Jesus learned something from the Canaanite woman. We shouldn’t feel reluctant to say that. Yes, Jesus is the Son of God but the Bible assures us that Jesus was like us in all thing but sin. Needing to learn stuff is not a sin so, as a human being, Jesus needed to learn. As Son of God Jesus did not need to learn mercy — but he did need to learn that every human point of view is limited by the space and time of the viewer. What he learned was that God’s plan for his mission in the world was bigger than he envisioned. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” he tells the woman. He had clearly defined boundaries. I will put my energies here, and not worry about there. The lost sheep of Israel are more than enough to be concerned about. But the woman changes his mind. She expands his understanding of where he has been sent. The lost sheep are everywhere. How does she change his mind? With a mother’s fierce and protective love. Jesus sees in this foreigner, this stranger the kind of faith that he was hoping to find during his mission. He learned that faith was broader than he had imagined it to be. He learned that his circle of care needed to expand.
Pope Francis invites the Church to learn to expand the understanding of its mission as Jesus did. He talks about it in terms of going to the “periphery.” What concerns him is the tendency we have as Church to be, what he calls, self-referential. We focus in on what we are experiencing as an institution: the lack of vocations, the closing of parishes, fights over what constitutes genuine liturgy, indignation that government intrudes on religious freedom. The Holy Father does not dismiss those concerns but he urges us to open the lens wider, not to be self-absorbed. The Church should be on the periphery, with those out there, among the ones who don’t feel like they belong. The business of Church is not church business. The business of Church is God’s mercy. Those who live in a pitiless world need what we have as Church – the blessed assurance that every single person is made in God’s image and likeness, that each one of us are well-beloved and precious in the eyes of God, that forgiveness is possible and we are made to live in peace and harmony with one another. Our mission as church is not limited to who comes through the door. We, like Jesus, can learn to expand our circle of care.
This all seems terribly relevant because of the political situation we find ourselves in currently in the United States. Instead of going to the periphery, instead of expanding our circles of care people seem to be hunkering down into their particular tribes. How our culture will deal with racism, anti-Semitisim, anti-immigrant fervor and, in general, a fear of the “other” seem to be the challenge in our national debate. Jesus learned to see someone different from him with new eyes and that seems to be our call today. Remember the classic American novel, To Kill a Mockingbird? There is a scene where Atticus, the father, is teaching his children how to deal with the charged racial environment in their little town. He told them, “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” The way we can learn, as Jesus did, to expand our circle of care will be to walk around in the skin of another, to see things from their point of view, to feel what they are feeling. We must imagine what it is like to be judged simply because of the color of one’s skin. We must feel the fear and insecurity that courses through an immigrant’s veins. We must understand the dislocation that the working man feels when his way of life is taken from him. Once we learn these things we are on the way to a more just and peaceful world.
However, as you recall from the novel, just because you climb inside the skin of another does not automatically make things turn out for the better. Hatred still exists. Violence still occurs. Death still stalks humanity. This should not surprise us since it happened to Jesus as well. But the example of Jesus demonstrates that the end result is in the hands of God, not ours. Our job is to learn to enlarge our circle of care. God will take those good intentions and transfigure them just as God transfigured Jesus. That is the kind of “great faith” that Jesus praised the Canaanite woman for having – great faith in the mercy of God who makes all things well.
So what does this look like in the concrete here at St. James? How can we learn, as Jesus did, to expand our mission? Where is the periphery Pope Francis calls us to? Whose skin should we walk around in? To answer these questions let us learn, as Jesus did, that differences matter. It is no accident that the one who made Jesus change his mind about what his mission entailed was of another ethnic group, was an unbeliever, was a woman. Jesus could not presume that this person shared his perspective on things. In fact, the exact opposite was true. He had to learn to see things from her point of view. Appreciating the differences made his mission fuller. Yes, the lost sheep of the House of Israel are chosen and God’s call is irrevocable — but all people are loved and cared for by God. Yes, it is important to possess the truth — but the deepest truth is God’s universal compassion. Yes, everyone must be hard-headed about the facts — but the passionate, protective love of a mother has reasons as well. The differences that are out there call us to learn. We learn to listen to the experience of others. We learn to accept that things aren’t going to be the way they were. We learn to receive what another can give. Only by weaving the differences together will we make a tapestry of God’s love.
