While taking a boat ride away from an incredibly full day or two, Jesus’ disciples were distracted by something Jesus said. While talking about “yeast of the Pharisees,” the disciples got distracted by bread, and their thoughts were on literal bread.

I love to hear my dad’s stories. One of those stories was about the time when my dad was working construction and came up against a problem he couldn’t make sense of, so he called my Uncle Bob. My Uncle Bob was someone who my dad trusted and had great wisdom when it came to commercial excavation.

In Exodus 4:10, Moses says to the Lord that he is slow of speech and cannot be used for God’s purposes, but God disagreed. In Mark 7, we read about how a man is deaf and speechless and God opened his ears and mouth and he spoke plainly after that.

This passage always bothered me, but the Matthew Henry Commentary helped me understand this better. Jesus is saying that the Jewish nation has the primary place in receiving the miracles He is doing. The Greeks, like the woman we read about in today’s passage, “have been snarling at them, spiteful toward them, and ready to worry them.”  There is a deep and bitter history between the Greeks and Jews.

I was once in a small village in a developing nation and in this particular village they had no running water, but there was a stream behind the hundreds of shanties built up along the hillside. I looked into the narrow valley and it was hard to imagine surviving there; it was a combination of trash, sewage, and wandering dogs sniffing through the piles that were lying in standing pools of greyish backend water.