Reflection 16 August 2026 

Hurt That Heals by Rev Dr Fei Taule’ale’ausumai 

Genesis 45:1–15 | Matthew 15:21–28 

 

I remember looking at some paintings of a famous Pacific female artist and writer and poet Sia Fiegal with some Pacific women I had recently met.  I remember saying that I too like to write poetry depending on the mood I’m in and the person standing next to me said “just as long as you don’t bleed all over the place in public” meaning that the person we were studying tended to express her emotions so publicly, that sometimes, there are some emotions that should remain private.  Sadly and unfortunately, that famous writer Sia Fiegel recently committed suicide.   

You’ve heard the saying “hurt people, hurt people”.  Today’s readings open us up to consider that sometimes “hurt can also become an avenue towards healing”.  There are some hurts that never completely disappear.  We learn to live with them. We build our lives around them. We may forgive. We may move forward. We may even discover that we can speak about them without the pain overwhelming us.  But that does not mean they never happened.  And sometimes the reality is after trying reconciliation to no avail we just need to walk away, we really do not need that negativity gnawing away at our psyche.   

And healing is not about pretending that the wound was never there. Healing is what happens when the wound no longer gets to decide who we will become.  That is where we find Joseph. 

By the time we meet him in Genesis 45, Joseph has travelled a very long way from the young man his brothers threw into a pit.  We know the story as I shared last Sunday.   

This week, Joseph is now one of the most influential people in Egypt, and because of famine his brothers come before him needing food.  The tables have completely turned. 

Once Joseph was at their mercy.  Now they are at his.  And Joseph has every reason to seek revenge.  He has power.  He has opportunity. And he has justification.   But Joseph chooses something else because his love and compassion for his family overwhelmed him.  Instead of retaliation, he weeps.  In fact, Joseph weeps so loudly that the Egyptians hear him.  All those years. All that distance. All that hurt. All those memories.  And suddenly the powerful Egyptian official disappears, and standing before these frightened men is simply their brother.  “I am Joseph.”  he says, what an extraordinary moment. 

Joseph chooses not to return violence for violence. He has the power to punish but chooses forgiveness and relationship.  He has the opportunity for revenge but chooses reconciliation. He has every reason to hate but chooses love.  

That does not make what his brothers did acceptable.  But Joseph refuses to allow what his brothers did to determine what he will now do to them.  And that is one of the deepest meanings of forgiveness, that is what healing looks like.  Not forgetting.  Not pretending.  Not excusing.  But breaking the cycle. 

The next story of the Caananite woman from Matthews Gospel gives us another extraordinary story about hurt and healing. 

Jesus has travelled into the region of Tyre and Sidon, beyond familiar Jewish territory.  And a Canaanite woman comes towards him.   

She is a woman. She is a foreigner. She belongs to a people historically regarded as outsiders. And she has a daughter who is suffering. She cries out to Jesus for help.  And Jesus just looks at her and says nothing.  That silence is uncomfortable.   

We sometimes move too quickly through this story because we know how it ends. But imagine being this woman. 

She comes desperate for help for her child. She cries out. And Jesus is silent. Then the disciples want her sent away. And when Jesus finally speaks, he says: 

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  In other words:  You are not part of the group I have come for.  It’s like me saying that I offer  

pastoral care to only the Samoan’s because I was sent only to the lost sheep of Samoa” and you are not one of them.  How very rude and insulting!  

Amazingly this woman does not leave.  Instead, she kneels before him. 

“Help me.” She says, and then comes one of the most difficult sayings attributed to Jesus anywhere in the Gospels: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”  OMG, who is Jesus call a dog?  This woman?  Surely not, really?  There is no need to soften it.  There is no need to pretend it is not offensive.  The woman is being placed outside the circle.  The children belong at the table. She does not. 

And yet this woman does not allow somebody else’s definition of her to become her definition of herself. She does not walk away. She does not become violent. She does not scream abuse.  Neither does she quietly accept the place assigned to her. 

She answers Jesus. “Yes.” And then she turns his own image back towards him. “Yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  She’s saying, that even the dogs are more privileged than her in this picture that Jesus’ is painting.   

What a woman?  Such courage,  such grace.  She takes the very metaphor that could diminish her and transforms it into an argument for inclusion. 

If your table represents the abundance of God’s grace, she seems to say, then surely that grace cannot be contained by the boundaries you have placed around it. 

Surely there is enough.  Enough compassion.  Enough mercy.  Enough healing.  And something happens.  Jesus listens. “Woman, great is your faith.”  Your  daughter is healed. 

I wonder though whether there are actually two healings taking place in this story. 

The daughter is healed.  But something else opens as well.  The boundary around Jesus’ mission becomes wider.  The outsider has challenged the insider.  The excluded woman has become the teacher. 

And Jesus listens.  For some Christians that idea can feel uncomfortable because we have been taught to imagine Jesus moving through life untouched by the limitations of human culture and discrimination in particular.   

But the Christian tradition also insists that Jesus was genuinely human in this encounter.  He grew.  He learned. He asked questions.  He  was teachable.  

The Canaanite woman does not defeat Jesus.  She enlarges the conversation.  And Jesus does not silence her.  He honours her and there is something profound in that. 

Joseph and the Canaanite woman therefore stand in very different circumstances, but they share something important. 

Neither allows hurt to have the final word.  Joseph could use his hurt to punish.  He chooses reconciliation. 

The Canaanite woman could allow exclusion to silence her. She chooses to speak. 

One has power and refuses to use it violently.  The other has very little power and nevertheless claims her voice.  And both create the possibility of a different future. 

This is hurt that heals. 

There is a paradox in those words.  Because hurt itself does not necessarily heal us.  Sometimes people say things such as, “Everything happens for a reason,” or “God needed you to go through that.”  Hmmm, sympathetic observers often have the right cliches to throw in the conversation often when you least need it and often not very helpful.   

Some things happen because human beings make terrible choices.  Some things happen because systems are unjust.  Some things happen because people abuse power.  Some things should never have happened at all. 

I do not believe we need to make God responsible for our wounds in order to discover God within our healing. 

Joseph did not need to be sold into slavery in order for God to love him.   

The Canaanite woman did not need to experience exclusion in order to prove her faith. 

But somehow, within the hurt, something new becomes possible. 

Joseph discovers that he can hold power without becoming violent.  The Canaanite woman discovers that she can speak from the margins without surrendering her dignity. 

And I believe that Jesus discovers too that grace is always wider than the boundaries we draw around it. 

That is the healing. 

Perhaps sometimes reconciliation begins not with explanations but with tears. 

Somewhere between Joseph’s tears and the Canaanite woman’s courage, we glimpse the possibility of healing.  But its also a healing that does not erase the scars.  Nor is it a healing that denies injustice.  Nor a healing that demands silence from those who have been hurt. 

It’s a healing that says: 

What happened to me will not determine what I do to you.  The boundary you place around me will not determine my worth.  And the grace of God will always be larger than the tables and walls we construct. 

May we therefore have the courage of Joseph to break the cycle of violence. 

May we have the courage of the Canaanite woman to speak when someone needs to hear the truth. 

And may we have the humility we see in Jesus to listen when the voice from the margins challenges us to enlarge our understanding. 

The reality is that sometimes the very place where we have been wounded becomes the place from which we learn how not to wound another.  Sure the scar remains, but life continues.  And love chooses what happens next. 

Healing happens when hurt is transformed rather than transmitted. 

When the person who has been hurt refuses to hurt someone else. 

When the person who has been silenced finds her voice. 

When the person who is challenged has the humility to listen and change and when the table that once seemed too small becomes larger than any of us imagined. 

Perhaps that is the realm of God: not a world without scars, but a world in which our scars no longer become weapons against one another.  Amen. 

 

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Audio of selected readings and reflections

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Audio of the complete service