20th Sunday Year A - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2008 

In today’s first reading, Isaiah quoted God as saying: My house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.  Did Isaiah get it right?  Jesus believed him.  To explain his rejection of the temple after his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, Jesus quoted precisely that line from Isaiah.  He rejected the way the temple was being run, with its ruthlessly policed exclusion from its inner sanctuary of all non-Jews, women and the physically disabled.  My house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.

Jesus’ own appreciation of the truth of Isaiah’s claim about God may have resulted from his encounter with the non-Jewish, Canaanite woman, recounted in today’s Gospel passage.  There, Jesus corrected his initial reaction of rejection and chose to extend his healing power to the woman’s non-Jewish daughter.  It seems to have been one of those special moments of insight - of the penny dropping - in Jesus’ own journey towards wisdom and maturity.  Hear her catechism … and, being a pagan, she might have got all her answers wrong!  Conduct a moral inventory on her – Would she have done any better?  Interestingly, Jesus commends her faith, in stark contrast to the response of the religious elite of his day.  Yet, Jesus said of her: Woman, you have great faith!.

What is faith?  Obviously, it isn’t theology.  It doesn’t seem to be moral perfection either – Jesus simply ignored those issues.  Then, what is faith? - the faith that matters?  It seems to spring from a deep awareness of need, of need for wholeness; and to consist in the readiness to admit to our own powerlessness, and to trust Jesus as the source of that wholeness.  It seems to be more heart than head, something arising from deep within our own spirit.

I love the short prayer we all make before we begin our pilgrimage towards the altar for Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word, and I shall be healed.”  Come along!  Join with all those other sinners making their way forward!  The Irish author, James Joyce, got it right in his reference to Catholicism: “Here comes everybody!”  We come in trust, yearning for wholeness, forgiveness, acceptance and welcome, straining to love more consistently and to be at home, accepting and non-judgmental, with all the others receiving Communion with us.   “… Say but the word, and I shall be healed.”  And what is the word we so much want to hear?  Perhaps: peace, acceptance, shalom, welcome, I forgive.

But there’s tension, too, isn’t there.  We have made some sinners feel excluded.  We have been selective with our sins – Many homosexual people, for example, do not feel welcome, nor do some of those married, or remarried, outside the Church.  It’s as though some sins matter, and other sins don’t.  Or it may even be that, when we say our little prayer before Communion, we don’t consider ourselves real sinners.  We’re a bit more respectable, and would like to reserve Eucharist for those like us.  But, if we’re not really sinners, if we don’t yearn for wholeness, if we are not straining to love consistently and wisely, there is little point in our fronting up for Communion.  As Jesus said on another occasion: The healthy don’t need the doctor.

Isaiah sort of put the cat among the pigeons when he had God saying: My house will be called a house of prayer for all peoples.  “Here comes everybody!”