Today’s readings: Isaiah 56, 1.6-7; Romans 11, 13-15.29-32; Matthew 15, 21-28.
Jesus commending in today’s gospel a Canaanite woman for her “great faith” contrasts heavily with his rebuke of Peter in last week’s gospel for being a “man of little faith”. This is highly significant for Matthew, who wrote his gospel at a time when the incipient Christian community was torn between, on the one hand, faithfulness to Hebrew tradition in its legalistic form, and on the other, the understanding of universal salvation beyond religious boundaries.
The Canaanite woman hailing from a region of pagan brand, stands in this gospel for the myriad of people whom the 20th-century German theologian Karl Rahner termed as ‘anonymous Christians’. There are so many, even around us, who explicitly do not confess our faith in its ecclesial form and who are so far and yet so close to the centre.
There is a whole tradition in Christian theology, rooted in the Scriptures, which acknowledges a so-called ‘instinct of faith’ in each and every individual that opens them intuitively to the divine. In his recent document The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis wrote that through the anointing with the power of the Spirit, God furnishes all the faithful with that wisdom which enables them to grasp the divine realities intuitively.
Jesus’ behaviour in today’s gospel sounds paradoxical. While insisting that he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”, yet he personifies God’s infinite and universal mercy in responding to the needs of a pagan woman. He thus underlines that it is through faith that one is saved, and that cannot be reduced to a simple belonging to an institution or religion.
This is how boundaries are obliterated. This is in practice what Isaiah is saying in the first reading when he speaks of “foreigners” whom “I will bring to my holy mountain”. Isaiah specifies further what the requisites are for those who really belong to the “house of prayer care for justice and integrity.
It is this same point that St Paul is making in his letter to the Romans. Paul also is torn between the Jews to whom he belongs by blood, and the pagans who culturally owe allegiance to the Roman empire and to whom he feels he is sent. In what can be considered a most powerful statement in today’s second reading, Paul affirms that “God never takes back his gifts”.
What does all this mean to us today at this point in time of our history and in connection with our being Christians in today’s world? Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are living in times of epochal significance, times that call for a new paradigm of Christianity. In early Christianity, the philosophic principles of Greek neo-Platonism became the framework on which Christian theology was formulated over the next thousand years.
It was only after Aristotle was rediscovered, nearly a thousand years later, that in the West it was possible to explore and construct theology from a different base. Something similar to that threshold might be characterising our epoch. There is a different base from which to judge, explore, and understand the human and the divine.
In some sense, Jesus in today’s gospel is discarding ‘academic theology’ because it was irrelevant to the real life issues facing people. There is so much in our doctrine and theology that people today simply no longer find significant or relevant or even that helps them connect in some way with God. We need to differentiate between the nature of faith and the content of faith.
The Canaanite woman expressed no content, repeated by heart no statement of belief or creed. Yet she was a woman of great faith. She did not belong to structured religion, yet she experienced the loving embrace of the God who cares and whose love is gratuitous and who, in Juan Luis Segundo’s words, “is not looking to another world beyond this life. It is this physical world that is moving forward on an evolutionary trajectory towards completion”.