Ep 100 - The Grace of Encounter

In Episode 100 of Brother from Another Father, Father Isaac Fernandes reflects on the encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman — a Gospel passage that invites us to take seriously both Jesus' humanity and the prejudices shaped by our upbringing and culture.

The Canaanite woman's persistence challenges Jesus' assumptions about who is worthy of God's mercy, and her encounter with him becomes a moment of transformation. From this story, Father Isaac explores how prejudice can be deeply embedded within us, often without our awareness, and why genuine encounter with people who are different from us is essential to overcoming it.

The journey beyond prejudice is not an instant conversion but a gradual one. Like the early Church's growing understanding that God's salvation was intended for all people, we too are invited to remain open to the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes, it is through the person we least expect that God teaches us to see the world — and ourselves — differently.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to episode 100 of Brother from Another Father as we celebrate the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time. When we approach the Gospel stories, we need to take Jesus' humanity seriously. Today's Gospel, perhaps more than any other gospel, invites us to take the full measure of Jesus' humanity and appreciate the truth of the statement that Jesus' divinity did not prevent him from having a fully human experience. Part of taking Jesus' humanity seriously means appreciating the impact of the conditioning he would have received in his Jewish upbringing. We know well that Jews looked down upon Samaritans because they had defiled the purity of the Jewish race by intermarrying with pagans. By doing so, Jews regarded the Samaritans as having forfeited any claim to the blessings of the covenant with the Lord Adonai. So according to the Jews, the Samaritans were no longer part of the chosen people, because they were half-bloods. If this was the way the Samaritans were regarded by the Jews, you can only imagine the treatment that the full Gentiles got from the Jews. It was so bad that a derogatory term Jews used for the Gentiles equated them to dogs. Jesus would have been brought up to believe all of this. He would have thus regarded the Gentiles as being unworthy of the mercy, the grace, and the healing that his father had sent him to preach. Now, it is true that Jesus would not have simply absorbed wholesale all the prejudices ingrained within Jewish culture. We do see a critical rejection in Jesus' preaching of Jewish antipathy towards the Samaritans, for example. This is especially apparent in his parable of the good Samaritan, which would have been an oxymoron for most Jews. His words and actions also seem to push back somewhat on the gender stereotypes that characterized Jewish patriarchal attitudes towards women. So we often think of Jesus as having a special love and concern for the marginalized and for those who are rejected by everyone else, like women and Samaritans. This is true, but his love and concern for the marginalized and rejected only extended to Jews. The lepers that he healed were all Jews, plus at least one Samaritan. The prostitutes and tax collectors that he associated with were all Jews. If Jesus associated with Gentiles, we can be sure that his enemies, the Pharisees, the scribes, and the chief priests, would have made a meal out of it. But since the only criticisms leveled against him in terms of who he associated was that he ate and drank with sinners and tax collectors, we can be quite sure that he stayed well away from Gentiles. His concern for the marginalized and rejected of society only extended to his fellow Jews. That is, of course, until he meets this woman, the Syrophoen woman, of our gospel today. If there was any doubt in our minds that Jesus was convinced that his mission was only to save the nation of Israel, this gospel makes explicit what was hitherto implicit. That Jesus had absorbed the anti-Gentile prejudice of his Jewish upbringing is clear from the manner in which he chooses to ignore the Canaanite woman when she first makes her plea to him. Jews did their best to limit their interactions with Gentiles for fear of being rendered ritually impure through contact with them. It is only because this woman persists in her pleas that Jesus' disciples plead with him to do what she asks him, simply to get rid of her irritating whining. But Jesus insists that he was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. Jesus has not even deigned to respond to the woman by this stage. He is talking to his disciples. However, the woman seizes on Jesus' response to his disciples as if it was a response to her and makes a plain of direct appeal to Jesus. Lord, help me. He knows her problem, but all she can do is appeal to his compassion. Knowing who Jesus is and his values and the way he looks at people, we cannot help but conclude that Jesus must have been moved by this woman's plight, who is beside herself for her afflicted daughter. So Jesus looks at her and addresses himself to her for the first time. He does feel for her, but he tells her that he is hamstrung by the rules. He has to follow the mission that he has been given by his father. He does not feel in conscience. He can take bread, which is a metaphor for the grace of his healing ministry, and give it to dogs, another metaphor for the Gentiles. The harshness of this statement, effectively calling the woman kneeling before him a dog, is only slightly mitigated by the fact that in the Greek of Matthew's gospel, Jesus uses the diminutive kanion, which means a puppy. Even if we take the more affectionate regard of Jesus upon this woman, looking at her as a puppy, it is clear that he does not regard her as his equal. It beggars belief that this woman chooses not to be put off by Jesus' anti-Gentile prejudice. She could have given up at this stage and said to herself, Well, if this man regards me as a dog, then there's no way I'm going to get anywhere with him. But instead of giving up, she has faith in her relationship and in her power to move him sufficiently out of his prejudice in order to get him to heal her daughter. Amazingly, this woman chooses to embrace Jesus' prejudice and actually outwits him in his own metaphor. Something in this woman's answer suddenly shifts Jesus' perception of this woman and causes the walls of his prejudice to crumble. Suddenly, Jesus sees this woman as an equal. He sees this woman as a person exactly like the countless other Jews who have come to him asking for healing, mercy, and grace. As the walls of his prejudice crumble, he feels the grace surge out of him and onto this woman and her daughter. We can imagine Jesus feeling this grace surge out of him like water from a damn wall that has just burst. As Jesus feels this grace surge forth from him, we might imagine that it is perhaps with some amazement that Jesus says to her, Woman, great is your faith. Let it be done to you as you wish. What is fascinating for me about this passage is how prejudice can be overcome by encounter. We cannot be sure what exactly changed in Jesus' perception of this young woman. It might have been her wit, it might have also been her dogged determination to stay in the conversation, believing that as long as she kept the channels of communication open, there was a chance for transformation. I think that there are a number of valuable lessons contained in this incident. Firstly, I think it is important to take the full measure of how pervasive prejudice can be, especially the prejudice that is baked into our own sociocultural upbringings. If even the Son of God, Jesus Christ, was not immune to such prejudice, who are we to think that we might have escaped the clutches of such prejudice? This passage was one of the key reflection passages used by many Christian churches in the wake of George Floyd's murder that sparked the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. We need to acknowledge that we are all inhabited by some measure of prejudice, whether it be against people of different race, nationality, tribe, gender, sexual orientation, social class, political or religious conviction from ourselves. Indeed, if we are honest, we're probably inhabited by a bit of all of these above prejudices. Secondly, the way to overcome such prejudice is through genuine encounter with the other person. I think it is no accident that most of the prejudicial systems in the world, think of apartheid, for example, did everything in their power to prevent genuine encounters from happening, including prohibiting interracial marriages. While it is true that encounter alone is not enough of a cure for our prejudice, encounter with the other person is crucial to at least starting the journey, to becoming conscious of our own prejudice and then learning how to overcome it. We need to consciously seek out encounters with others who are different from ourselves. The gospel remains silent on the reason that Jesus ventured into pagan territory, the territories of Tyre and Sidon. Was it to escape the warisome crowds who were thronging him in Israelite territory? We do not know. But what is certain is that leaving his homeland territory gave him the opportunity to encounter this woman who challenged his preconceived ideas about who merited God's salvation. The third and final point to make is that the journey towards overcoming our prejudice is just that. A journey, and it is a long one at that. This incident did not lead to Jesus suddenly having a light bulb moment and reorienting the entire thrust of his ministry to include the Gentile people. It would take several decades after the resurrection and Jesus' ascension into heaven and the descent of the Holy Spirit for the early church to realize that it was indeed God's will for all men and women to be saved through the name of Jesus Christ, without first having to become Jews in order for this to happen. The work of the Holy Spirit in bringing the whole human race into one family is a slow one, but if we are open to conversion and transformation through the grace of encounter, we may avail ourselves to become the Spirit's instruments in this great divine project of unity. God bless and have a good Sunday.