--" target="--" href="https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081626.cfm">Readings for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Psalm 67; Romans 11:13-15, 20-32; Matthew 15:21-28
This morning, mothers in Gaza are still searching for food, clean water, medicine, and safety for their children. Even after a supposed ceasefire, Palestinians continue to be killed. Families already displaced again and again are being driven from one ruined shelter to another. Children are growing up hungry, traumatized, orphaned, and surrounded by the rubble of homes, schools, hospitals, mosques, and churches. With complete U.S. support, more than 64,000 of them have been killed or injured by Zionists in the last 23 months.
Meanwhile, here in the United States, other mothers are afraid to take their children to school. They fear that masked immigration agents might seize them on the way, at work, in a courthouse, or even near a church or hospital. Families that have lived peacefully in this country for ten, fifteen, or twenty years are being separated. Refugees fleeing persecution find our doors closed. Human beings are confined in degrading prison camps, transferred far from their families and attorneys, and deported without anything resembling justice.
Most disturbing of all, these policies enjoy their strongest support among Americans who loudly identify themselves as Christians.
Many carry Bibles, display crosses, describe the United States as a "Christian nation," and insist that they are defending Christian civilization. Yet they support bombs for Israel, starvation for Gaza, closed doors for refugees, and mass deportation for immigrants. They seem not to notice the glaring contradiction between the Jesus they claim to worship and the cruelty they applaud.
Today's readings directly address that contradiction. The Gospel reading shows Jesus overcoming cultural prejudice in himself.
The reading begins with a mother's desperate cry: "Have pity on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is tormented by a demon."
Matthew calls the petitioner a Canaanite woman. Mark's version remembers her as Syrophoenician. She lived near the twin cities of Tyre and Sidon, outside predominantly Jewish territory. She was therefore a foreigner, a Gentile, a religious outsider, and a woman addressing a strange man in public. She came from the land inhabited today by Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians. Today, we'd call her a Palestinian.
At first, Jesus ignores her.
Then, when she refuses to go away, he tells his disciples, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." Finally, he responds to her with words that should shock us: "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs."
We should not try to make those words sound nicer than they are. "Dogs" was a contemptuous designation for Gentiles. Jesus seems to be repeating the exclusionary language of his culture-- language not far removed from an ethnic insult. As I have sometimes put it, he comes perilously close to calling this desperate woman a "b_tch."
That kind of animalizing language is not incidental. It always prepares the way for persecution. Before people can be enslaved, imprisoned, deported, starved, bombed, or exterminated, they must first be described as vermin, invaders, criminals, terrorists, snakes, or animals. Once their humanity has been erased, anything can be done to them.
We have heard precisely such language applied to Palestinians. Israeli officials have described them collectively as "human animals" and treated Gaza's entire population as responsible for the resistance of Hamas. The result has been the destruction of the conditions necessary for human life. The United Nations' Independent International Commission of Inquiry has now concluded that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.
We hear the same kind of language in our country. Immigrants and refugees are called "illegals," "invaders," "criminal aliens," and poisoners of American blood. Their names disappear. Their individual stories disappear. Their children disappear. All that remains is a threatening category that can be hunted, detained, and expelled.
The Canaanite woman refuses to disappear.
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