Today’s readings: Isaiah 56,1.6-7; Romans 11,13-15.29-32; Matthew 15,21-28.
St Matthew’s gospel addresses a community of predominantly Jewish extraction having to choose between a straitjacket religion and the universal salvation proclaimed by Jesus. After more than 2,000 years, it is the same choice many of us are still troubled with. We still belong to a religion, a Church, and communities where many are judged not only as undeserving of our understanding, but even of God’s own universal love and infinite mercy.
The essence of any religion is to enhance the peace and harmony of each individual and of humankind at large. This is central in today’s Scripture texts and so vital nowadays that we face a resurgence of different forms of racism and exclusion, as well as ways of justifying the unfair and ill-treatment of many believed to be inferior to others. We still hear echoes of old spectral ideologies that look down on cultures, races and peoples, believing some are superior to others.
Honestly, this ‘us and them’ attitude underlies many biblical narratives and was still mainstream at the time of Jesus, as today’s gospel story confirms. Jesus withdraws from the Jewish territory and crosses to a pagan region whose inhabitants were considered by the Jews as unclean. The story of the Canaanite woman serves as pretext for the breakthrough of Jesus’s message over the ungodly religion of the Jews.
Again, this is a mostly challenging discourse for our civilisation in the third millennium. The entire planet should be the common home for everyone, and no people can ever be justified in claiming any sacred right over other peoples, let alone considering a threat whoever is in search of a homeland.
Religion can easily be a disguise when it serves only as a potion to the individual soul or when it creates comfort zones that continue to be exclusive. Isaiah, in the history of Israel, was a robust voice, daring in words and vision, and his words still echo as planetary: “Have a care for justice, act with integrity”. “I will make foreigners joyful in my house of prayer.” He was proclaiming this because Israel had narrowed down its vision of a chosen and privileged people in the eyes of God.
Jesus in the gospel seems to be refusing to minister to the Canaanite woman on the ground that she was a foreigner. But faith belongs to the domain of the heart and to the essence of what is deeply human in every person, irrespective of what makes us different one from the other.
From the standpoint of our churches, there are still so many whom we treat as ‘Canaanite women’ and who are excluded from our pastoral concern. Writing to the Romans, St Paul in today’s reading refers to himself as the apostle of pagans. At such an early stage, Christianity kept broadening its vision to be inclusive, though later, for centuries it was blocked in a world-Church antagonism that made it exclusive and inward-looking.
It is high time we break free from these internal blockages. The pastoral conversion at the basis of Pope Francis’s vision cannot happen on an institutional level because it is an attitude of the soul and it debunks the exclusivism of religion and belies the ‘holier than thou’ spirit. Our task as believers is to see the world as God sees the world, not as it is seen by religion or politics or culture.
Today’s gospel narrative invites us, among other things, to know the feeling of being excluded, of being left on the margins in the name of religion or on the premise of some entitlement on God by religionists. We may be out of sync with the rest of humankind, but seeing the world as God sees it should make us speak a different vision of the world and of what enhances the peace and harmony of humankind.