Wednesday of the 18th week in Ordinary Time
Readings of the day: Numbers 13:1-2, 25, 14:1, 26a-29a, 34-35; Psalm 106:6-7ab, 13-14, 21-22, 23; Matthew 15:21-28
Is it possible, on the one
hand, for the quality of our relationship with God, whether our fundamental
relationship toward God is one of trust or one of fear, to affect our
relationships with God’s creation; with one another? On the other hand, is the
opposite also possible, when the quality of our relationships with creation; with
one another are reflected in the quality of our relationship with God?
Our readings today, from
Numbers and the Gospel of Matthew, suggest a connection between our
relationships with the created world, with one another, and with God. In the
Book of Numbers, we hear of the final preparation stages for the people of
Israel to return home to the land God has promised them. Through Moses, God
sends spies into “the land of Canaan” to scout the land the people of Israel
are to settle. After forty days of scouting Canaan, the spies return and report
on their spy mission to “Moses and Aaron and all the congregation of the
Israelites in the land of Paran.” Their report is mixed: Canaan is prosperous,
flowing with “milk and honey.” And yet the scouts doubt the ability of the
people of Israel to conquer both the land and the people of Canaan. The people
of Canaan “are stronger than we,” the scouts report, “to ourselves we seemed
like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” The land of Canaan itself “is a
land that devours its inhabitants.”
Indirectly, the scouts’ lack
of confidence that the people of Israel could settle successfully in Canaan shows
their lack of trust in God, who had promised this land to them. Their default
relationship with God is one of fear. And so God’s promise, the inheritance of
the land of Canaan, will be for the next generation. Because of the scouts’
lack of trust in God, shown by their unfavourable report about the land of
Canaan and its people, their generation is left to perish in the desert.
Contrast the fear and lack of
trust of the Israelites under Moses, of the scouts to Canaan in Numbers, with
the boldness of the Canaanite woman (a pagan, not even a Jew!) who asks Jesus
in Matthew’s Gospel to heal her daughter. The Canaanite woman would have had
every reason to fear or doubt Jesus’ ability to heal her daughter of the demon.
Jesus’ disciples try to send her away because she continues to pester them.
Even Jesus does not seem too keen on helping the woman. Jesus’ first priority,
he says to the woman, is to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Jesus even
seems, to our ears, harsh with the Canaanite woman (what this meant in Jesus’
time, if different from its meaning today, is difficult to say), likening her
and her non-Israelite people to “dogs.”
Nevertheless, the Canaanite
woman is not deterred. She even plays along with Jesus’ seemingly derogatory
reference to her people. The Canaanite woman shows bold trust in Jesus’ ability
to heal her daughter, trust that is clearly from God and that she reflects back
to God in a kind of gift exchange. Jesus must acknowledge her deep trust in him
and so in God, which is greater than that of most of his own people: “Great is
your faith”!
Great is the faith of those
people who show their trust in God by acknowledging and trusting God’s
handiwork in creation and in our relationships with one another.
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