20^th Sunday of the Year A

Matthew 15: 21-28

Mahatma Gandhi in his autobiography tells how, during his student days, he read the gospels and saw in the teachings of Jesus the answer to the major problem facing the people of India, which was the caste system ( a human societal structure which divided people according to different categories). Hoping to do away with it, Gandhi seriously considered to embrace the Christian faith. One day he intended to talk to the minister about the idea. On entering the Church, however, the usher refused to give him a seat and told him to go and worship his own people. Gandhi left the Church and never returned. “If Christians have caste differences also,” he said, “I might as well remain a Hindu.”

The belief that God’s blessings are somewhat limited to peoples of certain tribes or cultures has been around for a very long time. Such a belief was very much alive in the society in which Jesus grew up. When Jesus said in today’s gospel reading, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel” Matthew was expressing a popular belief. It is not clear whether he really believed it himself or whether he said it in order to expose and correct its false claims. Every people and culture has a handful of such prejudices and myths – from the myth of the Jews as the only beloved people of God to that of the teaching of the Church before Vatican II which says, “Outside the Church there is no salvation.” From the prejudice of the caste system in India to that of racial superiority in Nazi Germany, from the myth of the superiority of men over women to that of the superiority of the Western cultures. We are today invited to expose such myths and correct their false and exaggerated claims. As Christians we are invited to teach at all times, that all men and women are equal regardless of their religion, culture, or race. In the eyes of God, we are all His sons and daughters, with same privileges and rights.

In the gospel story, it took the intervention of a complete outsider, a Canaanite woman, to create the awareness among early Jewish Christians that the belief in the exclusive divine prerogatives of the Jewish people did not stand up to reason. Probably you and I owe the fact that we are Christians today due to the heroism of this unnamed woman who dismantled the dividing wall of intolerance between Jews and Gentiles. We need to consult this woman to teach us how to go about dismantling the structures that create undue division among God’s children in today’s world, the human race that God has loved into being.

“Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done to you as you wish.”