Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 19, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twentieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
August 19, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The text on which the brief homily was based was:

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will give a pagan woman the greatest compliment he ever gave anyone. It is the type of tribute he wanted to give to every one of his fellow Jews, the accolade he wants to bestow on every Christian, and the commendation he wants to say to each of us now and when we meet him face-to-face: “Great is your faith!”
• Jesus’ praise of the woman in this Sunday’s Gospel was not cheap. It was a result of the way the woman responded to the terrible predicament of having a possessed daughter and all the problems that likely contributed to her possession and followed upon it. Jesus’ admiration was also the result of his dialogue with her that would have tested her faith to the limit. His tribute was the end result of a process of growth in faith that culminated with his amazed acclaim. We are able this Sunday to enter the scene and learn from this Syro-Phoenician woman how we, too, can grow in faith so that our faith may, too, become great and praiseworthy.
• The question we ought to ask at the outset, however, is whether our faith is great, small or just average right now. Are we living by faith part-time or full-time? Is our relationship with our triune God the most important aspect of our self-identity? Jesus once wondered aloud whether when he returned he would find faith on earth (Lk 18:8). If Jesus were to come right now, would he compliment us like he praised the Canaanite woman or would he say of us what he often said of some of his closest followers as we heard last Sunday: “O you of little faith?” Most of us, if we’re honest, might respond like the man whose son Jesus healed of possession, who said to Jesus, “Lord, I do believe. Help my unbelief!” This Sunday Jesus gives us that assistance through his interaction with this needy mom. We see her great faith shine and grow in the four tests Jesus gave her.
• 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.” Jesus’ response was total silence. St. Matthew, an eyewitness, tells us, “He did not say a word in answer to her.” Jesus’ silent treatment seems a cruel thing to do to a desperate mom. Jesus, however, who almost certainly was prepared to work the exorcism, wanted to effectuate another miracle that day, a greater one, for the woman, for the disciples with him, and for all of us. To do that, though, he needed to try her faith. He did so first by his silence. Even though he was seeming to ignore her, the woman didn’t give up.
• Her second attempt was intercession. She ran up to the disciples and asked them to intervene. We can imagine her grabbing on their clothes and arms, raising her voice, begging their assistance. It drove the disciples to their breaking point. They approached Jesus and said with frustrated urgency, “Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us!” They were asking Jesus to work a miracle just to get rid of the lady, she was so bothersome. Jesus refused their advances, too. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he said, within her hearing. This was her second test. Jesus treated her as if she were a pagan have-not. It would have been easy for her to wallow in self-pity and go away dejected. It would have been easy for her out of frustration and disappointment to call Jesus and the apostles hypocritical and heartless. 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 and begged, simply, “Lord, help me!” “Help!” is one of the most poignant expressions that exist in any language. Most people come running when a woman begs for help. Jesus, however, responded, “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 expression Jesus used 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 field. 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 like that, may have just stopped in our tracks and wept or sought to defend our disrespected dignity. This woman, in her third test, didn’t. Instead, unbelievably, she 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,” saying that even puppies and chihuahuas eat the crumbs that fall from the children’s table. She was essentially saying that even if she and her daughter were insignificant little dogs incessantly barking, even if they 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 by the woman’s persistence, trust, and deep theological understanding, and so he proclaimed what had been gradually revealed over the course of their dialogue: “O woman, great is your faith!” Her faith was not crumb-like in size or the size of a mustard seed. It was much bigger, and faith like that can move mountains. Jesus then worked the miracle the woman had been requesting: “Let it be done for you as you wish,” an echo of what another woman of great faith, his Mother, had said to the Archangel Gabriel. St. Matthew tells us that the woman’s daughter was healed from that very instant. But that was the woman’s fourth test. She needed to walk away with faith that what the Lord’s words to her would indeed be filled. 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 similarly trusted and departed — and her faith did not let her down.
• Sometimes the Lord uses similar, non-conventional, obviously difficult means to help us grow in faith. He often responds to us in silence. When we pray and don’t seem to get a response, how do we handle it? Do we give up, stop praying, think God doesn’t care, and drift away from him? In these circumstances God is often giving us a chance to learn how to pray perseveringly so that we may grow in faith and perseverance in life. Similarly, when we encounter favoritism in the Church, when we don’t seem to be in the in-crowd, when we’re not treated in accordance with our dignity as the Lord’s sons and daughters, do we storm off in anger, do we sulk or do we persist in faith? Again, when people who are supposed to be acting in Jesus’ name insult us accidentally or seemingly intentionally, when they scandalize us compared with the way we anticipate they should behave, do we allow it to commit spiritual suicide, cutting ourselves off from Christ, or do we continue to draw out the good in people with holy intransigence and wit? At the most general level of all, when we encounter contradictions to our faith, when our prayer doesn’t seem to work, when those we count on initially don’t respond as we hoped, do we continue to fight the good fight and keep the faith, or abandon both fight and faith? Today, as students are in various places returning to school, as many employees are returning from vacation, and classes to become Catholic are about to recommence, the Lord wants us to convert these new beginnings into opportunities for our faith to grow. He teaches us that the path to become great in what is most important in life is not an easy path, nor an expected one, but one that is meant to forge us in a crucible to become truly heroic in our loving trust in God and loving care for others.
• This Sunday at Mass, we will meet the same Lord the Canaanite woman did. He will not give us leftover crumbs from a table but will nourish us first with every word that comes from his mouth and then with himself as the Bread of Life. Let’s trust in his words as the woman did at the end of the Gospel. Let’s ask him, too, to give us the grace of holy perseverance in prayer, in the Christian life, and in the grace 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 all the heroes of faith at the eternal banquet of God’s children.

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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