Becoming Great in Faith through Divine Trials, 20th Sunday (A), August 20, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
August 20, 2023
Is 56:1.6-7, Ps 67, Rom 11:13-15.29-32, Mt 15:21-28

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s Gospel Jesus gives a pagan woman the greatest compliment he could give to anyone, the type of tribute he wanted to give to every one of his fellow Jews, the accolade he wants to give every Christian, the salutation he wants to give to people from all nations (the subject of the first reading and psalm), and the commendation he wants to say about each of us now and when we meet him face-to-face: “Great is your faith!”
• Jesus’ praise was not cheap. It was a result of the way the woman responded to the terrible problem of having a possessed daughter and all the issues that likely led to her possession and followed it. It was the result of a dialogue with Jesus that would have tested her faith to the limit. It was the end of a process of growth in faith that culminated with Jesus’ amazed acclaim.
• In today’s Gospel we are able to enter the scene and learn from this Syro-Phoenician woman how we, too, can grow in faith so that our faith may genuinely become great.
• The question we ought to ask at the outset, however, is whether our faith is great or small or just average right now. Are we living by faith full-time or only part-time? Is our faith the most important aspect of our self-identity? Do we want it to be? If Jesus were to come, would he compliment us like he praised the Canaanite woman or would he say of us what he often said to some of his closest followers, including the apostles last week in the crash course on faith he gave them during a storm on the Sea of Galilee: “O you of little faith!”? Jesus once wondered aloud whether we he returned whether he would find faith on earth at all (Lk 18:8). He said those words at the end of a parable about an importune woman who bothered an unjust judge so much that he finally did right by her, suggesting that if he finds faith, he’ll find us persevering like that bothersome widow or today’s Canaanite mother. Do we have that type of resolve that flows from faith and helps it to grow? And if we have that resolve, how, practically, can we grow in faith?
• We see the various steps involved in that growth in today’s dramatic Gospel scene, which is at the surface one of the most confusing and even disturbing in all of Sacred Scripture, when Jesus subjects a woman to a test in faith. But he did so because she was capable of it, and in helping her to grow in faith, Jesus would help his disciples and all of us. There are four essential steps to the boot camp of faith in which Jesus trained her, each one of which was a bigger challenge, and all of which she passed.
• The first test happened when she went up to Jesus and called out, “Have pity on me Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.” She began with an act of faith in his power and goodness. The fact that she used the language she did showed already how much she was prepared to do and to risk. Canaanites, especially those in Tyre, had nothing to do with Jews. They were considered enemies all the way back to the time of the Phoenicians who battled against David. For her to call Jesus “Son of David!” was almost an act of treason for the people of her region and for her to call him “Lord” was an act of apostasy against the region’s system of pagan worship. But as Jesus was coming into this pagan territory to get away from the intrigue of those seeking to entrap him, she was going out to meet him in what seems to be a divinely arranged encounter. She had almost certainly heard about the Nazarene carpenter who had worked many exorcisms and other great miracles and with maternal love was begging for him to do the same for her daughter.
• What was Jesus’ response? Total silence. St. Matthew, an eyewitness, tells us, “But he did not say a word in answer to him.” It seems a cruel response to give to a desperate mother! Jesus, however, who almost certainly was prepared to work the exorcism, wanted to effectuate a far greater miracle than an exorcism on behalf of the woman’s daughter, but a miracle of faith in the mom, the disciples and all of us. We, too, need to learn how to deal with God’s silence. When we pray and don’t seem to get a response, how we do handle it? Do we give up, stop praying, and think that God doesn’t care? What God is often doing in these circumstances is giving us a chance to learn how to pray perseveringly so that we may grow in faith to such a degree that we will persevere faithfully in life. Regardless, when Jesus responded to the woman with cold silence, perhaps even seeming to ignore her, the woman didn’t give up.
• Her second attack was intercession. She ran up to the disciples and asked them to intervene. We can imagine her grabbing their clothes and arms, raising her voice, and imploring their assistance. The disciples couldn’t handle it. They approached Jesus and said, “Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.” Jesus refused their advances, too. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he retorted, doubtless in the woman’s earshot. She was apparently a have-not, a persona non grata, and an insulted one at that. Jesus, it might seem, didn’t care about the non-Jews. His behavior at first glance might suggest he didn’t want all nations to praise him, as we sang in the Psalm, or to have his Father’s house called a house of prayer for all peoples, as Isaiah prophesied in the first reading. It would have been easy for the woman to have gone away to wallow in self-pity. It would have been easy for her to have called Jesus and the apostles hypocrites, heartless and other names. But she was not going to give up.
• Having been rebuffed a second time, she ran up to Jesus, fell down on her stomach before him — that’s what the Greek proskinesis means — and begged, simply, “Lord, help me!” “Help!” is one of the most poignant expressions that exist in any language. Most people come running to a woman or a child who screams, “Help!” But Jesus didn’t respond that way. Instead, he said, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” We don’t know if Jesus said this with a wink of the eye or with a tone in the voice to soften it, but the text of what Jesus said was hugely insulting. In the ancient world, most dogs were stray, eating your trash, going to the bathroom at your front door, attacking kids when they were playing in the fields. To call someone a stray dog in contrast to children was about the most denigrating thing that could have been said. Many of us, if we had been called by Jesus something similar — like “cockroach” today — may have just stopped in our tracks and wept. Or we might have insisted that we have more dignity than to be offended like that. This woman didn’t protest. Instead, in her third test, she amazingly agreedwith Jesus. “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the little dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” She changed Jesus’ word “dog” into “little dog,” which could mean one of two things: that we’re dealing with puppies or chihuahuas; or the diminutive can also signify a “dear dog” or a pet. She was saying that even the littlest house puppies eat the crumbs that fall from the children’s table; even if, compared to the Jews, she might be an insignificant little dog barking incessantly; even if she and her daughter were not worthy to receive what the children of the king receive, she was professing her faith that Jesus was indeed King, Lord and Good Shepherd of the tiniest poodles, and even the littlest crumb of his mercy would be enough to work the exorcism of her daughter.
• Jesus was deeply moved, indeed positively astonished, by the woman’s persistence, great trust, and deep theological understanding, and so he proclaimed what had become obvious over the course of their dialogue: “O woman, great is your faith!” Through the tests to which Jesus had subjected her, everyone saw that her faith was not crumb-like in size at all. If faith the size of a mustard seed was sufficient to move mountains, as Jesus said elsewhere, her faith was so much greater. Jesus then worked the miracle the woman had been requesting: “Let it be done for you as you wish,” an echo of what his own Mother had said in faith to the Archangel Gabriel.
• Matthew tells us that the woman’s daughter was healed from that very instant, as she would later find out. But the healing itself was the woman’s fourth test of faith. She needed to walk away with trust that what the Lord’s words to her would indeed be fulfilled. Like the pagan centurion elsewhere in the Gospel who asked Jesus to heal his servant and believed he could do so even at a distance, so this woman needed a similar trust. And she had it. With faith she departed — and her faith did not let her down. Just as Jesus had said about the centurion that not even in all of Israel had he found such faith, he could have said the same thing to this mother about faith outside of Israel. For her to walk away, confident in the miracle of exorcism Jesus had promised had happened, was a witness of great faith, indeed.
• This progression in faith we see in the Syro-Phoenician woman is something that the Lord wants to happen to us in prayer, in life and at every Mass. At the beginning of every Mass Jesus comes out of his native place as we come out of ours to meet him. We cry out “Lord, have mercy! Christ, have mercy! Lord have mercy!” We turn to him because we’ve succumbed to the wiles of the devil, because our family members have, because our fellow citizens have, because so many in the world have, and need to have recourse to Jesus’ expulsatory power. Just like the miracle in today’s Gospel happened not just for a possessed girl at a distance but for her mother’s growth in faith, so we come at the beginning of Mass with all our own crises and problems, our own struggles, and beg for mercy for ourselves and others. The second step is when Jesus reminds us of his first mission on earth to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, as we hear the Sacred Scriptures of the Old Testament, the first reading and the psalm, that God gave to that household, and we approach him humbly, as we seek to live off of every word that comes from God’s mouth. That leads to the third moment when Jesus says, “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” We say, with the centurion in the Gospel, in imitation of the faithful persistence of the woman day, “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.” Then we get ready for something far more than crumbs. Jesus gives us the greatest meal ever, receiving not tiny crumbs, but God himself. Entering into communion with him, we change from metaphorical little dogs to true sons and daughters of God. Every Mass, therefore, help us to grow in faith, as we go from contrition and petition, through the gift of the Word of God, through the humility of the Centurion and the woman, to having all of us sit at God’s table as he then precedes to wait on us and give us himself despite our unworthiness.
• Today at Mass, we ask the Lord to strengthen our faith, that of our Christian brothers and sisters throughout the world, and all those whom God is calling to join us in his house of prayer. We thank him for giving us the word of God and for giving himself to us as our food. And we ask him to give us the grace of holy perseverance in prayer, and in the Christian life of faith, so that the Lord may say of us today, tomorrow and at the day he comes for us, “Great is your faith” and give us a seat with, we pray, the Syro-Phoenician woman and with all those who have become great in faith at the eternal banquet of God’s children.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 2
ROM 11:13-15, 29-32

Brothers and sisters:
I am speaking to you Gentiles.
Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles,
I glory in my ministry in order to make my race jealous
and thus save some of them.
For if their rejection is the reconciliation of the world,
what will their acceptance be but life from the dead?

For the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable.
Just as you once disobeyed God
but have now received mercy because of their disobedience,
so they have now disobeyed in order that,
by virtue of the mercy shown to you,
they too may now receive mercy.
For God delivered all to disobedience,
that he might have mercy upon all.

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