Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost. Octoechos Tone 8; Holy First-Martyr and Equal-to-the-Apostles Thekla.
2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1; Matthew 15:21-28.
Read Matthew 15:21-28
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Ever try to change someone’s opinion of their favourite music? Almost impossible. How about politics? Try religion – difficult, isn’t it? The fact of the matter is that we can’t tell other people how to feel. Faith is about more than intellectual belief. For belief to become the reliance and trust called faith that endures in the face of trials and doubts, it must come from an embodied place within us – “faith apart from works is dead” (James 2:26). Allowing for a range of emotional temperaments between different people, faith always comes to have this visceral aspect to it.
Jesus is, of course, theologically correct in today’s gospel reading. Though he has “other sheep, that are not of this fold” (John 10:16), that ever-widening circle from “Jerusalem…Judea…Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8) was to begin with his mission to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel”.
Jesus purposely uses triggering words with the Canaanite woman. His analogy comparing Jews to children and Canaanites to dogs under their table was addressed specifically to her as she knelt before him. It didn’t start that way. At first, “he did not answer her a word.” Seeing that and realizing that she wasn’t going to stop “crying after us,” the disciples pleaded for Jesus to send her away. Instead, Jesus engaged her in the kind of probing conversation he had with the Samaritan woman at the well.
The woman’s response was as focused on the truth of Christ as her original appeal of “O Lord, Son of David” – Jesus is both Lord and Master of the Jews and his divine crumbs are effective no matter who picks them up.
Our Lord sometimes probes our faith as pointedly as this. May his response increasingly be, “great is your faith!”
Bible References