20th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Two major questions obsessed the first few generations after Jesus. First, Jesus had promised his contemporaries that he would return to take them with him. His apparent failure to fulfil this promise caused the first crisis in the infant Church. But, in time, the Church adapted to the new circumstances. The death of Jesus was the beginning rather than the end of the Christian era.
The second great question was the relationship between the emerging Christian Church and the Jews. Now Judaism was a very close-knit, introverted religion, deeply suspicious of outsiders. And understandably so. It was a minority religion that several times had faced extinction, either through enforced exile or through assimilation and absorption into neighbouring religions and tribes. So contact with neighbouring tribes and religions was actively discouraged. Intermarriage was not just frowned upon but forbidden by law.
Yet, right through Israel's history, there were always leaders to remind the Jews that God worked through the gentiles too. A good example is to be found in our first reading today. "I will bring foreigners to my holy mountain. I will make them joyful in my house of prayer." The house of prayer was of course the Temple at Jerusalem. Foreigners were banned under pain of death, to go beyond an exterior courtyard of the Temple. Yet here is a prophet saying, 'The time will come when foreigners will pray and sing psalms of joy in the temple. That must have been galling news to the observant Jew. The prophet believes everyone has a part to play in God's plan - even those who don't belong to the "true religion."
Since the historical Jesus is more interested in reforming his own people than in bringing non-Jews into "the fold," he seldom has anything to do with Gentiles. This view is confirmed in today's gospel: "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel", he protests to the Canaanite woman who asks for his help. As far as we can tell, the earliest Christian communities imitated his example and concentrated on their Jewish brothers and sisters. They didn't ignore Gentiles; they simply put their conversion on a back burner. They'd deal with that issue after all their fellow Jews accepted Jesus. Paul adopted a very different approach, as we see form today's second reading. "I glory in my ministry," he writes, "in order to make my race jealous and thus save some of them." His own race of course was the Jews. He believed that Jews need only glimpse the joy and fulfilled lives that Christians lived.
Today's Gospel encounter is a rarity. Jesus crosses from Jewish territory into gentile territory, the district of Tyre and Sidon. This is the only time in Matthew's gospel that we find Jesus on gentile soil. But this deviation has come after something of a domestic crisis. He has just had a blazing row with the sanctimonious Pharisees who thought the whole world outside of Judea to be unclean. So immediately after this row, Matthew brings Jesus away from this religious claustrophobia, into the fresh air of the pagan lands. Jesus crosses over the border and still feels that he is still in God's world. It may also have been to teach the lesson here to his disciples. God is indeed interested in the salvation of the Gentiles, even though their work would initially involve only the Jews.
It was at this point that the Canaanite woman approaches Jesus. The Canaanites were foreigners. They had been planters in Palestine while the Jews were in exile. When the Jews returned they drove them north. The Canaanites were regarded as 'land-grabber' by the Jews, the lowest of the low. They had exploited the Jewish exile to their own advantage. And the Jews never allowed them forget that fact.
His infamous response: "It is not good to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs" must be read in this context too. The picture here is that of a family meal, with the pet dogs running around the table and begging for something to eat. There was therefore nothing degrading about the Lord's metaphor; he was simply emphasizing the relative positions of the Jews and Gentiles. The children of Israel first, then their pets (the gentiles, obviously). The woman makes the point that the pet dogs (gentiles) can be fed without any loss to the household. Matthew is saying to this community: "Look, we can minister to the gentiles without neglecting the Jews." But the most important lesson is that faith in Jesus transcends all boundaries and barriers. In the new dispensation, the terms Jew and Gentile have become religiously irrelevant.