A good Sunday to all.
To understand today's Gospel passage, it is good to put it in context. Jesus is in Genesaret, near Capernaum, and receives an unexpected and unpleasant visit; there is a group of scribes and Pharisees who had left Jerusalem for three days' journey, to reach Genesaret. They were sent by the central Jewish authority because there is a serious problem with Jesus.
What did Jesus do? What is the reproach they blame? Jesus neglects ritual cleanings before meals. This is not a hygienic matter, hands should be washed well before eating, but this is not the case ... purifications must be made and all the gestures that must be done are well specified in the Torah. The reason is that the hands can come into contact with an object that has been touched by a pagan, therefore, impure, for this reason, before eating, purifications should be made. Jesus not only overlooked these purifications, but also taught the disciples to do the same.
It is precisely the type of arguments that outrage Jesus because, like the prophets, has always preached the adherence of the heart to the Lord and is not interested in external practices invented by men. In fact, the dispute immediately flares up a lot and Jesus tells them: "You are hypocrites, you attach so much importance to the traditions that were invented and then neglect the Word of God; and I can immediately give you an example: there is the commandment of God who orders to help the father and mother, but if you have self-interests, with your subtle discourse you can skillfully evade the Lord's precept. Then Jesus turns to the crowd to warn them against this false religiosity.
The disciples who are close to Jesus, when they see how frankly the Master speaks, they feel a little ashamed and when they are alone with him they say: "Master, look that the Pharisees, who came from Jerusalem, were scandalized by what you said." Jesus, who is tired of this dispute, interrupts and says: "Leave them, they are blind people and blind guides." Peter has the bad idea of insisting and asks Jesus to explain himself better, and at this point Jesus can't take it anymore and responds with irritation: ‘You're so dumb’ = ‘assūnetoi’, 'crazy'. Do you not understand that it is not what enters the person that makes him impure, but what comes out of the heart what makes him impure? And immediately he lists seven behaviors that come from the heart and that dehumanize the person; these are the evil projects, murders, adulteries, impurities, robberies, false testimonies, slander: these make the person impure, and not by eating without having done purifications!
Jesus no longer endures this hypocrisy of the Jewish religious institution; they are showing to be increasingly stubborn to the novelty of the Gospel. The religious institution is old wine-skin and new wine blows up old wineskins! Jesus feels uncomfortable, in this closed and isolationist world; he feels the need to get out of this world and breathe fresh air.
Let's hear what he decides to do:
“At that time, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. And behold, a Canaanite woman of that district came and called out, ‘Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon.’”
The verb with which the story begins: "withdrew" is important; it is the verb ‘go out’ = ‘iazza’ in Hebrew, is a technical term that refers to what happened in Exodus, when God sent Moses to free his people. God said to Moses, ‘Bring my people out of the strict condition of slavery and take them to the wide spaces of freedom.’ The same verb is used because Jesus feels being bound and enslaved in that religious institution, in that mentality and is looking for wider spaces; he is a free man.
What was the Israelites' conception of the pagans? Israel always considered themselves as the only chosen people loved by the Lord. They despised the pagans to whom they directed the epithet ‘dogs’. And they said ‘just as dogs are not circumcised, so the pagans are not circumcised.’
They lived apart, from the religious point of view because the Jews were strictly monotheistic and the pagans notoriously polytheistic. Then they were also morally separated; the Israelites were always very rigorous, especially in the field of sexuality; about pagans we know very well what was their behavior. Just read the Greek-Latin literature; the moral life of the pagans was dissolute. Then there was also social separation, they married within their own people and they followed their own diet. Therefore, they were separate.
If we read the fifth chapter of the Tacitus Histories, we find a description about the customs of the Jews, especially their separation from other peoples; in one instance Tacitus says the Jews were called ‘enemies of humankind’. And Juvenal, in his satires, says: ‘If you are looking for a road sign, do not ask a Jew because he will point to you the wrong direction; and if you're thirsty, he won't take you to the fountain.’ This was the conception that, then, the pagans had of the Jews.
Jesus grew up breathing this isolationist mindset from an early age, so he clearly understood the language used by his people when they spoke of the pagans; he knew the epithets they used and quickly got rid of them. We also remember that, at the synagogue in Nazareth, at one point Jesus was expelled precisely because Jesus quoted two prophets to justify his choice to carry out works of salvation for a semi-pagan people like those of Capernaum: When there were many widows in Israel, Elijah went to help a widow from Sarepta, that is, a pagan widow. And also quoted Elisha: although there were many lepers in Israel, Elisha healed Naaman, the pagan commander of the army of the king of Damascus.
Jesus was expelled from the synagogue because he did not share the isolationist positions of his people. Now Jesus has turned away; he has left Israel. He has a goal: he has 12 disciples who are not free of this mentality, they are still imbued with that separatism that is typical of Israel towards other peoples and they cannot become proclaimers of the Gospel if they do not allow themselves to be released of these mental enclaves and do not open their hearts to universalism. This must have been a reason, perhaps the main reason, for Jesus' journey to the land of Tire and Sidon.
When he arrives, a Canaanite woman approaches him and begins to shout: Lord, have mercy on me! My daughter is tormented by a demon. In Greek, it is "kacós daimonízetai", she is shaken by a demon and misbehaves. 'She has a demon' – this does not refer to the devil that the exorcists are chasing ... it has nothing to do with those. When people saw a person behave strangely, when this person was not responsible for his or her actions, and seemed touched by a bad force that led them to act detrimentally to themselves and to others, they said that these people were not the ones doing it, it was a demon that made them do it.
These were clearly diseases that Jesus had the power to heal and he often healed. However, the evangelists, when they speak of the healings made by Jesus, they always intend to give also a symbolic value, they want to show the wonders that happen when the Word of the Lord reaches a certain world. Here we have the encounter between Christ and the world that is still possessed by the evil one, the pagan world. What does this girl influenced by the demon represent? She represents the condition of pagan humanity that Jesus now meets for the first time. It is a humanity moved by evil forces that lead to carry out inhuman actions, a humanity that commits atrocities, murders, adulteries, robberies, debaucheries ... This is the humanity that Jesus meets for the first time!
We notice that the father does not appear, there is only the mother and the mother also represents this humanity that generates these daughters, who will then generate other daughters always possessed by a demon, that is, they carry out these actions that are not worthy of people. Of course, both this girl and this woman could also represent the condition of our humanity today. This mother realizes the condition of the daughter she has brought into the world and she does not resign herself to seeing that this situation continues; is the awareness that our humanity today has to come to terms to. A condition of helplessness and the need to present these miseries to the Lord, so that, with his Word, with his Gospel, Jesus will heal her. She asks Jesus to intervene on behalf of her daughter; the woman hopes that Jesus will heal her; and we would expect that Jesus decides now to go and see the girl, instead, he begins a dialogue with this Canaanite woman.
Let's hear how Jesus reacts to her request:
“Jesus did not say a word in answer to her. Jesus’ disciples came and asked him, ‘Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us.’ He said in reply, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But the woman came and did Jesus homage, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He said in reply, ‘It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.’”
At first, Jesus is indifferent, he does not respond to the woman, and this is strange because Jesus never reacted this way with the people who asked him for help. He doesn't seem to want to deal with pagan problems here. The disciples then tell him ... (Here we have to be careful because the translation is incorrect, "Send her away." The Greek verb is "apolūson"; it's an imperative, it means 'kick her out of the way, kick her out, can't you see she's still screaming?').
Jesus does not listen to the disciples and explains the reason for his silence, saying: "I have been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel! (Therefore not to the pagans). But she approached and fell down before him saying: Lord, help me!” And now comes the harshest response directed at women. Jesus says: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.”
Our translation is correct. Some translate as ‘puppies’ ... no, the puppy in Greek is called ‘cūnídion’, but here it says ‘cūnárion’, which is the house dog, the domestic dog, the one who runs through the kitchen is not the stray dog. Let's leave things as they are, he's talking of dogs that don't have to eat their children's food. The dog-child metaphor is clearly very hard, but it is what was used in rabbinical literature to mark the distance between the Jews and the pagans; it was a known insult in Judaism and the disciples used this speech because they had been brought up to maintain this separation from the pagans. We have heard it in the reaction they had, they said to Jesus: "kick her out."
In the face of this shameful response from Jesus, we ask ourselves, why does he speak this way? An interpretation has been given that is widely followed and that starts from an undeniable truth, that is, Jesus did not always and only teach; he also learned and when he met people, being God, but also a man, the person grows in the encounter with people and is enriched with every encounter.
Even Jesus, who grew up in that closed and isolationist mentality of his people, could only have assimilated this mindset. Here, according to this interpretation, it was this woman who made him understand that the pagans were not as bad as the Jews have thought of them It is an interpretation, but it does not completely convince me because Jesus has been cast out from the synagogue for a long time already, because he cultivated sympathies for the pagans.
The disciples are the ones who are still in this closed mentality towards the pagans and Jesus wants to free them. In fact, we notice that Jesus talks about bread, in addition to that offensive language towards the pagans; Jesus speaks of bread, but the woman had not come to ask for bread but to ask for the cure of her daughter. And then I wonder if Jesus was talking to the woman or he wants to make his disciples understand. Jesus is using the language of the disciples who know very well who the dogs are and know well what bread is; they know the book of Proverbs in chapter nine, when it talks about the Wisdom who sets the table, ‘Wisdom is what comes from God, what educates to be truly men’ and Israel has received the Torah, this Wisdom. And they know what the prophet Isaiah said in chapter 55, when he recommends "don't go looking for bread that doesn't satisfy, you already have the bread that is the Word of God", that bread that came down from heaven.
I wonder then, if Jesus, more than speaking to the woman, he is speaking to his disciples; it is they who must be educated in this universalism, which is an indispensable concept for those who want to proclaim the Gospel. They had been sent by Jesus who said: "Don’t go not to the pagans, but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." They had not understood the pedagogy of God.
Israel had to assimilate that bread well, to understand that it was a bread that satisfies them and would enable them to take this bread also to the pagans. The woman reveals in her response an extraordinary intelligence and dialectical capacity. She does not know the discourse of the bread that the disciples know, that of Wisdom, but she has understood that children have a blessing and she wants some crumbs also fall on the pagans.
So she doesn't respond like maybe we would have responded ... resentful of the insult, she accepts the image of the dogs and carries it forward; she says: “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.” ‘And these crumbs, for us dogs, are enough; but let these crumbs fall. ‘I am not asking you for bread, a few crumbs of your Word, of your Gospel are enough to humanize my daughter.’
Therefore, she does not question that children should be fed first, but the same food must also reach us, the so-called ‘dogs.’ In the Gospels two moments are observed in which Jesus is amazed, surprised. The first time was in Nazareth when he marvels at the unbelief of his villagers, he did not expect that they were so impenetrable to the novelty of the Gospel; the second time in Capernaum when, in front of the centurion, he says: "I have never met anyone with such faith in Israel."
Here it is not explicitly said that he was surprised by the woman's response, but that the astonishment of Jesus shines through what he says.
Let us hear it:
“Then Jesus said to her in reply, ‘O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And the woman’s daughter was healed from that hour.”
Jesus wanted to remove from the minds and hearts of his disciples the prejudices that they had towards the pagans, but he did not do it with reasoning, but showed them the great faith of this woman; He turns to the woman and says: "Great is your faith."
The disciples are listening and they have certainly asked themselves: But what does the greatness of this woman's faith consist of? Maybe they thought, they remembered what happened and that we heard in the Gospel of last Sunday, when Jesus said to Peter "You are a man of little faith". What does this woman's great faith consist of? She's not a Jew, she doesn't even practice the Jewish religion, she goes to pagan temples… What is the greatness of her faith?
First of all, she understood before the disciples did, the most important truth: In God's heart, there are no children and dogs, all are His sons and daughters; equally loved, regardless of what religion they may practice. God offers everyone the same bread. It will take a long time for Peter to understand this; he will understand it in Jaffa when he has that vision that will show him that all creatures are pure and he will understand that there are no pure and impure people, they are all sons and daughters of God; in fact, he will go to Caesarea and he will baptize the centurion Cornelius. But when he arrives in Jerusalem he will be severely rebuked; they will say to him: ‘Peter, what have you done? You entered a pagan's house.’
This woman understood before the disciples the unconditional love of God for each one of his sons and daughters; understood God's concern for his children who are possessed by demons and also behave in an inhuman way, but continue to love them. This, the Canaanite woman understood this before the Israelites did!
Let's try to ask ourselves: Did we really understand what this pagan woman understood or do we still cultivate an image of God who loves and reserves his love for the good people, and hates the bad ones? Let's try to ask ourselves if our faith is at least a little like the great faith of this Canaanite woman.
Second reason why this faith is great: this woman understood before the disciples, the wonders that the Word of God does, she understood that it is enough to assimilate even a few crumbs of the Gospel so that the demons that dehumanize society would disappear.
Here we also try to ask ourselves: Do we have this same faith in the power of the Word of the Gospel that changes the world? Perhaps our religion is reduced to devotions and practices, that we do not want to condemn, but what matters is the proclamation of the Gospel, to distribute this bread in abundance because where this food arrives the demons of society disappear. Sometimes we complain that society is corrupt, where will we end up? ’... but let's ask ourselves if we have distributed the bread that is the Gospel.
Third reason: The woman understood, always ahead of the disciples, the pedagogy of God that He decided to bring the bread of life through Israel. Before the Israelites were satisfied, they had to assimilate this Wisdom of God; it was from them that came this full light of Wisdom that is Christ, but then it must be brought to each man, to each woman. This is the pedagogy of God. The Israelites and the disciples had not understood it and thought that the bread of the Word was reserved for them.
Finally, we note that it is not Jesus who casts out the devil with a miracle. He announces the Word and it is faith in this Word that casts out demons. It is what happens in us many times, perhaps we hope that the Lord will make it rain miracles from heaven to change society, no! He gives us the bread of life, and only if we accept his message with faith, that is, if we trust this Word, that we can witness the promised wonders.
I wish you all a good Sunday and a good week.