Being a Child
This
past Sunday’s Gospel is one of the more challenging to understand.
It recounts Jesus’s encounter with a Canaanite woman who has come
to him to ask for healing for her daughter. Jesus’s response is
coarse to our modern ears. He tells her that He has been sent only
to the lost sheep of Israel and that it is not right to give the food
of the children to the dogs. The woman responds that even the dogs
eat the scraps that fall from their masters’ tables, to which Jesus
says, “Great is your faith,” and He grants her request.
Why
does Jesus initially seem unwilling to heal this woman’s daughter?
Why does He make reference to children and to dogs? I remember
seeing a movie about Jesus many years ago in which this scene is
portrayed as Jesus being taught a lesson by this woman. It
apparently expands His compassion and refocuses His mission.
Well, that didn’t sit well
with me, so when I got my hands on the Catena
Aurea, this was the
first passage I looked up. I was eager to see what the Fathers and
Doctors of the Church had to say. Here is my interpretation of
Sunday’s challenging Gospel, informed by what I found.
There
are a few things to remember. First, the miracles of Jesus are signs
that point to who He is. He is not a magician, or a traveling
sideshow. He is God, come to redeem the world. Also, the Jews of
the time divided people into the Children and the goyim (dogs) –
the pagans. The woman understood that, so Jesus was not throwing an
insult at her.
What
is amazing is not that Jesus has a conversion experience, but that He
invites this woman to become a child of God. Jesus, in this event,
is eliciting faith from this woman. He is bringing salvation to her.
Being a child, Jesus teaches us, is not about ethnicity, but about
faith. When she approached Jesus, the woman had probably heard of
this wonder-worker and hoped he could help her, like some traveling
magician. But Jesus will have none of that. He challenges her to
identify not with the dogs, but with the children. Her desperation
over the condition of her daughter opens the woman to faith, with a
little prodding from the Lord. Once she has faith, the healing of
her daughter can take on its full meaning.
What,
then, can we learn? Jesus is the great Healer, but He offers us much
more than simply the answer to a problem. He invites us to be
children; He calls us to faith; and through that Faith we are freed
from bondage, as was the daughter of the woman in Sunday’s Gospel.
May we have the humility and openness of the Canaanite woman, and
like her, truly become children of God.
