20th Sunday Ordinary Time – A – August 20, 2023
Although the unnamed Canaanite woman says little, it is enough to expand Jesus’s perspective.
Matthew’s Gospel was originally written for a Jewish Christian community that was becoming more Gentile in its makeup. (Today’s second reading reflects the demographic tension.) The Gentile region of Tyre and Sidon had welcomed Jesus’s preaching, while many among Jesus’s own had rejected it. That resentment is the backdrop for the disciples’ annoyance and Jesus’s derogatory language.
To Jew or Gentile, woman or man, God’s gifts and call are irrevocable. With faith, we see that we are more alike than different. Click To TweetFrom this context, the woman pleads, “Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David!” appealing to Jesus’s lineage and signaling that she, too, as a Canaanite, is related to him. Matthew’s community would have recalled the Gospel’s opening genealogy of Jesus in which three Canaanite women are named: Rahab, a prostitute who risks her life to help the Israelites; Tamar, treated as cursed, but who creatively ensures the continuation of Judah’s line; and Ruth, a childless widow who defies the patriarchal system to become the great grandmother of King David.
No wonder this woman would not be deterred by silence nor slur. With deference and courage, she reminds Jesus that it is from outsiders like her—women of great faith and determination—that Jesus inherits some of his own bold spirit.
To Jew or Gentile, woman or man, God’s gifts and call are irrevocable. With faith, we see that we are more alike than different.
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