Year A 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

[SPEAKER_00]: a reading from the Prophet Isaiah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Thus says the Lord, have a care for justice, act with integrity, for soon my salvation will come and my integrity be manifest.

[SPEAKER_00]: Foreigners who have attached themselves to the Lord to serve him and to love his name and be his servants, all who observe the Sabbath, not profaning it, and cling to my covenant.

[SPEAKER_00]: These I will bring to my holy mountain.

[SPEAKER_00]: I will make them joyful in the House of Prayer.

[SPEAKER_00]: Their holocausts and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar, for my house will be called a House of Prayer for all the peoples.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Word of the Lord.

[SPEAKER_00]: The Responsorial Psalm is, O God, let all the nations praise you.

[SPEAKER_00]: O God, let all the nations praise you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh God, be gracious and bless us, and let your face shed its light upon us.

[SPEAKER_00]: So will your ways be known upon the earth and all nations learn your saving help.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh God, let all the nations praise you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let the nations be glad and exalt for your role to world with justice, with fairness to your role to peoples, and you got the nations on earth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh God, let all the nations praise you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let the people's praise you, O God, let all the people's praise you.

[SPEAKER_00]: May God still give us his blessing till the ends of the earth reviewer him.

[SPEAKER_00]: O God, let all the nations praise you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Arroading from the letter of St. Paul to the Romans.

[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you, Pagan's this, I have been sent to the Pagan's as their apostle, and I am proud of having been sent.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the purpose of it is to make my own people and theus of you, and in this way, save some of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Since the rejection meant the reconciliation of the world, do you know what their admission will mean?

[SPEAKER_00]: Nothing less than a resurrection from the dead.

[SPEAKER_00]: God never takes back his gifts or revokes his choice.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just as you have changed from being disobedient to God and now enjoy mercy because of their disobedience, so those who are disobedient now and only because of mercy, who will also enjoy mercy eventually.

[SPEAKER_00]: God hasn't present all men in their own disobedience, only to show mercy to all mankind.

[SPEAKER_00]: The word of the Lord.

[SPEAKER_01]: A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Matthew.

[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus lifted Janesarit and withdrew to the region of Tyra and Sidon.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then out came a canonite woman from their district and started shouting, so Son of David have pity on me.

[SPEAKER_01]: My daughter is tormented by a devil.

[SPEAKER_01]: not a word.

[SPEAKER_01]: And his disciples went and pleaded with him, give up what she once they said because she is shouting after us.

[SPEAKER_01]: He said in reply, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the woman had come up and was kneeling at his feet.

[SPEAKER_01]: Lord, she said, Help me.

[SPEAKER_01]: He replied, it is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the house dogs.

[SPEAKER_01]: She retorted, I yeser, but even house dogs need the scraps that fall from the master's table.

[SPEAKER_01]: Then Jesus answered, a woman, you have great faith, did your wish be granted, and from that moment her daughter was well again.

[SPEAKER_01]: The gospel of the Lord.

[SPEAKER_01]: The theme of today's readings is the embracing and inclusive love of God, and I hesitate to use that word inclusive because it is a term that is today being largely a hijacked and come to me and doing whatever you want and justifying all sorts of sins which be no resemblance to anything remotely Christian.

[SPEAKER_01]: But I use it today in the classical sense.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we look at our first reading, we find a chasened Israel, who had recently returned from exile, and they're still looking at wounds and they're reflecting on the disaster that they had just survived.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they were reflecting as well how they could avoid happening again in future.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so the prophet tells them to careful justice and act with integrity.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then secondly, something that they would have learned in exile anyway, I guess, that their ancestry does not put them in a better position than those foreigners.

[SPEAKER_01]: They, God, envisages the possibility that outsiders might attach themselves to Him, to serve Him.

[SPEAKER_01]: And if the foreigners do God's will, then what will God do to them?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the text tells us he says, I will bring them to my holy mountain and make them joyful in my house of prayer.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then he's this sort of image of the temple as a gathering place for all nations.

[SPEAKER_01]: And in our current environment, it's the world is just so connected and it's fractured.

[SPEAKER_01]: And right here, the church, our temple, this is our earthly home.

[SPEAKER_01]: In the second reading from St. Paul to the Romans, our reading takes place at the end of a long passage where Paul has been trying to work out an answer to the difficult question, if God has welcomed the Gentiles into his covenant, so where does that leave the Jews?

[SPEAKER_01]: And now it is the turn of the Gentiles to be told that they do not have exclusive rights over God.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's the script of sort of flipped.

[SPEAKER_01]: Paul sees here his mission to the Gentiles, in his mission to Gentiles, a way to stimulate his fellow Jews and bring some of them to salvation.

[SPEAKER_01]: Paul maintains that the election of Israel as he's chosen is irreversible in human history.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's not now that the Gentiles are kind of involved into the picture that he's he's shoving Israel off to the site.

[SPEAKER_01]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: They special place Israel.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's manifested in the favor that was shown to its patriarchs and that's a kind of the Gentiles lack.

[SPEAKER_01]: Look,

[SPEAKER_01]: The original intention of God still has Israel in view, so Paul is at pains to explain that their consecration as the chosen people has not been cancelled and he confirms this in verse 16, he is certain that God's free gift and invitation are not for changing.

[SPEAKER_01]: but Paul sees the Jews who refuse to accept Jesus as saviour, as being the sort of broken of branches, and they have had their place taken by these Gentiles, but they have not been discarded forever.

[SPEAKER_01]: Paul was a Pharisee and he agrees with the view of his Jewish brothers and sisters that Gentile disobedience was disbelief in God.

[SPEAKER_01]: But now, the attitude of Jews towards Christ represents the same type of disobedience.

[SPEAKER_01]: God's aim is always to have mercy on absolutely everybody if they seek it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So here we see that the Gentiles are warned not to be full of pride.

[SPEAKER_01]: They have not replaced Israel.

[SPEAKER_01]: It is just that the basic consecration has now been extended to the Gentiles.

[SPEAKER_01]: The disobedience of those who are hostile to God is temporary, as they've seen themselves when they weren't people of faith.

[SPEAKER_01]: and his mercy always stands ready to welcome them home, and so it will be with the Jews.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's Matthew, sorry, Paul's point.

[SPEAKER_01]: In our gospel from Matthew today, we continue to see differences of emphasis between the gospels of Mark and Matthew, whereas Mark's emphasis in the account of this woman and this meeting, his emphasis on the miracle of the healing of a daughter.

[SPEAKER_01]: Matthew's focus is on the dialogue, and so in Matthew's Gospel today, it is a reminder to us that Jesus was a man like us in all things but Son, Luke 252 tells us that he grew in wisdom and stature.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, Jesus didn't pop out of Mary's body fully grown with a beard, but it would look like a weird baby.

[SPEAKER_01]: But

[SPEAKER_01]: Messiah ship, yet it grow into everything that it means to be a man.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so here we see a rare glimpse into Jesus' internal life and how this incident, with this woman, helped him clarify his own mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: Remember, Jesus would have been aware that he was the Messiah, but he was quite focused and given his background, would have thought that his mission was just for the Jews.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so his father has to lead him into a situation where he realizes the universality of his mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: That the core for him is for everyone.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so when the woman calls out to Jesus, he ignores her at first.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he strange silence is explained in the next verse.

[SPEAKER_01]: He did not want to exceed his divine mission together all the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, that was what he believed was his brief.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we just take a step back here, the background to the meeting between Jesus and the woman is as follows.

[SPEAKER_01]: Jesus has just been rejected in Galilee by the Jews as represented by the Jewish leaders, the Pharisee.

[SPEAKER_01]: And now he's in the area of Tire and Siden just to the north of Palestine.

[SPEAKER_01]: So it's to the sort of north of Galilee where he had been operating.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we have to hold two things in suspension here.

[SPEAKER_01]: What is happening in the gospel, and then Matthew's audience to whom he is writing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Matthew is writing for primarily Jewish audience, and he calls her a canonite woman.

[SPEAKER_01]: What does Mark call it in his gospel, same story, same deals as everything, but he uses a different name.

[SPEAKER_01]: He calls it a sorrow-finition woman, which was the common term used for people from that area at the time.

[SPEAKER_01]: So why does Matthew use canonite?

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the inhabitants of this area were racially and linguistically as language wise, connected to the ancient canonites who lived in Palestine when the Israel's came and invaded,

[SPEAKER_01]: And so they had no real sort of love, I guess, for the Jews.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were outsiders, and Kenanites was the term that the inhabitants actually prefer to use for themselves, but it indicates that the church for which Matthew wrote must have been located in the area of Tyron's side and by the time that he wrote his gospel, which would have been a number of years after Jesus' death.

[SPEAKER_01]: The woman addresses Jesus as son of David, and that was a title amongst the Jews that expressed the sort of nationalistic hope of Israel for the re-establishment of the Kingdom of David.

[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to have a new King David, but there was something which was definitely not appropriate for a Gentile, can an odd woman to say, he would never have said that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Matthew chooses this old biblical name in place of Mark's sort of contemporary sorrow-finition, name to remind us that the woman is doubly marginal.

[SPEAKER_01]: She's a woman alone in a man's world and she's a gentle and therefore she's unclean.

[SPEAKER_01]: And she doesn't seem to, he seems to care about any of the politics surrounding, you know, surrounding the sort of history.

[SPEAKER_01]: She just wants to get her daughter well again.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we look at then Jesus' response, Matthew keeps the harsh saying from Mark, which was it is not fair to take the children's food and feed it to their house dogs, but he doesn't soften it as Mark does.

[SPEAKER_01]: Mark's softens and Mark says, let the children, meaning Israel, first be fed.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this would have been fine because of the order of salvation history.

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, God reveals himself to the Jews and then to the Gentiles.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that would have been fine.

[SPEAKER_01]: but in Matthew Jesus does not, Jesus response is dismissive and some writers have tried to talk it away by suggesting that Jesus was joking or putting it to the test, but that does not fit in the text.

[SPEAKER_01]: In fact, the harshness of his response, as a literary function, makes her reply all the more bold.

[SPEAKER_01]: It kind of makes her reply pop, and it absolutely stops Jesus in his tracks, and I can seem almost laughing and saying to the woman when she responds to him, well played lady, well played.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you can see that Jesus is gracious, and he's generous in his praise, afterwards, as he understands, she is, of course, right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he recognizes God's open heartedness in her, and her daughter was healed as a result from that hour.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, we should also remember the two distinctions here in this account.

[SPEAKER_01]: The inner struggle of Jesus when He's confronted with the request to extend His mission beyond the Jewish limits in which He had begun.

[SPEAKER_01]: And secondly, the struggle within the early church, we saw with the Council of Jerusalem where they had this wrestling as to whether the message and powers of the kingdom were open to Gentiles as well as Jews in the sense that did they have to first get circumcised or not.

[SPEAKER_01]: But the reappearance of the phrase for the lost sheep of Israel in chapter 10 verse 6, this strengthens the impression that this story is preserved because of its burial on the question of the limits of the church's mission, where you have these two voices in the church and hearing Matthew's community as well, you know, the one sort of wanting to look at the universal approach for everybody and the other one being particular, only looking at the Jewish

[SPEAKER_01]: The story of Salvation, being offered to the Gentiles through faith in Jesus, this account of this woman, would have encouraged the church's mission to the Gentiles after Jesus' death and resurrection.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we must reach out to those beyond the church and invite them in, wherever we find them,