About a month ago, we read at Sunday Mass the account from Matthew’s gospel of Jesus’ meeting with the Canaanite mother in the region of Tyre and Sidon (Matthew 15:21-28). I found it a challenging reading.
Matthew’s Jesus believed he “was sent only to the lost sheep of the House of Israel”, but on this occasion, he temporarily leaves Israel and enters the region of Tyre and Sidon. He is approached by a gentile mother desperate for help with her sick daughter. She begs Jesus to heal her. Jesus first ignores her and then abuses her, likening her to a dog. I have always been shocked at Jesus’ attitude and behaviour in this story. How could the loving Jesus be so seemingly cruel? How could Jesus who was normally so sensitive and encouraging with the poor and suffering behave like that?
The answer is because he was a Jew of his time. Jews traditionally thought of Canaanites as evil and godless and likened them to dogs. The story illustrates the reality of the incarnation. Jesus was fully a man of his time, place and culture. He had all his people’s prejudices.
But the mother, for the sake of her child, approaches Jesus, risks rejection and endures neglect and then ridicule. And when Jesus likens her to “a dog”, she quips back, “but even the house dogs can eat the scraps that fall from their master’s table”. In this mother, Jesus “met his match”, not just in her quick-wittedness, but in her passionate love and great faith. She makes him acknowledge her love and it expands Jesus’ sense of mission and appreciation of the faith of foreigners.
The mother’s love is a wonderful thing to behold but so is Jesus’ capacity to learn. Many years ago, I read a moral theologian who claimed that “if we are lucky and open, life may convert us”. All of us are people of our time and place with our fair share of prejudices, but if we live life fully, openly and reflectively we may grow and become better lovers with bigger hearts and minds especially when we cross borders as Jesus did that day.
It was a critical day in Jesus’ growing clarity about his vocation. Slowly and almost begrudgingly he acknowledges that there is faith outside of Israel and his mission must extend beyond the Jews. And all because of something as simple and human as a mother’s love for her daughter.
As I prayed that Sunday I thought of the many mothers on our borders who clearly love their children passionately because they have left their homes and fled with their children on boats only to encounter our “prejudices”. Unfortunately, we cannot see them. They cannot plead personally with us, as the gentile woman did with Jesus. Perhaps if they could we might experience what Jesus did and it might change our hearts and expand our capacity to love.
Fr Noel Connolly SSC is a member of the Columban Mission Institute in North Sydney and a lecturer in Missiology at both the Broken Bay Institute and the Catholic Institute of Sydney.
