Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary time Yr A

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary time Yr A

20 August 2017

Homily

Today’s Gospel passage always makes me uncomfortable. Jesus’ initial dismissal of the woman asking for help is quite brutal. This is not the image of Jesus I like to keep.

To the mindset of the time, where if bad things happen to you, you must have done something to deserve it, this woman’s plight would indicate that she must be a very bad character indeed! She is Gentile, a woman, a widow whose daughter is possessed. You need to stay well away from her!

At this time, in this culture, a woman’s identity was as someone’s daughter, wife or mother of a son. This woman has nothing. With a daughter possessed, she has no hope of a son-in-law helping. She is really desperate.

Matthew adds to this by describing her as a Canaanite. Canaanite culture had been dead for some thousand years at this point. It is like a writer now describing someone as being Saxon or Frankish! However, the word had a whole freight of meaning for the Jewish people. It was the Canaanites who they were sent to supplant; the Canaanites who had constantly sought to draw the people of Israel away from the Lord. To this mindset, Jesus’ original reaction is quite correct. Jesus has no responsibility to this woman. And yet…

Knowing all of this, she is so desperate that she approaches Jesus for help. Her response to his original dismissal is to persevere. Imagine what it must have been like for her to this in public! She is risking massive humiliation in her community.

The disciples ask Jesus to do something, basically for the sake of shutting her up. Her public approaches are embarrassing them.

His response, comparing her and her daughter to dogs, is quite devastating in a Semitic society. Dogs were most definitely not pampered pets in this culture. The dog most people would be familiar with were the pariah dogs which hung around taking scraps or disposing of dead animals.

But she comes back with a response any mother would recognise – children are messy eaters, there are scraps available.

To me, it is almost like she is helping Jesus to realise that his call is not, as he said earlier, to only the people of Israel. His call, his message of the coming of the Reign of God is for all peoples. He is human, with all the limitations of his culture and times – but he is able to be drawn past those limitations!

As he often does, Matthew has presented a scenario and then immediately subverted what his audience would have expected. He is demanding that his own community, which includes ourselves, recognise that we can sometimes, maybe often, exclude those who we think, are not quite “our type”.

Have we ever excluded people? Have we ever, even if only in the secret places of our hearts felt that someone did not “deserve” God’s call?

God does not give us what we deserve, but does give us what we need – love, forgiveness and a call to relationship.

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