Today's Gospel is unsettling (the readings for today's Mass can be found here). We have painted in our minds a picture of Jesus, invoking in our imaginations concepts like "meek" (whatever one thinks that is), mild (the moneychangers in the Temple notwithstanding), and universally available. So we read this Gospel and think, "What? Who is this? This isn't the Jesus I know!" We should offer a correction here: "This isn't the Jesus I imagined!"
Part of the sting I believe may be the realization that most of us fall within the category of the Gentile woman. We are not descendants of Abraham through Isaac his son and Jacob his grandson. Jesus was not sent to proclaim the Gospel to non-Israelites, and by extension most of us, being Gentiles/non-Jews. We are part of the "dogs", awaiting the crumbs to fall from the table. The sting we feel is the sting she doubtless felt. This Jesus, whose fame reverberates through the world, told her (and us!) that He was sent to Israel, not to the Gentiles.
Let's face a hard fact: this is true. As he told the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well in Sychar, "Salvation comes from the Jews," so the work of salvation had first to be perfected within Israel itself before it would be offered outside Israel. Regardless of how "exceptional" we feel our nation, our people, our clan, tribe, or family to be, we ALL have to take a back seat to Israel.
Yet the Gentile woman persisted...she did not get her back up at all but stated that even the nations could, and would, benefit from the excess that spilled from the Table of Israel. The message of the Law and the Prophets spilled out the doors of the synagogues throughout Israel's ancestral homeland and also wherever the Jewish Diaspora went, and it could not be contained behind the doors of the Ark where the scrolls of the Law were kept. The Good News could not be limited to one region or people. As the account today showed, despite concentrating on Galilee and Judaea, the Gospel Jesus proclaimed spread to the largely Gentile populations of what is now Lebanon and Syria. She reminds Jesus that the Gospel is so all-encompassing that it could not but help overflow the proverbial table and hit the floor for the rest of the world to benefit.
This trust, this faith in someone not trained or raised to possess it impressed Jesus. In acknowledging that faith, in granting her the prayer of her heart, Jesus confirmed for all people at all times that God does not turn away those who come forward in faith. The gross majority of the Church throughout the ages far outstrips the Jewish core of the community of faith, because the Gospel overflows the table that much. God's grace and mercy flow out and because He is infinite these are infinite, and while originally given to the people of Israel, it has overflowed their plates and cups, their tables, their houses, and their homeland to spread throughout the world. Truly, the feast is so great that the crumbs are more than the world can consume, if only the world has the faith to recognize it for what it is, the very Words of Life. In seeing her faith, Jesus saw that she understood what was before her, and that grace offered freely was hers for the receiving.
May we have such faith to see the overwhelming mass of "crumbs" before us.
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