The Canaanite woman (the "Syrophoenician woman" in Mark) is among the most frequently abused biblical stories today. Jesus’ nativist prejudices are not challenged by a woman’s sarcastic advocacy for herself. Rather, Jesus intentionally puts her radical humility on display to instruct the Jews about the meaning of saving faith. However, modern preoccupations with intersectional status notwithstanding, the woman’s ethnic status is a critical detail in the story, so the preacher must walk a careful rhetorical line, straying neither to the "colorblind" right or the social grievance-obsessed left.
Being a Canaanite, one of the peoples originally driven out of the promised land, put this woman at the bottom in the eyes of the Jews, and she would have had every reason to be resentful. Nevertheless, she has left her country to seek Jesus out, addressing him with the messianic honorific "Son of David" and responds to an intentionally belittling remark from Jesus ("dogs" likely being a common anti-Gentile slur which Jesus repeats, possibly softening it to "little dogs") by gladly accepting dishonor if only it would result in God’s salvation, manifested in the near term as the exorcism of her daughter.
Thus, it is the woman’s childlike forgetfulness of her status before men and the grievances of the past that exemplifies her faith–given the rare honor of great by the Lord, contrasting with the little faith commonly attributed to his disciples–and this is the polar opposite of the sort of fashionable grievance-mongering prescribed to everyone today, which is just the storing up of another kind of social currency of "victimhood."
In the end, the Lord is not content to merely throw the woman a scrap, as the disciples would have done in verse 23, but instead uses the situation to honor her over and above the chosen people, giving her a foretaste of the blessing that will come to all the Gentiles through him. Because the Jews have presumed on God’s favor as "the chosen" they are at risk of being excluded from the kingdom altogether. The poor and marginalized are to be considered blessed because they are most frequently free of the many species of pride that come from of birth, wealth, and status, making them especially open to receiving God’s blessings. Woe then to the rich of high station who trust in worldly wealth which decays and glory in the honors that die with them. The last, indeed, will be first.
