹

But it’s hard to see those values in this story unless we read it more closely and give it some important context from the Jewish Bible.

If we do that, this story from Jesus’ life can actually show us what it means for Jewish people to be both “chosen” and inclusive as they follow the Messiah. And for Gentile Christians like myself, it shows us a deeper level of God’s love for all peoples in the Messiah.

Setting the Scene

To understand what today may seem like Jesus’ callousness in this story, we have to remember that Jesus was every bit the Jewish rabbi of his day. He upheld the Law of Moses, including the commands for Jewish people to be separate from their pagan neighbors,² also known as the nations, that is, Gentiles.

You don’t have to know very much about ancient pagan Gentile culture to understand why this separation was important. The idolatrous religions of Israel’s pagan neighbors were unlike the religions we’re familiar with today. Many included horrible practices like ritual murder, ritual prostitution, and infanticide. Pagan theology did not have a strong belief in universal human dignity. So, the kind of social structure that often went along with it could be quite brutal and stratified.

Pagan theology did not have a strong belief in universal human dignity.

Despite those negative elements, pagan religions were also, in a way, quite alluring. Paganism was like spiritual gambling—always holding out a carrot of hope that you could entice the gods to bless you by giving them sacrificial offerings.

The paganism of ancient Israel’s neighbors had been a huge snare for Israel in its early history. Repeatedly, the Hebrew Scriptures show how the one nation who knew the living God personally kept turning back to dead idols with a kind of national addiction. This continued even when the practices and underlying attitudes of idolatry led to the spread of social injustice and, finally, God’s judgment through the eventual overthrow of the nation by the Babylonians.³

By Jesus’ time (centuries after the return from Babylonian exile), the Jewish people were eager to be rid of foreign dictators and their foreign gods. The common expectation was that the Messiah would lead a military coup to overthrow Gentile oppressors. Jesus completely disappointed those expectations. But he didn’t cozy up to Gentiles either.

Was Jesus Sending Mixed Messages?

On the one hand, Jesus followed the traditional route of distancing himself and his followers from Gentile idolatry. When he first sent his disciples to spread the good news of God’s coming kingdom, he told them, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles and enter no town of the Samaritans.”⁴ In another place, he instructed his followers how to deal with their fellow Jews if they refused to repent, saying, in effect, “Treat them like a Gentile”—in other words, don’t interact with them.⁵

And yet, Jesus also reserved some of his highest praise for specific Gentiles, including the woman he initially refused to help. Let’s take a closer look at that story now.

And behold, a Canaanite woman … came out and was crying, ”Have mercy on me, O Lord, Son of David; my daughter is severely oppressed by a demon.”⁶

This Gentile woman knew something about the God of Israel, because she refers to Jesus as the Son of David, which was a Messianic term. She may have even known that a Gentile named Ruth was King David’s grandmother (and therefore one of Jesus’ ancestors).

Even so, at first Jesus doesn’t respond to her. He allows her to keep crying out and doesn’t send her away—even when his disciples suggest he ought to.

He tells them in the woman’s hearing,

I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.⁷

But the woman is not deterred! She gets into Jesus’ space and says, “Lord, help me!”⁸

That’s when Jesus responds with,

It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.⁹

As insulting as this sounds to our modern ears, the woman herself was unfazed. Why?

For one thing, there was a genuinely insulting word for calling someone a dog that implied a street mongrel. But that’s not the word Jesus uses.

Instead, he uses a word that describes a cared-for pet. And he uses it to draw a metaphor from daily life. Both children and pets have a place in the home—both are loved and cared for—but one rightly has priority of parental attention and concern.

In effect, he’s saying (in an obviously provocative manner) that it is not right to take the blessings that have been promised to God’s people and give them to the nations that had long rejected God and encouraged God’s people to do the same.

The woman seems to understand and accept this when she replies,

Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.¹⁰

It is at that point that Jesus says,

“O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you desire.” At that moment, her daughter was healed.¹¹

“Great is your faith” is a huge affirmation that even Jesus’ 12 disciples would have loved to hear. Actually, in several instances he’d told them that their faith was small.¹²

Faith, not ethnic or national background, is the deciding factor here.

This is similar to what happened in an earlier story in which Jesus emphatically praised the faith of a Roman centurion who loved the Jewish people and showed surprising trust in Jesus.

Jesus was so impressed that he remarked, “Not even in Israel have I found such faith” (v. 10). ¹³

In other words, the centurion’s faith not only exceeded what you could reasonably expect from Gentiles, who had little access to God’s Word, but it was also head and shoulders above that of those who’d been raised on the Scriptures.

Jesus is enthusiastic about affirming the faith of non-Jewish people.

So, when Jesus says that he did not come for the Gentiles, he’s not expressing an ethnic prejudice.¹⁴ In fact, he’s enthusiastic about affirming the faith of non-Jewish people who seek him out because of their faith in Israel’s God.

Jesus came to make it possible for all people to know and love God. He started with the Jewish people because God had long ago chosen to work through Abraham (Genesis 12:1–3), and he continued that promise through a specific line of Abraham and Sarah’s descendants. The Psalms and the Prophets affirmed that plan.

As Isaiah prophesied hundreds of years before Jesus walked the earth:

[God] says:
“It is too light a thing that you should be my servant
to raise up the tribes of Jacob
and to bring back the preserved of Israel;
I will make you as a light for the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”¹⁵

Jesus knew that he’d come as the fulfillment of this and other such prophecies.¹⁶ He also knew that salvation was on the way for Gentiles, because he would later command his Jewish followers to spread the gospel far and wide.

After he rose from the dead, he told them, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”¹⁷

Jesus was deeply committed to the messianic mission as described in the Hebrew Scriptures.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that Jesus was very exclusive when it came to whom to worship. In that way, he was very much a traditional Jewish rabbi and prophet. The God of Israel is the only true God. But as far as who is invited to know and experience the love of God, Jesus was ultimately inclusive—universally so.

Faith in Jesus always has been and always will be rooted in God’s promises to his chosen people, the Jewish people. To be inclusive, Jesus first had to prioritize the Jewish people, creating a community of Messianic faith that could then go and proclaim the good news to the world. In fact, his first-century Jewish followers did such a great job that millions of Gentiles have been adopted into God’s family. I’m personally deeply grateful for that because if they hadn’t, I would have never known the God of Israel, the Creator of all.