Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Aug 20, 2023 Readings: Isaiah 56:1-7; Romans 11:13-32; Gospel of St. Matthew 15: 21-28. Theme: Expanding your Heart!
In the Scriptures of today’s liturgy we hear God speaking to us about our human tendency to be exclusive and judgmental towards others. In the first reading from the prophet Isaiah, He calls Israel to expand their hearts and minds in order to welcome others into their worship. You see, they had developed the erroneous idea that only the Chosen People of Israel were worthy to worship the one true God. No one else was considered spiritually clean enough to enter into the Lord’s House of Prayer. But the Lord tells them that their most sacred place or worship, the Jerusalem Temple, was indeed to become a “house of prayer for all peoples.”
They had become so exclusive that they wouldn’t even touch anything that had been contaminated by a non-Jew. And if they did so, even accidentally, they would themselves be denied access to the temple because they would be marked as unclean in God’s sight. A large segment of the more strict among them came to be called Pharisees (which in Hebrew means “those who are separated”) whom we know from the Gospels formed Our Lord’s primary opposition. Their narrow-mindedness became so blinding that they couldn’t even recognize the Messiah when He came among them in the flesh as Jesus from Nazareth. Why? Because He didn’t have the right credentials (in their eyes) to be the Messiah. He was a humble laborer-turned-preacher from a good-for-nothing small backwoods village, who was too friendly with unobservant Jews and Gentile outcasts. Therefore, in their closed minds, God could not possibly be working in and through Him.
In our second reading, St. Paul also comments on the need to expand hearts and minds so as to see God working in the lives of others. He reminded the Jews that once they were “nobodies” among the nations of the world and that only by God's grace were they able to become “somebody”, that is, to be counted among the Chosen People. And he is telling Christians to get off their “high horse” and never forget that the only reason they came to know Christ was because the Jewish people made it possible. Paul is basically telling both groups to “remember who you really are and where you came from” as we sometimes say. And to welcome all who turn to God in sincere faith, no matter who or what they are, for everyone can be brought into a relationship with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
Today’s Gospel also carries this same theme of expanding hearts and minds. Our story brings us to a day when Jesus and his disciples are being pestered by a Gentile woman from Cana. The disciples are begging Jesus to get her off their backs and their judgmental attitude is showing itself. First, she was a pagan and thus in their minds unpleasing to God. And secondly, she was a woman, and thus they thought that she had no business whatsoever speaking publicly and directly to a rabbi such as Jesus. However, she ignores their rebukes and persists in her plea. Like any devoted mother she would not take “no” for an answer when it came to her sick child.
Even though Christ tells her that He was sent first of all for the Jews, she responds in a clever and respectful way. If you will allow me to paraphrase her, she is basically saying to Jesus: “Expand your heart, Lord, and expand your mission for the sake of my daughter!” And He did! The Heart of Jesus expands to grant her request and heal her daughter. The Heart of Jesus expands to teach His disciples that all people are welcome to come to Him. The Heart of Jesus expands to embrace all who seek Him no matter who they are, where they have come from, or what they have done. This expansion of heart and mind is at the very core of the Gospel message, of what it means for us to live and think and act as Christians. We are to accept others as God accepts them. We are to forgive others as God forgives them. And we are to love others as God loves them. We receive clear insight into how to do this by looking at the words and example of Jesus, Who is God-come-in-the-flesh.
But Jesus never asks the impossible of us. He knows we cannot love as he loved all on our own. And so He gave us supernatural power to accept and to forgive and to love by means of the Eucharist. His True Presence that we receive within us at Holy Communion can expand our own hearts and make them more like His if we allow it to do so. The Eucharist can rid us of the habit of looking at others with an attitude of exclusivity and superiority and enable us to see the reflective image of God even in those whom we do not naturally like.
The Eucharist can give us the grace to not be like the Jews who restricted access to the templed to those whom they deemed unfit. The Eucharist can enable us to not be like the disciples who tried to block access to Jesus by those whom they considered unworthy. Instead, it can move us to welcome into our churches and into our lives those whom we would be tempted to classify as sinners or unworthy. The frequent and intentional reception of Jesus in Holy Communion can transform us and re-make us to be more like Him so that we accept those whom God accepts; so that we forgive those whomGod forgives, and so that we love those whom God loves. And that, my friends, is everyone.
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