The epitaph on the grave of Albert Camus, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, reads: "Here I understand what they call glory: the right to love without limits." In our gospel lesson we see two people who love without limits. Neither of them seem very glorious. One is a tired itinerant preacher named Jesus. The other is a woman who has no name -- only a racial designation: a Canaanite woman. "Canaanite" was to the Jews of Jesus' time what "Native American" is to the majority of North Americans. The Canaanites were the people from whom the ancestors of the Jews took their land. The dialogue that takes place between them doesn't seem very loving, at least not at first. In fact, it may be the most unloving portrait of Jesus in the gospels.

As their dialogue proceeds we see each of…