The episode in today's gospel disrupts any idea that Jesus was a saccharine, soft touch who went around being "nice" to everybody. When we look at the Gospels we find that Jesus challenged people and tested them often with hard questions. People come to Jesus and they are often in tears, desperate or angry. Jesus does not evince a neutral or disinterested response and he hardly answers a question with a direct answer. As Jesus was in life so he is in the resurrection. In our prayer life we need to be aware that Jesus will challenge us and test us. His answers to our prayers will not always be immediate or exactly what we expected. In fact, his answers to our prayers, usually in hindsight, yield a far better result than I could have expected at the time. What a wonderful, personal and loving God we have! He knows us better than we know ourselves and loves us more than we can know! Let us therefore approach him in faith as did the Syro-Phoenician woman and allow ourselves to be tested so that our relationship with Jesus my mature and grow.
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