Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
Jesus is the Son of God, the savior of the world, the Prince of Peace, King of kings, and Lord of lords. He would also have been a public relations firm’s nightmare. He is constantly saying things that are unpopular and confusing, offending all the important people, alienating even his own relatives, not taking the advice of his inner circle, and in today’s Gospel he gets caught on the record making ethnically insensitive comments. No wonder Fr. Ed left town for this Sunday’s readings!
Today’s Gospel raises two difficult issues I’d like to touch on this morning. The first is the way Jesus gives this woman such a hard time, as if he doesn’t want to help her. Why? The second issue is the role ethnicity plays in today’s readings; the woman speaking to Jesus is a Canaanite—a Gentile, not a Jew. This issue is perhaps especially important given how much talk of racism has been in the news recently.
But first, why does Jesus give this woman such a hard time? She comes to him obviously in distress because of a suffering child, the sort of situation we’ve seen Jesus handle with great compassion before, and first he gives her the silent treatment. Then it gets worse. Then he tells her, “We don’t serve your kind here.” If you cringed a little bit when you heard Jesus’ words this morning, you were hearing them correctly: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” Does Jesus have an evil twin?
Now at first glance you might be so surprised by Jesus’ strange behavior that you miss other behavior that is just as surprising—that of the Canaanite woman. How many of us, if someone called us a dog, wouldn’t get upset, but would continue to seek that man’s help, even doing so in a clever way: “Even dogs gotta eat!” The Canaanite woman persists because of (1) her love for her daughter and (2) her faith in Jesus. She still believes in his power and goodness despite his initially harsh response. In fact, that harsh response gives her a chance to demonstrate her faith.
Jesus puts the woman to the test. There’s a long tradition in the Old Testament of God putting his faithful ones to the test so that they can demonstrate their faith. God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac is the most important example. The book of Job is another. Faithful Job suffers misfortune after misfortune—his children die, raiders carry off his cattle, lightning strikes his sheep, and he develops boils all over his body. All these things happen so that Job can demonstrate that he really does love God, and not just the benefits that God gives. Testing, in the Old Testament, is something God allows to happen to those with faith so that their faith will grow and they can demonstrate that faith to others. In this case, at the end of the story, the Canaanite woman gives the disciples—who were ready to dismiss her right away—a lesson in faith.
This phenomenon of testing is important because sometimes it happens to us. God doesn’t always answer our prayers according to our specifications or in the timeframe that we give him. This isn’t because we are bad people, or he doesn’t hear, or he doesn’t care, or our prayers are defective. It may be that we are being tested, that good is being worked through our patient suffering even though we cannot see it at the time. The thing about these Biblical tests is that they don’t work if you know it’s a test; the confusion we feel during the test is precisely why we need faith. Many saints have written about going through a dark night of the soul, when it seemed like God was silent or distant or not there at all, in order to achieve a deeper intimacy with God. And I think the dark night of the soul is probably a part of any journey to spiritual maturity.
Now the second issue from today’s Gospel that I’d like to touch on is the role of ethnicity. Today, we probably don’t realize the degree to which in pre-Christian religions, religion, nation, and ethnic group were all the same. Each nation had its own god or gods; to be a Canaanite meant worshiping Baal; to be a Babylonian meant worshipping Marduk; being a good Roman citizen meant sacrificing to the Roman gods. This way of thinking was present in the Israelite religion too: we worship Yahweh because we’re Jewish and Yahweh is the God of the Jews. But as Israel’s relationship with Yahweh deepened, the Jews began to realize that there was something special about their religion. First of all, Yahweh was the only God that existed and all other gods were false. And God—the only God—had a special relationship with Israel. Israel is God’s chosen people, not the Greeks, not the Romans, not the Italians, not the Lakota, not the Americans. But—this is important—they are chosen not because they are better or are meant to rule over other peoples, but because they have a special mission which is for the good of all peoples. This is what Isaiah writes about in the first reading: “The foreigners who join themselves to the Lord… I will bring to my holy mountain… for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”
It is Israel’s mission to unite the world in worship of the true God, and this universal mission is fulfilled in Jesus. We see this fulfillment taking place in today’s Gospel. The old way of understanding religion, something almost universal before Christianity, was of thinking about a nation’s gods as loyal only to that nation and vice versa. So, Jesus says, “I came only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Quite often what went along with this pre-Christian way of thinking was that everyone outside of our nation was the enemy or, as Jesus says today, dogs.
What is it that changes this way of thinking in the Gospel reading?
Faith. It’s the woman’s faith.
Our religion is not based on citizenship, membership in any nation; it is not based on race or being born into any ethnic group. It is based on faith. Being a Christian means choosing, of our own free will, to believe in and follow Christ. The Jews are still the chosen people because Jesus became human, and being human means being born in one specific place at one specific time, and Jesus was born to a Jewish mother and was raised in a Jewish home. But being a follower of Jesus is not a matter of our genetic makeup or birthplace or citizenship.
And being a follower of Jesus is a call that goes out to all people. This also explains why racism is a sin. There has been a lot of discussion of racism in the news this past week, not all of it all that intelligent, some of it frankly a little self-righteous. As with any sin, it’s not enough just to condemn it, but we also should understand why it is wrong. The most profound reason racial or ethnic prejudice is wrong is because it is an offense against human dignity; our human dignity is based on our capacity to love and serve and worship God in spirit and in truth. And the call to do so extends to everyone.
One of the best comments I saw this past week came from the satirical website, Eye of the Tiber, which is sort of like a Catholic version of the Onion—humorous, ironic, but often with a serious subtext. Eye of the Tiber ran a headline that I think shows how absurd racism is; it said, “White Supremacist Catholic Really Hoping that Heaven is Segregated.” Well, good luck, buddy, because nothing could be more ridiculous.
Sometimes satire helps us to see the truth of certain ridiculous attitudes. What Jesus does in today’s Gospel, the test to which he puts the Canaanite woman, is similar. At the end of it he wants us to turn our eyes to God’s holy mountain foretold by Isaiah, a house of prayer for all peoples, a kingdom united by faith.
Readings: Is 56:1, 6-7; Rom 11:13-15, 29-32; Mt 15:21-28
St. Isaac Jogues Catholic Church
Rapid City, South Dakota
2017
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 