20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 14, 2005
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? The language of acceptance and rejection is the language of human decision and organization. The two terms ‘accept’ and ‘reject’ derive from Latin words that suggest ‘taking’ and ‘throwing back’. Deciding what to keep and what to dispose of is also known as discernment. In monastic spirituality, we speak of the discernment of thoughts, which is to say, our aim is to learn to recognize the thoughts going through our minds and then to learn how to accept or reject them. By the choices that we make, we determine the type of character we shall have.
In the context of a nation or a people, the issue of discernment determines what sort of person should be in and what sort of person should be rejected. Western nations, in the wake of the London and Madrid bombings and wage depression caused by unauthorized immigration, are waking up to the fact that any society must provide rules by which everyone must live, if that society is to have any measure of security and coherence. A negative way to state the same dilemma is this: not everyone has your best interests at heart; choose your friends and your compatriots carefully. Test them. Conversely, if we want to be a part of a particular society, then we must be willing to be tested, to demonstrate our good will toward the others within it.
What sort of society should the Church be, based on today’s Liturgy of the Word?
In today’s gospel, Jesus puts the Canaanite woman to the trial, and it is a discomforting one for those who think of Jesus’ gospel as merely the preaching of love and acceptance. If this woman is going to win Jesus’ acceptance and avoid his rejection, she has to do some pretty quick thinking and acting. She didn’t have the luxury of a year-long catechumenate: her daughter was ill and needed help immediately. Why did Jesus resort to this odd standoffish behavior?
The Fathers of the Church pointed out that Jesus, knowing the hearts of those He met, knew that this woman had the requisite faith and good will and was genuinely seeking not merely the health of her daughter, but in return, the glory of Christ. Jesus knows that testing her faith would lead to edification for His disciples; indeed, I hope to demonstrate that He had even more in mind. We should bear this story and this trial in mind at prayer when we, like the Canaanite woman, do not receive an immediate answer. This is not necessarily a sign that we lack sufficient faith; indeed, it might be a sign that God knows our faith is strong as has special plans for this gift in us.
It is worth noting that in the silence that follows, she does not immediately speak. The disciples interrupt and make their own suggestion to Jesus, to send her away. I would again liken these to the demons whom we encounter in prayer when things don’t seem to be going well, those nagging thoughts that we have displeased God in some way, that He doesn’t want to listen, that our prayer is rejected and not accepted.
The disciples’ rejection is poignant when placed in the larger story of Matthew’s gospel. In the previous chapter, Jesus had fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread with 12 baskets of scraps left over. This was a clear sign of God’s appearance at the end of time to redeem Israel. Despite this sign, when Jesus returned to the towns, the Pharisees were waiting for him, ready to pick fights with him regarding purity laws. In their minds, if God was going to come to Israel, it would be because the people were steadfastly rejecting anyone who sullied the observance of the law. They were not willing to accept Jesus and His disciples because despite the signs that Jesus worked, He didn’t seem to have Israel’s interests at heart. He was not a strict observer of the Law. I make this observation, of course, withholding judgment on whether the Pharisees knew what was good for them.
After the disciples had suffered rejection by the Pharisees because they were not sufficiently acceptable to Israel, it is somewhat painful to hear them dismiss the Canaanite woman on essentially the same grounds. Jesus will touch upon this when he compares the pagans to dogs, who were impure creatures.
When He does make the comparison, the words He chooses are quite intriguing, and are somewhat weakened in translation. Let me paraphrase a bit to give you an idea of the impact of Jesus’ words: "It is not right to accept the bread of the children and throw it away to the dogs." As in many languages, the Greek word for food, artos, literally means ‘bread’, even ‘loaves’.
The woman’s reply to this reinforces the suggestion that Jesus had some particular goal in testing the Canaanite woman. Why did He mention bread, why taking and throwing away? I wonder if she had heard about the miraculous feeding and all of the extra bread. What happened to the twelve baskets full of bread, anyway? On a figurative level, I would like to suggest that the superabundance of bread was an invitation to the Gentiles to seek after the true bread from heaven, Jesus Christ. The faith of the Canaanite woman and her persistence in prayer to Jesus made manifest the new plan of God breaking into the world, a new plan for human society.
No longer would the defining characteristic of the People of God be the purity laws of the Torah, good as they were. The new characteristic is faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of God.
Twenty centuries later, we must press ourselves in asking: how do we make judgments about who is in and who is out? Do we adopt the rule of faith as did the Canaanite woman? Or am I on the lookout for the signs of non-conformity in others as an excuse not to include them? When I encounter someone new, or someone who irks me, seems importunate or uses words that seem problematic, do I try to send that person away, or do I remain open to embracing him, after carefully testing of the spirits?
Many people are asking today, "What kind of Church should we be?" Should we be about radical inclusion? The high adventure of orthodoxy? Retrenchment in preconciliar models of liturgy and authority in the wake of postconciliar abuses? Principled advocacy of the marginalized? The model we choose will be related to the persons whom we are willing to embrace, to test, to love. We should first of all readily admit that while the superabundance of grace offered to the world in Jesus Christ is extended to everyone, that everyone is invited, to enter requires that we be tested and demonstrate our faith. Likewise, we should be forewarned that neither the great religious men of the day, the Pharisees, nor the simple unlearned disciples got it right. We must always stand ready to have our own ideas of what the Church ought to look life challenged. This is because all of us alike are emerging not from some remote pristine location where we’ve been able to obey God with complete purity of heart, but we emerge into Kingdom from sinful lives and sinful choices. This is truly Good News. The extent to which we exempt ourselves from Paul’s dictum that all have been delivered to disobedience, the less likely we are to understand the radically inclusive offer of God’s love to all men and women.
Let us prepare ourselves now to be that People of God. Let us probe our own thoughts and actions and find those that are not in keeping with the requirements of citizenship, renounce them and come forward seeking reconciliation with Jesus Christ and therefore with each other in Holy Communion. May Christ be praised for ever and ever. Amen.
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
If their rejection is the reconciliation of the world, what will their acceptance be but life from the dead? The language of acceptance and rejection is the language of human decision and organization. The two terms ‘accept’ and ‘reject’ derive from Latin words that suggest ‘taking’ and ‘throwing back’. Deciding what to keep and what to dispose of is also known as discernment. In monastic spirituality, we speak of the discernment of thoughts, which is to say, our aim is to learn to recognize the thoughts going through our minds and then to learn how to accept or reject them. By the choices that we make, we determine the type of character we shall have.
In the context of a nation or a people, the issue of discernment determines what sort of person should be in and what sort of person should be rejected. Western nations, in the wake of the London and Madrid bombings and wage depression caused by unauthorized immigration, are waking up to the fact that any society must provide rules by which everyone must live, if that society is to have any measure of security and coherence. A negative way to state the same dilemma is this: not everyone has your best interests at heart; choose your friends and your compatriots carefully. Test them. Conversely, if we want to be a part of a particular society, then we must be willing to be tested, to demonstrate our good will toward the others within it.
What sort of society should the Church be, based on today’s Liturgy of the Word?
In today’s gospel, Jesus puts the Canaanite woman to the trial, and it is a discomforting one for those who think of Jesus’ gospel as merely the preaching of love and acceptance. If this woman is going to win Jesus’ acceptance and avoid his rejection, she has to do some pretty quick thinking and acting. She didn’t have the luxury of a year-long catechumenate: her daughter was ill and needed help immediately. Why did Jesus resort to this odd standoffish behavior?
The Fathers of the Church pointed out that Jesus, knowing the hearts of those He met, knew that this woman had the requisite faith and good will and was genuinely seeking not merely the health of her daughter, but in return, the glory of Christ. Jesus knows that testing her faith would lead to edification for His disciples; indeed, I hope to demonstrate that He had even more in mind. We should bear this story and this trial in mind at prayer when we, like the Canaanite woman, do not receive an immediate answer. This is not necessarily a sign that we lack sufficient faith; indeed, it might be a sign that God knows our faith is strong as has special plans for this gift in us.
It is worth noting that in the silence that follows, she does not immediately speak. The disciples interrupt and make their own suggestion to Jesus, to send her away. I would again liken these to the demons whom we encounter in prayer when things don’t seem to be going well, those nagging thoughts that we have displeased God in some way, that He doesn’t want to listen, that our prayer is rejected and not accepted.
The disciples’ rejection is poignant when placed in the larger story of Matthew’s gospel. In the previous chapter, Jesus had fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread with 12 baskets of scraps left over. This was a clear sign of God’s appearance at the end of time to redeem Israel. Despite this sign, when Jesus returned to the towns, the Pharisees were waiting for him, ready to pick fights with him regarding purity laws. In their minds, if God was going to come to Israel, it would be because the people were steadfastly rejecting anyone who sullied the observance of the law. They were not willing to accept Jesus and His disciples because despite the signs that Jesus worked, He didn’t seem to have Israel’s interests at heart. He was not a strict observer of the Law. I make this observation, of course, withholding judgment on whether the Pharisees knew what was good for them.
After the disciples had suffered rejection by the Pharisees because they were not sufficiently acceptable to Israel, it is somewhat painful to hear them dismiss the Canaanite woman on essentially the same grounds. Jesus will touch upon this when he compares the pagans to dogs, who were impure creatures.
When He does make the comparison, the words He chooses are quite intriguing, and are somewhat weakened in translation. Let me paraphrase a bit to give you an idea of the impact of Jesus’ words: "It is not right to accept the bread of the children and throw it away to the dogs." As in many languages, the Greek word for food, artos, literally means ‘bread’, even ‘loaves’.
The woman’s reply to this reinforces the suggestion that Jesus had some particular goal in testing the Canaanite woman. Why did He mention bread, why taking and throwing away? I wonder if she had heard about the miraculous feeding and all of the extra bread. What happened to the twelve baskets full of bread, anyway? On a figurative level, I would like to suggest that the superabundance of bread was an invitation to the Gentiles to seek after the true bread from heaven, Jesus Christ. The faith of the Canaanite woman and her persistence in prayer to Jesus made manifest the new plan of God breaking into the world, a new plan for human society.
No longer would the defining characteristic of the People of God be the purity laws of the Torah, good as they were. The new characteristic is faith in Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of God.
Twenty centuries later, we must press ourselves in asking: how do we make judgments about who is in and who is out? Do we adopt the rule of faith as did the Canaanite woman? Or am I on the lookout for the signs of non-conformity in others as an excuse not to include them? When I encounter someone new, or someone who irks me, seems importunate or uses words that seem problematic, do I try to send that person away, or do I remain open to embracing him, after carefully testing of the spirits?
Many people are asking today, "What kind of Church should we be?" Should we be about radical inclusion? The high adventure of orthodoxy? Retrenchment in preconciliar models of liturgy and authority in the wake of postconciliar abuses? Principled advocacy of the marginalized? The model we choose will be related to the persons whom we are willing to embrace, to test, to love. We should first of all readily admit that while the superabundance of grace offered to the world in Jesus Christ is extended to everyone, that everyone is invited, to enter requires that we be tested and demonstrate our faith. Likewise, we should be forewarned that neither the great religious men of the day, the Pharisees, nor the simple unlearned disciples got it right. We must always stand ready to have our own ideas of what the Church ought to look life challenged. This is because all of us alike are emerging not from some remote pristine location where we’ve been able to obey God with complete purity of heart, but we emerge into Kingdom from sinful lives and sinful choices. This is truly Good News. The extent to which we exempt ourselves from Paul’s dictum that all have been delivered to disobedience, the less likely we are to understand the radically inclusive offer of God’s love to all men and women.
Let us prepare ourselves now to be that People of God. Let us probe our own thoughts and actions and find those that are not in keeping with the requirements of citizenship, renounce them and come forward seeking reconciliation with Jesus Christ and therefore with each other in Holy Communion. May Christ be praised for ever and ever. Amen.
posted by Prior Peter, OSB | 8:50 PM
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