The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time [A]
Isaiah 56:1,6-7  +  Romans 11:13-15,29-32  +  Matthew 15:21-28

“For God delivered all to disobedience, that He might have mercy upon all.”

+     +     +

references to the Catechism of the Catholic Church cited for this Sunday by the Vatican’s Homiletic Directory:

CCC 543-544: Kingdom first to Israel, now for all who believe
CCC 674: Christ’s coming hope of Israel; their final acceptance of Messiah
CCC 2610: power of invocation with sincere faith
CCC 831, 849: the catholicity of the Church

+     +     +

Love is what moves people through life.  Love is what motivates.  Love is what gives meaning to life.  But what is true love?  What does real love look like?  The world defines love in countless ways, many of which contradict each other.  If you flip through television or YouTube channels, you’re likely to find a different definition of love offered by each channel.  Love of money, love of possessions, love of knowledge, love of pleasure:  all of these are definitions of love that the world offers for our belief.

The Church proclaims that the love of God is summed up by the crucifix.  If we want to know what love is, that’s all the further we have to look.  But to understand the love of God, and to make it part of our own lives, is something much different and more difficult.  It requires faith.

Today’s Gospel Reading, in turn, shows us how faith becomes love.

The dialogue between Jesus and the Gentile woman shows how God relates to each of us who like the Gentile woman is a sinner.  This dialogue also shows how God wants us to relate to Him:  both in our daily lives, and from the broader perspective of our spiritual growth over the years.

In Sunday’s Gospel Reading, the evangelist Matthew tells us that a Canaanite woman—which is to say, an outsider—came to Jesus and called out, “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!”  This woman, despite not being one of the people who had been waiting for the Messiah, nonetheless knew who Jesus was.  So she cried out to Him for help.  But what happened next?

Jesus did not say a word in answer to her.  Not a word!  Here is a woman whose daughter is being tormented, yet Jesus did not say a word in answer to her.  What kind of love is this?  If you have ever prayed intensely for a serious problem, and felt that God did not answer your prayer, you can identify with the Gentile woman.

But can you identify with her faith?  Perhaps you can identify with her cry for help going unanswered, but can you identify with what the woman does next?  She is a woman whose faith is not shaken, and who puts her faith into action time and again.  She goes now to Jesus a second time, and simply says, “Lord, help me.”  What is Jesus’ response?

He calls the woman a dog!  He says to this outsider, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”  The “children” Jesus is referring to are the children of Israel, the ones the Father sent Him to teach, while this woman is an outsider, a “dog”.  But why is Jesus talking this way?

God demands faith from us, even when we believe we have none.  He is willing to “pull” our faith out of us—indeed, to test us—in order to purify our faith.  Jesus knows what sort of faith this woman has.  He is willing to draw it out, because without faith on this woman’s part He will not work a miracle.

Faith is always required for God to work in our lives.  God requires faith, in the sense that He demands it from us.  Whenever you read the Gospel and see an occasion where Jesus does not work a miracle, it is not because His divine power has “run out”.  Without faith on our part, God’s grace would be an empty gift.  But what kind of faith does God want from us?

The faith that God wants from us is not passive.  It’s active.  God does not want the sort of faith that says, “God is going to take care of everything, so I can sit back and coast.”  That is not our Catholic understanding of faith.  Faith involves something active on our part.  It demands constant prayer.  It demands the sort of dialogue that we hear between Jesus and the Gentile woman.  We might even say that God wants us to challenge Him in our prayer, so that He might challenge us to greater faith, and thereby greater love.