Today it is very easy to be reflecting on the results of racial or social tension. To be shaking our heads about the consequences when delicate fault lines through the fabric of societies and communities collapse to produce ugly flash points that lead to hatred, violence, or murder.

This last week parts of our country have seen civil and social unrest of a scale not witnessed for almost 30 years, when racial tension in south London sparked rioting similar to that witnessed in London and some other major English towns in recent days. And, just as nightfall after nightfall led to scenes of ugly behaviour that was both violent and greedy, so, morning by morning, our radios, televisions and newspapers reported and catalogued both news and reaction.

From street corners, cafes and pubs, to television studios, and even Parliament, comment and criticism has poured forth. Politicians have condemned rioters, and rioters have condemned politicians. In a week of extraordinary rhetoric, not lacking in unintentional irony, just about everyone has had blame poured on them: the Government, the police chiefs, the courts, parents, schools, bankers, community leaders, the media, social networking sites the list is endless.

The left is too soft, the right is too hard, parents are too weak, youths are too out of control, politicians are too corrupt, the police are too ineffectual (or occasionally too brutal), nobody is getting it right.

Now, I will admit that I have not had time this last week to read and to listen to every single commentator such a task would not, I think, have been possible had I had all the time in the world but in amongst such a vast amount of social commentary, righteous indignation, hand-wringing angst, and all the other postures we have seen from politicians, the media, and people on the street, it is remarkable just how little humility has been present, and how little has really been said on addressing the complex and interwoven web of causes that underlie the terrible behaviour that has dominated our domestic news this week.

Violence has seemed endemic and unstoppable, condemnation has seemed inescapable, and justice has seemed punitive. But the voices that seem, genuinely, to want to contribute to a process of change that might consign rioting of this kind to the history books have been, to my ears, few and far between.

There are, of course, reasons for this. The first reason is that it is, in some ways, hard to know what can be said. The riots point to critical problems in different parts of our society that are not easy to solve. And, on the ground, this is reinforced by deep layers of prejudice and mistrust. And prejudice and mistrust are as destructive to society and community as cancer cells are to a body.

And part of the real problem is that, within all our hearts, lie seeds of prejudice and mistrust. Whether we are essentially liberal or conservative, there is a point beyond which we all flinch inwardly when presented with the image of someone who is too other to us for us to cope with easily. For some that relates to race, for others it can relate to gender, age, disability, sexuality or any other factors but all our hearts contain those shadows of prejudice, which sometimes blind our sight, even only for a moment.

It is for this reason that in this mornings gospel reading, we find Jesus warning his disciples that out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander, and that these are what defile a person. And we have seen much defiling this week, at least in terms of evil intentions, theft, and sadly, even murder. Indeed, this very conversation comes out of a stand-off albeit, at this point in the gospel drama, a non-violent stand-off between Jesus and the religious leaders of his day.

The Pharisees have taken offence at Jesus and not for the first time and, particularly in Matthews gospel, you can find plenty of instances of Jesus taking offence at the Pharisees, and using rhetoric which makes the allusion to blind guides seem gentle by comparison.

But the most telling moment in todays gospel reading is how Jesus himself is called to account when he lets the instincts even of his own heart get the better of him. For, to escape from the heat of the Pharisees for a while, he heads off into gentile territory. He goes to Tyre and Sidon or, to put it in todays politics and geography, he crosses the ever so sensitive border between Israel and Lebanon. A crossing which both in Jesus age and our own marked out the potential for suspicion, prejudice and hatred.

And whom should he encounter but a desperate local woman. Desperate because she has a child in need of healing a child for whom she would, in all probability, do anything even beg help from someone from a neighbouring culture that evokes all sorts of prejudice.

And the reaction is not pretty. Jesus tries simply to shun the woman he did not answer her at all. The disciples urge him Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us. He justifies his hard-hearted response with theology but with no pastoral care I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. And when she persists and which parent here would not have persisted he insults her by saying that the childrens food should not be thrownto the dogs. Am I alone in hearing just the tiniest hint of prejudice coming out in this exchange? Is there not the tiniest danger that Jesus even Jesus is on the brink of forgetting his own warning about how what comes out of the heart can defile.

Jesus learns something at that moment about the nature of true faith and true compassion, and about the problems when prejudices limit our own faith and compassion. Jesus has a turning point in this Lebanese encounter and so he becomes able to give the woman what she desires: Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.

In this story in the gospel, it is not Jesus words which heal and change, it is the words of a stranger the words of someone we are expected to dislike, someone we are expected to ignore and not to value, someone we think will take a hardline position and throw it in our faces. But this remarkable woman will not play that game and she changes the heart, even of the Son of God. She gives him new insight and new hope, and through the work of the evangelist, she gives that hope even to us.

And her spirit lives on, although in a week such as the week we have witnessed, it can be hard to find. But it was out there, even then.

The Canaanite woman is motivated by the love she has for her child a motivation that drives so many of us, and which I recognize in myself. I would argue so much more loudly to get a vital cure for Benedict or Linus than I would for myself not that I think I would ever be on the list of shy and retiring types. And such a motivation and such a love is not just powerful, but also, potentially dangerous. For if either of my dear children were killed through senseless and random violence, I have no idea how I would react.

And so, for me, the remarkable news that left me with one ray of hope came from Birmingham in the middle of last week, after three young men were knocked down and killed in what, almost certainly, was a deliberate, racist murder. An event which almost certainly should have led to an escalation of terrible violence, but which instead showed a country gone crazy a rare glimpse of dignity and hope.

You will, I am sure, have heard the words of Tariq Jahan, the father of one of the young men killed in this attack. A man who inherited the mantle of the Canaanite woman when he mounted a wall and pleaded with a crowd:

Muslims normally pray for sabr-e-jameel for the relatives of someone who has died a prayer that they may be given the highest degree of patience. As an onlooker from Islamabad wrote to the Guardian on Thursday, there is an example of someone who already possesses such a blessing. There is an instance of someone who has become a blessing, not just to his own people and community, but to all of us looking on, Muslims, Christians, and anyone and everyone else.

For Mr Jahans words, like the words of that remarkable woman who accosted Jesus and his disciples some 2000 years ago, his words are words that come from a heart that does not defile, and they are words which can change hearts, and thus change minds and lives as well. And they are words which none of us dare think we are above hearing and acting upon.

For distrust and tension between different communities is nothing new; prejudice and suspicion is nothing new. Indeed, in our other reading from Scripture this morning, Paul is addressing the rival and sometimes tense claims of Jewish and Gentile Christians groups which did not always sit easily together, as his correspondence shows. And travelling across a fault line between two communities that were divided in his own day and are divided in ours, Jesus also falls prey to the problems of ethnic division and distaste.

But the Canaanite woman, and Tariq Jahan are there to demonstrate to us that there are hearts bigger than the prejudices which bind them, and that it is possible to speak up and to speak out, and to start to change a broken and divided world.

For through them and with them God is saying to each one of us, I lost my soncalm down and go home Go home, for there are life-changing crumbs under every table, if we can but find them or hear them. And if we can do that, we can play our part, with them, in changing the world for good. Amen.