20th Sunday Year A - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2017

The week started with the Charlottesville riot in the United States on the Saturday, and was followed on Thursday with the terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain. There is a lot of prejudice and hatred in people’s hearts. For some it is so automatic that they do not even see it as hatred or prejudice but natural, taken for granted. On our part, it is always easier to see it in others, particularly distant or different others.

It is to this reality that today’s Gospel may speak. Until recently, I have interpreted the passage as illustrating how a simple Gentile woman managed to persuade Jesus to change his mind, to broaden his outlook and to act mercifully – though that interpretation has never really satisfied me.

We know that Matthew’s community of believers was composed of both Jews and of Gentiles, and that there were tensions in the community. Jews had an instinctive uneasiness regarding Gentiles, a resentment at their historical occupation of their country, and, more importantly, a sort of “taboo” feeling , seeing them as ritually unclean, and sexually promiscuous.

Matthew wanted to confront that deeply embedded, probably unnoticed, attitude of superiority and disdain for Gentiles among his Jewish Christians. In the Gospel he wrote, he had already made a feature of the Gentile Magi. He has shown Jesus insisting on “loving your enemies”, curing the servant of a Gentile centurion, and exorcising Gentile demoniacs in the region of the Gadarenes. He had also shown Jesus challenging the patriarchal disregard for women, deeply rooted in the culture of both Jews and Gentiles.

But perhaps Matthew wanted something more confronting. I wonder now if he reshaped today’s story, taken from Mark's Gospel, as a kind of parable in action. We are reasonably familiar with Jesus’ parables – how they generally start off with a familiar introduction that his audience can relate to, only to conclude with an unexpected and often puzzling sting in the tail. Jesus used them to get his audience really to listen and to be challenged.

So perhaps, in this case, Matthew so edited the story to get his audience firstly to identify with Jesus, and then twisted the knife, as it were, by having Jesus commend the faith, not only of a woman, but of a Gentile woman, and working a miracle in response to her admirable faith. As the story developed, Jesus firstly ignored her. Then he reminded his disciples that he was “sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”; and then he rudely responded to the woman's insistent request with “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house-dogs”. The story does not express Jesus’ historical attitude, but rather the unrecognized but deeply hurtful bullying mindset of Matthew’s Jewish Christians. They identified with that. But then, came the challenging twist, the surprise [that really was Jesus]: “Woman, you have great faith. Let your wish be granted”.

As Matthew shaped the story, the determining factor in Jesus’ response was the woman’s undaunted motherly love and her readiness to trust him – he showed no interest in her doubtful orthodoxy, nor her questionable moral worthiness, and certainly not that she was a Gentile woman. Jesus is as close to the ones at the edge as he is to the self-regarding bastions of worthiness. Within the Christian community, everything is sheer gift. 

Who might be today’s equivalent of the bullied Gentile woman, or of the Gentile and Jewish members of Matthew’s community? Might the story throw light, among other things, on the present contested profile of the LGBTQI community as the current discussion of gay marriage heats up? More importantly, might the story help all of us reflect humbly on our own undisputed certitudes, to see our world more clearly in the light of God’s unquestioning love for everyone? How do we reach out with respect, compassion and sensitivity to those whom society has relegated to the peripheries?