Expand Your Heart!

The 20^th Sunday of Ordinary Time, August 16, 2020.  Readings:  Isaiah 56:1-7; Romans 11:13-32; Gospel of St. Matthew 15: 21-28. Theme: Expand Your Heart!

In pondering the readings for today’s liturgy, it became quite apparent to me that God is calling us call us to expand our hearts.  The readings seem to speak to us about breaking through our sinful and selfish human tendency to be exclusive and judgmental towards others, particularly if they are of a different race or a foreign people other than ourselves. Considering that Isaiah lived 800 years before Christ and Matthew composed his Gospel 2,000 years ago, we see that our human tendency to exclude and condemn has a very ancient and tragic history.

In the first reading from the prophet Isaiah, we see that God himself calls Israel to break out of this exclusiveness and welcome all to join in their praise and worship. He says to through the prophet, “my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.”  You see, over time the Hebrews had developed the idea that only those who were born among them, born into the Chosen People of Israel, were worthy to worship the one true God, worthy to enter into his consecrated temple-house of prayer.

They had become so arrogant and exclusive in their “choseness”, that they would not even touch anything that had been touched by a Gentile, a non-Jew. They thought this would make them unclean and sinful in God’s sight. A huge segment of them, called Pharisees (which in Hebrew means “separated”) refrained as much as they could from any and all daily contact with Gentiles. And this exclusivity would eventually became so overbearing in their religious culture that they would not even be able to recognize their own God when he came among them in the flesh as Jesus Christ, a humble laborer-turned-preacher from Nazareth. That’s what exclusiveness and a sense of superiority can do: blind us to the truth and to recognizing the very presence of God in our lives and in others.

In our second reading, St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, we also find this theme of expanding our hearts and minds. He is reminding the Jews that once they were “nobodies” among the nations of the world and that only by God expanding his heart, so to speak, were they able to become “somebody”, that is, to become the Chosen People. Paul teaches that we, too, must expand our minds and get rid of division and prejudice. He reminds us that all who turn to God in sincere faith, no matter who or what they are, can be brought into fellowship with him and become, as we pray in Eucharistic Prayer III at Mass, “one body, one spirit in Christ.”

I think this message of expanding hearts is brought out most dramatically in the Gospel by Jesus himself.  In today’s story, we find that Christ and his disciples are pestered by a Gentile woman, a pagan Canaanite, and the disciples are begging Jesus to get her off their backs. The typical Jewish attitude, which assuredly resided to some degree in the hearts of Jesus’ apostles at this early stage of their transformation, was that she had two strikes against her. She was a pagan and thus in their minds unpleasing to God. And secondly, she was a woman, who thus had no business speaking publicly and directly to a rabbi such as Jesus.

Even though Jesus informs her that as Messiah his mission is first of all to the people of Israel, she keeps on asking.  She persists and it pays off. Like any devoted and loving mother, she would not take “no” for an answer when it comes to her child in need. In a clever and respectful way, she basically tells Jesus: “Expand your heart, expand your mission for the sake of my daughter!” And you know what? He does!

The Heart of Jesus expands to hear her request and heal her daughter. The Heart of Jesus expands to teach the disciples that all people are welcome to come to Him. The Heart of Jesus doesn’t discriminate due to skin color, or language or place of birth. No, the Heart of Jesus is open to all who seek Him with sincere hearts no matter who they are, where they have come from, or what they have done.

This expanding of hearts and minds is at the very core of the Gospel message, of what it means to live and think and act as a Christian, because we are to love others as God loves them. There is absolutely no room in authentic Christianity for a narrowness of mind and heart that excludes anyone due to their being an outsider, a foreigner, a stranger. There is no room for us disciples to think or act as if Jesus only helps those whom we deem to be proper and fit and worthy.

Through an intimate relationship with Jesus deepened by personal daily prayer and fed with the Holy Eucharist, we can find the light and grace to expand our hearts and our minds. We must refuse to be like the Israelites who closed their temples and their lives to those whom they judged to be sinners. We must refuse to be like the disciples who tried to block access to Jesus by those who they considered unworthy. Instead, we can become more like Jesus and expand our Christian mission of love, mercy, and compassion to all whom encounter, no matter who they or where they come from.   Deacon David Previtali · Expand Your Heart!