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We all grew up reading stories and having stories read to us. Often, they had a moral to teach or a lesson to learn. In particular, I’m thinking of a story that has been shared across many cultures and religions, each with their own unique details, but the settings are exactly the same: hell and heaven.

Sometimes it takes a while for me to come to understand an idea and how things come together. This is one of them. I have said that Thanksgiving is really in two parts; giving thanks directly to God, and sharing the blessings we have received and giving thanks for to benefit others as well.

Often when we look at a passage like the Gospel today we look at one word in the question and forget to look at the whole question and the context and who is asking and why. We tend to focus solely on the word divorce, and miss that the Pharisees came to test Jesus and use the word lawful. Jesus responds by asking; “What did Moses command you?” When they answered that Moses had allowed for a man to divorce his wife, Jesus said that this is because of hardness of heart.

Am I the only one not about to rush out and cut off or out an eye, foot or hand? Jesus is trying to make a point, that it is not about the parts of the body but something else, a more subtle and less obvious. We know from Psychology that to do so won’t solve the problem.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question I’m sure we were all asked at one time or another when we were young. When I was barely a teenager, I dreamed about becoming a doctor. I studied the classic reference work, Gray’s Anatomy, and buried myself in books about the history of medicine and surgery.

It seems to me there are two parts to this gospel this morning. The first part is answering the question about who Jesus is for ourselves. Jesus begins by asking who the people say I am, and then asks who they think Jesus is. That means we are to listen to what others think and say, and learn about Jesus and God from them, but ultimately it means deciding for ourselves.

Why the big secret? There are two reasons, one in each of the two parts of the Gospel today; Jesus is going away to the region of Tyre so that he can rest and not have the crowds of people following him. He doesn’t want people to know where he is so he can have a day off. Unfortunately the Syrophoenician woman has other ideas, and has some realization about who Jesus is.

In today’s Gospel reading, Jesus is focused on what is inside a person, in the human heart. He does this by confronting the law-abiding Pharisees who were the largest and most influential religious-political party in New Testament times. They were highly educated Jews who saw themselves as a reformist group, consisting mainly of lay people, not priests, who believed that the faith of Israel ought to be something lived in the daily life of every Jew, not merely something observed by the priests in Jerusalem.

Why is Jesus’ message so difficult? Is it that the one who eats this bread will live forever.” This may be impossible to believe? Yet Peter says “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” Or is there something else?