Homily preached by the Rev. Jonathan A. Mitchican at Epiphany of the Lord Catholic Church in Katy, TX on Sunday, August 20, 2023 - Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Matthew 15:21-28 and Isaiah 56:1, 6-7)
A couple of years ago, there was a meme circulating on Catholic Twitter that said, “What’s your favorite Marian apparition and why is it Our Lady of Guadalupe?” There are many reasons to love her, but one of the things I find most compelling about her is that she chose to appear as a mestiza, a person whose heritage included both Spanish colonizers and the native people who they often treated very poorly. The Spaniards thought of the native people as if they were inferior, yet Our Lady didn’t shy away from identifying herself with them. She chose to appear not to the rich, or the powerful, or the well-educated, but to St. Juan Diego, a poor farmer whose skin color, language, and cultural heritage made him a person of low standing in his society. It’s easy to look at Our Lady of Guadalupe and to hear the words of Mary in the Magnificat, “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly/ He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty.”
We see this same kind of radical embrace of the marginalized in our readings today. God speaks through Isaiah, announcing that “foreigners” who “keep [His] covenant” will be allowed “on His holy mountain” and their sacrifices and prayers will be accepted. This might seem like a small gesture, but in the ancient world it was huge. Each nation had its own god, and it was common for nations to believe that their god would bless them because they were superior to all others. Israel was no exception. Foreigners who looked different, who spoke a different language, who were poor and therefore perceived to be a drain on resources - Israel viewed these people as inferior and unworthy of God’s love. Yet God announces clearly here that the salvation He promises is for all people, of every race and nation.
Jesus is the fulfillment of that promise. In the gospel reading we just heard, a Canaanite woman is seeking Jesus, but she is an outsider, a foreigner, and so His disciples believe that she has no business bothering Jesus. They ask Jesus to make her go away, and He seems at first to oblige them. He says something to her that sounds rude to our ears, “It’s not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” The people of Israel are the children, while the Canaanites are dogs. This is a hard thing for us to hear out of the mouth of Jesus, because we wouldn’t want to believe that Jesus would think that way. So why does He say it?
He’s repeating here the common attitude of the people of His day, not because it’s what He believes, but because it’s what everyone around Him believed—it’s certainly what His disciples believed—and it was also what she would expect to hear. He’s testing her faith, her resolve, but she doesn’t flinch. She tells Him that she’s willing to be a dog, if only she might have some scraps from the Master’s table. But Jesus has something much better for her. “Great is your faith!” He says. “Be it done for you as you desire.” Jesus affirms in that moment that she’s worthy of the same promise that was made to Israel. He’s come for the “lost sheep of the house of Israel,” but that now includes her. Israel is no longer an ethnic group with clear and enforceable borders. Israel is now everyone who trusts in the power of God.
This is good news, friends! It is good news all the way around. It is good news for the poor and the oppressed whom the Lord lifts up and honors, offering them every blessing and a renewed hope for the future. But it is also in a strange way good news even for those who have been the oppressors, because it knocks the scales from their eyes and offers them not only a chance to repent but the opportunity to understand more deeply and more fully what it means to be made in the image and likeness of God.
In our fallen world, there’s always a temptation to identify our membership in some group or another with our salvation. We’re the good people, the ones with the right background, who do the right thing. They’re the real problem, the others, the outsiders, the ones who don’t look like us, who don’t think like us or talk like us, who are foreigners, agitators, criminals. Jesus and His Blessed Mother show us how wrong it is that we imagine we can save ourselves by not being them. In Christ, there is no them. We’re all Israel now, and though we may only deserve scraps from the table, Our Lord promises all of us who humble ourselves the riches of His feast.