20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year A
First Reading: Is 56:1,6-7
Second Reading: Rom 11:13-15,29-32
Gospel Reading: Mt 15:21-28
“Christ died for all men without exception,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. “There is not, never has been, and never will be a single human being for whom Christ did not suffer.”
However, in the Gospel Reading, Jesus says, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel” and compares the Canaanite woman to a “dog.”
Similarly, when Jesus first commissioned his apostles, he said, “Do not visit pagan territory and do not enter a Samaritan town. Go instead after the lost sheep of the House of Israel.”
God’s love is “elective,” Pope Benedict XVI said: “among all the nations he chooses Israel and loves her.” As his chosen people, she was “the first to hear the word of God,” says the Catechism, and “the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.”
However, God chose Israel “precisely with a view to healing the whole human race,” Pope Benedict noted. “Salvation is from the Jews,” Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well.
“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” God promised in the First Reading. Accordingly, Jesus’ final command to his apostles was to “make disciples of all nations.”
However, when Jesus met the Canaanite woman, it was not yet time. Only on Palm Sunday did he say, “The hour has come.” Nonetheless, the woman’s faith moved him to “jump the gun,” so to speak, and he healed her daughter.
In calling her “woman,” Jesus was not being disrespectful. “This was his normal, polite way of addressing women,” the Bible Knowledge Word Study explains. This is how he addressed his mother, Mary Magdalene, the Samaritan woman, the crippled woman, and the woman caught committing adultery.
Let us now examine his enigmatic behaviour in refusing, at first, to answer the woman because she was not Jewish, and then comparing her to a dog.
According to the American Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” That statement, of course, applies to nothing other than our democratic right to vote; in counting ballots, we give A’s the same value as B’s, even if A is a political economist and B a political ignoramus.
However, it has led to the widespread idea that all people have a right to be treated identically, even by God.
For example, a teacher told me that once, when he had allowed a student to leave the room, he was accused of favouritism for not letting another do the same.
“I explained that the first one had been working hard and had to go to the bathroom, while the second one had been ‘goofing off’ and simply wanted a break,” he told me. “If I hadn’t known them, I would have treated them both the same—but I did know them.”
Now God knows each of us in the depths of our being. He is not bound, then, by our legal fiction that we are all created equal. His treatment of every individual is infinitely better than we deserve.
Moreover, we have no “rights” in our dealings with God. On our own, we cannot deserve or merit his favour or do anything to earn it. “Who has given him anything so as to deserve return?” St. Paul asks.
“Between God and us there is an immeasurable inequality, for we have received everything from him, our Creator,” says the Catechism. Even the merit we acquire as Christians is due to him, for our “good actions proceed in Christ, from the predispositions and assistance given by the Holy Spirit.” Our very capacity to merit was merited for us by Christ.
It should not surprise us, then, that Jesus compared the Canaanite woman to a dog. What should surprise us is that God the Son, sent by his Father to the “lost sheep of the House of Israel,” allows us “dogs” to “eat the crumbs” from His table.
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available on YouTube in both written and audio form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course, and will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again, with new insights, starting August 30.
