20TH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (YEAR A)

1st Reading                Isaiah 56:1, 6-7

Psalm                           67: 2-3, 5, 6 & 8 (R. 4)

R:// "Let the peoples praise you, O God; let all the peoples praise you!"

2nd Reading              Romans 11: 13-15, 29-32

Gospel                         Matthew 15: 21-28

EVERYONE IS WELCOME

Friends, Pax et Bonum! On this 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A), we have our first reading from Isaiah 56: 1, 6-7. 

We need to observe that the text of the first reading, Isaiah 56:1, 6-7, belongs to the section of Isaiah that scholars call Trito-Isaiah, composed after the exile, addressed to a community that has returned to Zion only to discover that the land is smaller than the promise. In fact, Trito-Isaiah has a very high universalistic overtone and seeks to make room for foreigners even in the house of God. On that basis, the text mentions that "The foreigners who join themselves to the LORD..." Let us pause to see what the prophet had just done. He takes the Hebrew verb NILVIM (נִלְוִים, "who join themselves") and applies it to foreigners standing outside the assembly. 

The root LAVAH (לוה, "to join, to be joined") is the same root that gives Israel the name of its priestly tribe, Levi, whose mother Leah cried at his birth, "now my husband will be joined to me" (Genesis 29:34). What Isaiah is doing is to reach out for the same verb of the Priesthood itself and hands it over to outsiders. Therefore, the foreigner who loves the Name and keeps the covenant is tolerated in the worshipping assembly, but more than that, he is described in Priestly language, joined to the Lord the way a Levite is joined to the Altar. A foreigner can equally serve God. The first thing we should get from the text of the first reading is that the house of God and membership of the worshipping assembly is not restricted or limited to a select few. It is open to you, without inhibitions of tribe, race and culture.  

Let us observe a second built-in universalism from the text. The oracle closes on the Temple, Solomon's "house of prayer" [(BEIT TEFILLAH (בֵּית תְּפִלָּה)]. He insists that that house should be called "house of prayer for all the peoples" [KOL HA'AMMIM (כָּל־הָעַמִּים]. Remember that it is the same line that Jesus wjll quote, in righteous anger, while overturning tables in that same Temple (Matthew 21:13), because by his day the house of prayer for all peoples had been fenced off with a wall in the Court of the Gentiles bearing an inscription warning outsiders, on pain of death, not to proceed further. 

The Gospel passage is from Matthew 15: 21-28, the passage about the faith of the Canaanites woman. I want to suggest that we move a little backward to consider what came before this beautiful passage. The pericope comes immediately after Jesus has just finished dismantling the Pharisees' teaching on ritual defilement, and taught that nothing entering a man from outside can defile him, only what comes from the heart (15: 1-20). What we read today concretely puts that teaching to the test. Jesus crosses out of Israel into pagan territory, and there, in the mouth of a foreign woman his own disciples want silenced, he finds a faith purer than anything he has just encountered among the guardians of the Law. Let us underline three very important details from the text to butress that the point that persistence in prayer is rewarded. We shall do that at the comfort of the language and geography. 

 The first point is what Matthew tells us Jesus did. He "withdrew". The verb is ANECHŌRĒSEN (ἀνεχώρησεν). It is the same verb that Matthew used when he recorded the flight of thr Holy Family into Egypt (2:14), the same verb that sends Jesus away after John's arrest (4: 12), and the same verb that removes him from the plotting Pharisees (12: 15). I think we should see it as a verb of strategic movement away from danger and often, toward mission. In the Gospel of today, it carries Jesus across the border into the district of Tyre and Sidon, and that destination is very significant for our study of the text. 

Tyre and Sidon were the Phoenician homeland of Jezebel, the daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians (1 Kings 16:31), the queen who imported Baal worship into Israel and hunted the prophets of the LORD to the point that Elijah fled for his life. When Elijah fled the famine he had pronounced, the LORD sent him to Zarephath, "which belongs to Sidon" (1 Kings 17: 9), where a Gentile widow fed him and received back her dead son alive. Jesus will later name that very episode aloud in the Nazareth synagogue, provoking a riot, precisely because it proved that Elijah "was sent to none of them, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon" (Luke 4:26).

What is Jesus doing in that territory by withdrawing? I want to suggest that he is retracing the geography of the prophet who found in Sidon the hospitality Israel itself had refused him. Ezekiel and Isaiah both pronounce oracles of judgment against Tyre and Sidon as symbols of pride and idolatry (Ezekiel 26–28; Isaiah 23). However, the Psalmist almost names Tyre among the nations that will one day be inscribed as citizens of Zion, born there like everyone else (Psalm 87:4). Jesus walks into cursed territory carrying that older, stranger promise, and finds it fulfilled in a mother who will not let him leave without a blessing. 

The withdrawal of Jesus into that foreign area is the first argument of the passage, to teach us that foreigners even have a welcoming spirit for the salvation of God. They have the faith necessary to obtain salvation. On that account, they should not be dismissed. We can see faith well-expressed in areas where the Gospel message is not dominant. 

Let us reach out for a second detail. The Gospel according to Mark, in telling the same story, calls the woman a Syrophoenician, the ethnic-geographic term for a Phoenician of the Roman province of Syria (Mark 7:26). Notice that Matthew rather calls her a CANAANITE. "Canaanite" is a word out of Joshua and Deuteronomy, the ancient covenantal designation for the nations under "the ban", under the ḤEREM (חֵרֶם), the people Israel was commanded to drive out of the land (Deut. 7:1–2; 20:16–17). Far from telling us where the woman lives, I think Matthew is dressing the woman in Israel's oldest category of enmity, the nation that stood, in the world of the Torah, furthest outside the circle of election. Simply, the foreignness of this woman is told. 

The Gospel according to Matthew interestingly opens with a genealogy to tell us what he does with Canaanite women. Among the fathers is a line of mothers, thus, Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, the wife of Uriah, and Mary. Rahab is named clearly as a Canaanite of Jericho, a woman under the very ban this Gospel will later invoke, who nonetheless confesses before the walls fall that "the LORD your God is God in heaven above and on earth below" (Joshua 2: 11), and is grafted by that confession into the bloodline of the Messiah. I think the Canaanite woman we hear about today stands in Rahab's shadow. Both are women of the accursed nation who see, ahead of Israel itself, exactly who stands in front of them. Rahab confesses before Jericho's walls fall. The Canaanite woman confesses, "Lord, Son of David," before the wall of Jesus' own silence falls. Matthew is showing us that the pattern of Rahab has never stopped repeating, and that this woman on the road to Tyre is Rahab's daughter in faith before she is anyone's daughter in flesh. Although a foreigner, her faith, consistent with Rahab's confession, wins her admittance into the salvation of God. 

Let us end with a third detail. I think it is the hardest line in the text. Jesus said "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs". The Ancient Near Eastern insult behind the image, calling a Gentile a dog, ordinarily meant the wild dogs that scavenged the streets and ate carrion the very animals that devoured Jezebel's own corpse at Jezreel after her fall (2 Kings 9:36, a memory that would not be lost on anyone standing in Jezebel's home territory). However, Jesus does not use that word. He uses KYNARIA, the small household dogs kept as pets, permitted to linger near the table while the children eat. It is still, undeniably, a hard saying, a statement of order and priority, that Israel's children are fed before the household pets are fed. Notice that it is spoken in the register of a family scene, not a curse, and the woman hears the opening he has left her.

The woman replied and said that, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters" (v. 27). Let us expand her point a little. If it is granted that even household dogs eat what falls from the table without depriving the children of a single portion, then it follows, necessarily, that a Gentile may receive a crumb of Israel's Messiah without robbing Israel of anything at all. Jesus says that "Great is your faith". This is the only place in Matthew's Gospel where Jesus commends faith as "great". In other places, he addresses even his closest disciples as "of little faith" (8:26; 14:31; 16:8). The verdict of the third point is that a Canaanite mother, a foreign woman has expressed faith. 

Pax et Bonum