What have you learned in unexpected places, and from unexpected people? (Fr. James Martin)

  In the Gospel of Matthew (15:21-28), Jesus speaks sharply to a Canaanite or Syrophoenician woman who asks him to heal her daughter.  The woman is not Jewish and, apparently as a result, Jesus seems to dismiss her with a callous comment:  It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.

  That seems a stinging rebuke, no matter what the context.  Dogs?  I imagine the woman, hurt, thinking, Did he just call me a dog?  Did he just compare my people to dogs?

  When the woman responds that even the dogs get scraps from the table, Jesus softens.  And he heals her daughter.

  You could say that the woman shows us the importance of faith and persistence. And you could also say that Jesus evoked a beautiful response from her.  His presence brings forth her faith.

  But you could also ask, Why did Jesus speak so sharply?  Was he testing the woman’s faith?  If so, it’s a harsh way of doing so, at odds with the compassionate Jesus many of us expect to meet in the Gospels.  Perhaps Jesus needed to learn something from the woman’s persistence:  his ministry extended to everyone, not just the Jewish.

  Or maybe he was just tired.  A few lines earlier, in Mark’s version of this same story, we read, He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there.  Perhaps the curt remark indicates physical weariness.

  Whatever the case (and we’ll never know for sure) both possibilities – he is learning; he is tired – show Jesus’s humanity on full display here.

  Jesus was fully human and fully divine.  That meant he had both a human and divine consciousness.  That’s hard to grasp, a mystery if there ever was one.  But clearly he could learn.  After all, the Gospel of Luke says that as a boy Jesus progressed in wisdom.  In other words, in his human consciousness, he learned.

  At least that’s how it seems to me.  And here we see the fully human Jesus learning from an unexpected source.

  What have you learned in unexpected places, and from unexpected people?  How have they brought you closer to understanding who you are?

--Fr. James Martin, SJ

Evening Prayer:  The Syrophoenician Woman

Facebook, August 7, 2013

Image source:  Michael Angelo Immenraet, The Woman of Canaan (17^th c.), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorcism_of_the_Syrophoenician_woman%27s_daughter#/media/File:Michael_Angelo_Immenraet_-_Jesus_and_the_Woman_of_Canaan.jpg