Today’s Gospel is about humility, perseverance,
and faith.
In the Gospel, we see Jesus going up to the
district of Tyre and Sidon, two cities that are outside the boundaries of Israel. This is Gentile territory that Jesus is entering. The people who
lived there were not Jews; they did not follow the religion of Israel. They were “pagans” if you will. Jesus and
his disciples had been in Israel with
the Jews who claimed to be the chosen ones, because they obeyed the law and all
that it demanded of them, and thus they felt deserving of all of God’s
blessings. But Jesus became upset with
them and their sense of entitlement, and so he decided to take his disciples
out of Israel and
into the land of the Gentiles. And while he was there, a Canaanite woman came to see him.
The Canaanites were Gentiles outside of the covenant the Lord had made with
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Yet they were in close enough contact, close enough
proximity, to have some knowledge about the religion of Israel. And this woman apparently had knowledge of Jewish teaching,
because she calls out to Jesus “Have
pity on me, O Lord, Son of David!” Son
of David is a messianic term. The Messiah sent by God would be a direct
descendant of King David. It was understood
that when the Messiah came, his blessing would extend to the Gentiles as well
as to Israel. The Canaanite woman must
have heard about what Jesus was doing--his healings, his miracles, his acts of
mercy, and realized that he was the Messiah who was to come. “Have pity on me, O Lord, Son of David.” She
was suffering, because her daughter was tormented by a demon, and she came to
Jesus to beg him to heal her. Suffering
can drive us to despair, but it can also drive us to our Lord.
One of the benefits of suffering, strange as it may seem, is that it can lead
us to seek the Lord and his mercy. When life is going smoothly, and all is well,
we often forget about the Lord and take his blessings for granted—kind of like
the Jews did. But when suffering or
hardship comes, and we have no one to turn to for help, and all seems
lost--that’s when we often turn to God.
It’s
like the story of the priest who was supposed to go to a St. Vincent de Paul
meeting and then an altar server training.
As he was on his way to the first meeting, a couple of his friends
pulled up and invited him to go fishing with them. He knew he should be going to these meetings,
but agreed to go with them. “Just let me change my clothes” he said. “No time” they said, “we have extra gear for
you, too. Come on!” So he jumped in the car and they took
off. While they were fishing off of a
bank, a bear showed up and began to run toward the priest! The priest ran for his life, but tripped on a
vine and broke his ankle. He couldn’t
move, and the bear was fast-approaching!
And so he prayed: “Oh God, I am
humbly sorry for skipping those meetings today.
Please make that bear a Catholic!” (you know, because he was wearing his
collar, so the bear could tell that he was a priest).
The bear got closer, and the priest prayed all the louder: “Oh God, PLEASE make that bear a Catholic!” And just as the bear got to the priest, it stopped. The priest breathed a sigh of relief. Just then the bear clasped its paws together,
bowed its head, and said: “Bless us oh
Lord, and these thy gifts which we are about to receive...” Sometimes, even if we have humility,
perseverance, and faith, things don’t turn out the way we’d planned...
So back
to the Gospel. When the woman first
approaches Jesus, he appears to ignore her. That’s kind of surprising, isn’t
it? That’s not the response we would expect from Jesus. Is Jesus being rude, cold-hearted? How do we explain Jesus’ silence? How do we explain the silence of God in our
lives? Sometimes when we pray to God in our distress, we don’t
get the answer we’re looking for. We’ve been praying for a family member to
recover, but she dies. Did God not hear
our prayers? Is he ignoring us and our
pleas? Like the Canaanite woman, God’s
response to our prayers is silence. This
is hard for us humans to understand. But
we must remember: God works in
mysterious ways. The apparent silence of God is not his cold-heartedness,
but rather our inability to see and
hear what God is doing; to understand his plan for us. So Jesus did not answer right away. Perhaps he
wanted the woman to demonstrate her faith, to stretch it out a bit. And maybe
he wanted to teach his disciples a lesson in humility and faith, too. It seemed as though the disciples maybe had a
little cold-heartedness in them, a little sense of entitlement, because they
asked Jesus to send her away because she was annoying them. And so Jesus tells her, “I was sent only to
the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” which was the truth. In
his earthly ministry, Jesus was sent to minister to the house of Israel, that is, to the Jews, to gather them in first. It was not until
after his resurrection that the mission would be expanded in a major way to
include the Gentiles. In spite of his
seeming rebuke, the Canaanite woman persists. She perseveres. She kneels before
Jesus and says, “Lord, help me.” But again, another obstacle is placed in her
way. Jesus replies, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it
to the dogs.” That is to say, “It’s not right to take the blessings promised to
the children of Israel and give them to the Gentiles.”
That seems harsh on Jesus’ part, doesn’t it? It doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know at
all. It’s true that the Jews referred to the
Gentiles as “dogs,” as a term of disrespect, a derogatory insult. However, there’s something interesting in the
word Jesus chose here. In the Greek
language, there are two words for dog--
The one the Jews used to insult Gentiles, and a second. According to scripture scholars, Jesus used the
word that can be translated as “little pet dogs,” or “doggies.” An affectionate
term, used for dogs that lived in the house and were taken care of. She seizes on his choice of words and
immediately replies: “Yes, Lord, yet
even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” (now I
don’t know about you, but this is the only time I can think of where someone
seems to get the best of Jesus. HE is
usually the one with the great come-backs; but here, we can see how this Gentile
woman’s response perhaps even caused Jesus to smile and think: “good answer.”) The woman came,
not self-righteously, with a sense of entitlement like the Jews, but humbly
throwing herself on the Lord’s mercy. She was willing to be a dog that eats the
scraps off the table, if it meant getting to be around the Lord’s table;
because that’s where the blessings are. And when it came to her daughter’s health, she
would not take “no” for an answer. The
Canaanite woman did not give up when obstacles were placed in her way. She
persevered. She exhibited great faith—the kind of faith that even impressed our
Lord. And, my friends, God wants us to
have that same kind of faith—a persevering faith in a merciful Lord. God wants
us to come to Jesus, time and time again, in spite of any obstacles we may
face. To come to him and humbly say: Lord, help me.
Many
times, it is just easier to give up.
People do it all the time. When
there is suffering in their life, they give up and think that God is uncaring.
When something goes wrong, people give up and stop turning to Jesus. When
something at church doesn’t go the way they like, people give up and stop
coming to church. But God does not want us to give up. He wants us to
persevere, in faith, like the Canaanite woman did, and to seek--and find--his
mercy and blessings. When things go bad, that’s the time to turn TO Jesus, not
away from him.
We
need to be the woman in today’s Gospel.
We need to persevere in faith in the face of all of the obstacles placed
in front of us by today’s society. Rather
than say: “I give up” we need to
say: “I give IN”—to God’s will; to God’s
plan for my life. With humility,
perseverance and faith, we need to approach Jesus in the sacraments of
Reconciliation and the Eucharist. Then
maybe one day we will hear those beautiful words of the Gospel: “Great is your faith! Be it done for you as you desire.”
