Ordinary 20

The Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Psalm 67; Romans 11:13-15, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28

Foreigners. Aliens. Strangers. Why do we fear them?

They do not have to come from another planet or another part of the earth. It might simply be a person who walks into this church who is unwashed, possibly homeless, possibly suffering from a mental illness, someone acting odd – and our default is – fear.

Is that why Jesus ignores the woman crying out to him? She is an unaccompanied woman and the Canaanites were ancient enemies of the Jews.

Strangers. Foreigners. Aliens. Why do we fear them? Do we ever consider that people fear us for the same reasons? We are unknown, different in some manner, suspicious looking[?]…

Speaking of looking different, have you considered why from the beginning science fiction movies image ‘aliens’ as looking so unlike us that they strike fear and horror into humans? …to the degree we want to destroy them. The reaction is volatile.

Consider, are the ‘aliens’ of science fiction images of what we fear and hate about ourselves? Is it that we put off what we loathe about ourselves onto a being outside of us rather than deal with the difficult spiritual work within us?

The 1960s. Star Trek. Its mission? “To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.” Is that what Jesus is doing when he crosses over into the Gentile territory of Tyre and Sidon? Isn’t that what missionaries from the apostles through Augustine, Boniface, Francis Xavier, Isaac Jogues, and women’s and men’s religious orders have done down to our own day – gone where no one has gone before? Thus, Christians choose to become the alien, stranger and foreigner to others for the sake of Christ.

It is only with movies like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [1982] and Close Encounters of the Third Kind [1977]that we observe some semblance of openness to the ‘other’. However, they have made little impact on our worldview, which has become more nativist as refugees, immigrants and asylum seekers to our southern borders are call rapists, murders and criminals sent here to destroy us.

Yes, they are sent here; sent by parents who so greatly fear for their children’s lives that they send them walking thousands of miles alone to what hopefully will be safety from violence, drug lords and extreme poverty.

Every parent must resonant with this mother’s lack of decorum and persistence. What parent will not do anything for a child who is sick, addicted, dying or in danger? The Canaanite mother humiliates herself publicly prostrating before Jesus, an enemy, presuming her daughter has every right to the same care and compassion Jesus has shown to others. The woman doesn’t care Jesus is a foreigner and stranger. Compassion trumps fear.

Isn’t that what God did for us? The wonder-filled, incomprehensible and eternal God humiliates himself becoming a created being for sons and daughters who are sick with sin, broken and burdened by life. The woman and our God in Jesus on the cross utter the simplest and most profound of prayers, “Lord, help me”.

This brief yet impassioned prayer gets the mother a place at the table from which she had been shunned: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” It is easier to label, to presume and characterize people we know nothing about with the worse of intentions,  and judge them then it is to be compassionate to people in need. Period. “Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters.”

Yet as Christians we need to ask why the poor, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the homeless, the addicted, the indigenous peoples of nations, should just settle for the ‘scraps’ that fall from the tables of the rich, the privileged, the powerful, and the moneyed? Why are they not welcomed as equal partners at the table of the earth’s abundance? Jesus through his utterly uncharacteristic behavior eventually welcomes the mother and her daughter to the table of healing and wholeness. Strangers, even enemies, have something to teach us.

Through the Hebrew prophets and the psalms, Israel was always reminded by God that they were once aliens, strangers and foreigners in the land of Egypt. A pricking of the memory and conscious as to how they were to treat the stranger in their midst.

We Christians are aliens as well. For our true home is in heaven with God.

Thus my opening question. Foreigners. Aliens. Strangers. Why do we fear them? We are them!