Volume 19, Issue 13-14

“We do not own God. He’s out there where ordinary people are.” 

Reflection on the 1st reading (Isaiah 56:1, 6-7)

Our first reading comes from a prophetic person known as the ‘Third Isaiah’. He wrote about 100 years after the Babylonian captivity (720s BC). Predicting that, despite appearances, everything would turn out all right for the devastated Jews, ‘Third Isaiah’ introduced an idea already mooted by the much earlier ‘First Isaiah’. This idea was a shock to many Jews who had developed a mean streak of nationalism, probably out of self-defence. This idea was of universalism.

When Martin Luther King’s words rang out, “I have a dream…”, he was restating Isaiah’s prophecy. The people of Atlanta endorsed universalism when they reoccupied the city centre bombed during the Olympic Games in 1996. The city centre belonged to everyone, black and white. It was the closest the poor of Atlanta could get to a place of Olympic celebration. Urban terrorism occupied that special place so long as citizens were too afraid to return.

And, that’s the kind of atmosphere predicted by Isaiah. Jerusalem would no longer be the centre of an exclusive religion. Non-Jews would take their places beside God’s first Chosen People.

Admittedly, Isaiah still predicted that the pagans would have to accept Jewish ways.

Gospel reflection (Matthew 15:21-28)

God’s plan, however, went further. Only Jesus could preach and live true universalism, thereby attracting more and more hostile attention from the Jewish authorities. But the seed faithfully sown many centuries before, had sprung to life in Jesus of Nazareth; and it still blossoms, producing results, wherever and whenever men and women choose universalism against destructive separatism.

So, Jesus was forced to withdraw to the relative quiet and safety of the northern border of Galilee. In fact, he strayed across the border into Syrian-occupied Tyre. (Does nothing change? That region, now Lebanon, is plagued with hostilities involving Syria.)

It wasn’t God’s plan that Jesus should preach anywhere other than the area occupied as homeland by the Jews. He was to concentrate on training the 12 Apostles. They could then cross all borders, territorial and cultural, to bring the Gospel to the whole of humanity.

Back to Jesus in Tyre. A local woman, a pagan, heard that an important person, a Jew, was visiting her area. She had a young daughter, tormented by a demon. This mother begged Jesus, reputed to have healing powers, to cure her daughter. All parents will recognise her feelings of desperation. They will have waited patiently many a time for medical help for their children.

Jesus tested this mother a little further, not to torture her but to instruct the Apostles, who were racist and supremacist. They thought the pagan woman cheeky and presumptuous. Only their Chosen Race attracted favours from God!

Jesus put an end to this religious exclusivism. He healed the pagan child and praised the woman’s faith. Church, take notice! We do not own God. He’s out there where ordinary people are. We are commissioned to make God’s gifts more easily accessible to all His children.