Homily Ordinary 20A: All are invited to the Lord’s Banquet!

 Homily for the 20^th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year A 2020

Isaiah 56:1,6-7; Romans 11:13-15,29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

Introduction

Who is in and who is out?  These are questions we wrestle with every day.

·        At the playground kids have to decide who will be on their team and who will not. With the help of their parents they have to decide who to invite to their birthday party and who not to invite.  Weddings are a minefield; which family and friends do you invite and which don’t you invite.

·        Even beyond the family, in society, we ask who is in and who is out.  During this epidemic, during previous epidemics like Ebola, we talk about quarantine, essentially deciding who we can associate with and who we cannot.  Clubs and associations have to vote on who can be admitted as a member and who cannot.  Countries have to decide, which foreigners can be admitted and which ones cannot.

How do we make these decisions well?  We need help.  Thankfully as Christians we can turn to God’s Word to point us in the right direction.

Scripture and Theology

In today’s first reading, Isaiah helps the people of Israel to wrestle with this problem of who is in and who is out.  This reading is set after the exile, when the inter-mingling of the Jews and the foreigners had increased.  And so, the Jews who knew themselves to be God’s special people, were asking: "Does God really also accept the sacrifices and prayers of these foreigners?"

And Isaiah basically answers: “Yes he does.”  God accepts the worship of foreigners as long as they fulfil certain minimum conditions. Essentially, like the Jews themselves, these foreigners must observe the Sabbath and they must obey God's commandments, those that applied to them.  If the foreigners kept these conditions, they would prove that they had faith in God.  And having faith in God is the basic criterion for inclusion among the people God calls his own, whether one is Jewish or not.  And that is why at the end of the reading God says: “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”

Do you remember, in elementary school math class, something called the lowest common denominator?  That is the number by which a set of numbers is divisible.  For example, the lowest common denominator of 12, 15, 21 is three, since all these numbers can be divided by three.  Similarly, God is telling the people of Israel that the lowest or minimum common denominator for inclusion among his people is not nationality, but faithfulness to him.

In the gospel Jesus deals with the same problem.  He is a Jewish Rabbi, trying to reform his Jewish society so that they could be more faithful to God.  Should he give this message of salvation and work his miracles among non-Jews as well?  For the woman in the gospel was a Canaanite, one of the many pagan neighbours of the Jews.  Should he help her and cure her daughter?

At first sight the passage seems to suggest that Jesus does not want to share the Good News with non-Jews.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he says.  But when you follow the story closely and indeed when you read everything else that Jesus says in the gospels, we know that the issue is more complicated.  In fact, in this passage, Jesus says these things to give the woman a chance to argue her case, as to why, she a foreigner deserves to receive the benefits of God’s people.  And up to the challenge she is.

First, she tells Jesus that if left-over scraps are good enough for the dogs, Jesus surely must have some left-overs in his treasury of benefits for the non-Jews.  But most of all, it is her perseverance and her recognition of Jesus as Lord that show that she has the essential condition that Isaiah had indicated: faith.  That is why Jesus says to her: “O woman, great is your faith.  Let it be done for you as you wish.”  And he granted her wish and healed her daughter.

Christian Life

Like the Jewish people of Isaiah’s time, like the disciples of Jesus, we might also want to say to outsiders: "Send her away, for she keeps calling out after us."  What is our criterion for including and excluding people?  Let me offer three principles that should guide us when we make such decisions.

The first principle is that as Catholics our default position is to include all God’s people.  That is what we profess when we say “I believe in one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church.”  The word “Catholic” means universal, including all manner of God’s people like Isaiah and Jesus have showed us.  And we do this because God wishes to save all humanity.

In fact, sometimes we must even ignore what seem like legitimate reasons for exclusion and include.  For example, we must teach our children, that on the playground, even that weak and sickly boy must be included on our team.  Yes, he will probably be a liability, but then we are not playing to win the Superbowl, we are playing to enjoy a game.  Even for the wedding party, I know a young couple that decided to do a buffet rather than a sit-down dinner, so that they could invite more family and friends to their wedding and not exclude anyone.

A story is told of Protestant man who was the only non-Catholic in a rural town.  When he died, of course he could not be buried in a Catholic cemetery; that is how things were done in those days.  Out of consideration, however, the Catholic pastor allowed him to be buried right outside the fence of the Catholic cemetery.

A few years later, the daughter of this man returned home and went to put some flowers at her dad’s grave, whose location outside the fence she remembered very well.  To her great dismay, she could not find the grave.

Very angry, she stormed into the rectory and gave the pastor a piece of her mind.  “Not only did you refuse to bury my father in the cemetery,” she told him, “but even in death you dishonour him by destroying his grave?”  She went on and on, for quite a while, about all that is wrong with the Catholic Church.

Finally, when she was done, the priest told her: “We did not move the grave of your father; we moved the fence of the cemetery, to include your father’s grave.”

Thankfully as Catholics we have learnt to be more inclusive of our non-Catholic brethren: Protestants, Muslims and Jews. In fact, as Pope Francis says, while we discuss differences of doctrine, we must practice an ecumenism of charity.

A second principle.  Although our default position is to include, sometimes we must exclude people. But when we do our decision making must be guided by objectivity.  Like Isaiah laid down objective minimum conditions for admission of foreigners, our criteria must also be objective.  We must do what Martin Luther King dreamt for his children, that we judge people, not by extrinsic things like the colour of their skin, but by objective criteria like the content of their character.

And so, if Uncle Jimmy is jerk and foul-mouthed, we can sometimes exclude him from Thanksgiving dinner, especially if there are going to be children there.  We have schools for boys and schools for girls.  On the national stage, we need such objectivity to give us an immigration policy that welcomes or excludes immigrants and refugees, not based on their religion, nationality or race, but on objective criteria like their need for asylum, security, and their inherent human dignity.

A third principle.  Exclusion is sometimes needed for the good of the person excluded, in addition to the good of society.  For example, we lock up criminals so that they might reform and return to society as good citizens.  In the Church we have what is called excommunication, a process that puts one out in the cold, like the penalty box in hockey, so that they might see the error of their ways and repent.  That is why are in various levels of lockdown to protect the vulnerable.

Conclusion

And so, if God offers the citizenship of heaven to all who have faith in him, why do we deny citizenship in our earthly society to some people, especially we who are about to celebrate and receive the Eucharist, the sacrament of unity?

Especially given the recent events in this country, here are a few questions we should ask ourselves.

·        Do I knowingly or unknowingly hold prejudices against people who are different from me in any way?

·        Do I act on those prejudices rather than ask Jesus to heal me of them?

·        Have I been silent on acts of racism, hate or prejudice against any group?

·        Have I spoken or acted in ways that denigrate individuals or groups, just because they are different from me?

Let us make the prayer of today’s Psalm our own, praying: “May the peoples praise you, O God; may all the peoples praise you!  May God bless us, and may all the ends of the earth fear him!”