This story admits us into one of those curious and subtle phases of character in Christ which, when dwelt on and understood, make Him very near to us.
I. We ask why He said these harsh and cruel things so unlike Himself; and the answer we may give is this: That He desired to get to the root of the woman's nature a very human and natural desire. We lose the sense of what Christ was by removing Him too far from our common human nature, by thinking that He could not share in many of our ordinary impulses because He was too near to God. As if the Divine on earth would not become far more intensely human than any one of us can understand.
II. Christ's object was not only to find out that the woman loved and believed in Him, but also to kindle and to sting into vivid life the spiritual power of faith which He saw in the woman's heart. For not till that was kindled could He do her the kindness she asked. To awake that Christ gave trial, as God gives it, and the waking of faith was well purchased at the price of a little pain. The woman's soul was ennobled for ever.
III. The story illustrates the way in which God often deals with men, and it illustrates the faithful way in which men should accept that dealing. There are some who need kindness to make them love and trust God, and God is kind and makes life smooth for such. But there are others whom persistent kindness would weaken, whose characters need sharp treatment and development. And thus they learn the prayer and the perseverance of faith, which does not call itself faith, but which is infinitely more intense in reality than that sleepy trust in God which, believing that all is right, goes drawling through an inactive life without an ideal, without a noble sadness, without a burning desire to live and know we live.
S. A. Brooke, The Spirit of the Christian Life,p. 164.
References: Matthew 15:22. Clergyman's Magazine,vol. xii., p. 90; R. Glover, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxii., p. 228.