The 20th Sunday of the Year Is 56:1 & 6-7; Rom 11:13-15 & 29-32; Mt 15:21-28 (Year A)
“Foreigners who have attached themselves to the Lord … these I will bring to my holy mountain. I will make them joyful in my house of prayer.”
The tendency to isolate and exclude the stranger is a fundamental characteristic of a broken world. The children of Israel experienced such exclusion throughout their long history, and never more so than in the destruction of Jerusalem and their exile in Babylon. A people who had considered themselves chosen by God now came to know the bitterness of exclusion. The salvation that their God promised to this bitter experience reached beyond the narrow divisions of power and national pride. At a time when Israel felt most excluded, God raised their eyes to a kingdom in which all peoples would be gathered together on his holy mountain, and all peoples would be welcome in his house of prayer.
This vision, so beautifully expressed in the Book of Isaiah, challenges our sinful instinct to judge, divide and exclude. In so doing we put people beyond our love, failing to heed the generous prayer of the psalmist calling on “all the nations to be glad and exult in our God”.
One of the crucial turning points in the life of St Paul, and indeed in the life of the early Church, was the realisation that the Father’s love reached beyond the narrow boundaries of Judaism. As the Apostle to the gentiles, Paul abandoned centuries of self-righteous separation so as to embrace the generosity of the Gospel.
Few of us are conscious of a prejudice that excludes, and yet our daily encounters often betray very different attitudes. This was beautifully illustrated in the encounter of Jesus with the Canaanite woman.
The encounter brought together the habitual prejudices of the world to which Jesus preached. The woman approached Jesus with a longing common to all humanity. As a mother she wanted healing for her child.
The disciples simply wanted to get rid of her. First and foremost, she was a foreigner, an outsider. Secondly, she was a woman. Their reaction, far from compassion, was driven by an impatience to be rid of her. “Give her what she wants, because she is shouting after us.”
There are many explanations of the dialogue between Jesus and the woman. Could it be that Jesus, in a good humoured exchange, was laying bare their hidden prejudice? Yes, he had been sent first to the lost sheep of Israel, but his mission reached far beyond this. “Ah yes, sir; but even house-dogs can eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table.”
We are called to the same generous faith, the same humility, each and every time we approach the Eucharist.
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