Why does God remain silent amid the suffering and pain in our world? If He is love, why did He create a world governed by the brutal logic of survival, where the strong do what they want while the weak suffer what they must?

Whatever answers I give can hardly comfort those who are battered daily by sickness or who bear the pain inflicted by an unexpected tragedy or twist of fate. What words can keep their grief from swelling into despair? What biblical passage or theological statement can console someone who wants justice not on resurrection day, but right here, right now?

Whenever I preach about needless suffering, I am tempted to offer excuses for God’s apparent silence and lack of intervention. I find myself almost apologizing for what people understandably perceive as God’s neglect or indifference. I tell them that God did not create a world of suffering and injustice. He created us for life and goodness, but He also endowed us with the gift of freedom, which, unfortunately, we often use to hurt ourselves and one another. The bottom line is that the evil we experience is not God’s fault but ours.

But for those who witness or experience unmitigated evil, such an explanation would sound like a cheap platitude. How could it be their fault when they did everything they could to stay healthy and still became seriously ill? How could it be their fault that they must wade through filthy floodwaters because corrupt officials diverted funds meant for flood control? How could it be their fault when a child is born with a serious illness, a home is destroyed by an earthquake, or a family loses everything because of a typhoon?

There is so much injustice in the world that many of us easily become impatient with God’s seeming inaction. We want God to afflict corrupt and greedy leaders with boils from head to foot. We want Him to turn scammers, cheats, sex traffickers, unfaithful spouses, and negligent parents into pillars of salt. We want Him to rain brimstone upon the houses and business establishments of greedy capitalists. In short, we want God to do the killing for us, otherwise we will cease to believe in Him.

This makes the Gospel story of the Canaanite woman relevant to our time. She is a desperate mother begging Jesus to heal her daughter (Matthew 15:22). She comes believing that He can help her, yet Jesus seems to ignore her. When Jesus finally responds, He harshly tells her that she is not His priority. Worse, He appears to add insult to injury by saying: “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Matthew 15:26).

Being compared to a dog is hurtful, but she answers with extraordinary humility: “Please, Lord, even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters” (Matthew 15:27). Jesus then declares, “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter is healed.

The woman trusted Jesus even when no answer seemed forthcoming. She trusted even when she did not understand. Perhaps this is the kind of faith that we must have when we desperately want God to intervene, but He remains painfully distant and unmoved by our pleading. His silence does not mean indifference. Delay is not necessarily refusal. Even when God does not act according to our expectations, He may be doing something beyond our understanding.

The Canaanite woman teaches us that faith means remaining at God’s table even when all we seem to receive are crumbs. It means having the patience and humility to believe that His answer, whether yes, no, or not yet, comes from a love that sees what we cannot see and knows what we do not know. Faith is not merely trusting that God will give us what we desire. Rather, it is trusting that whatever God gives, or withholds, is ultimately the most loving thing He can do for us.