20 August 2023 – 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year A)

by Fr Fabian Dicom

Last week or the week before in the run up to the State Elections, we had Masses here, three days to pray. Pray that we would make a good decision, pray for a peaceful election and during the second day, I reflected on this whole area of racism. And I read an extract of a report by Compass, a Human Rights Communication Centre and I just want to share that short report with you which I shared on that day.

The report says that over the past eight years of monitoring and reporting incidents of racial racism, racial discrimination and xenophobia in Malaysia. Now racism is discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. Xenophobia is fear or dislike of anything which is perceived as being foreign or strange. Sentiments that are normally directed in our country towards migrants and refugees.

Now the report says that the Year 2022 has seen the highest number of incidents that cover all these things. Malaysians continue to suffer from inequality and discrimination due to their race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin. Now the surge of incidents could be attributed to the 15th General Elections last year where politicians, political parties and affiliated members continue to use race and religion as their political tool to garner votes and support.

Now all these including religious bigotry. Religious bigotry is the fact of having and expressing strong unreasonable believes and disliking other people who have different beliefs and different religions. All these are a constant plague in the Malaysian landscape. And the promoters of these are mostly some politicians and religious bigots and clerics.

Now continuing on racism. Perhaps on a more relatable explanation is from Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan who I think many of you are familiar who writes quite a bit, who describes the normal growth of the human in three generalised steps. He describes the human growth in three generalised steps. He says people move from self-care and he says that some of us are not able to move beyond this. He says that people move from self-care to group care or family care. Care where they are at least where you start caring about people like you. Same family, same community, same church, etc. Then he says, he continues by saying that he is sad that only a minority of humanity move to the next and third step, that is universal care. And he says that this is why we have racism.

Now the issue of race and how one race views another has been around since the beginning of humanity. And today we see a bit of it in the Gospel. The woman who approaches Jesus is described as a Canaanite. Canaan or Cana’an was the name for the territory that became the land of Israel. And the Canaanite were the people who were expelled when the people of Israel captured the land of Cana’an after having left Egypt and spending 40 years in the wilderness. The Canaanites were the traditional enemies of the Israelites. The people of Israel continued to view with great hostility these Canaanite people. Even in the time of Jesus. They thought of them as the inferior race.

I presume you may be a bit upset hearing the Gospel today. I hope you are. Because we find Jesus being rather rude and really insulting to this poor woman. Jesus, our Lord, our Master, our God, is being very unlike the way he normally is to those in need throughout the Gospels. In fact, he reveals his own cultural racism. He says: It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the house dogs. It is fairly clear that the children are the lost sheep of the House of Israel. And the house dogs are the likes of this Canaanite woman and other pagans.

Now Jesus seems to be articulating the fairly standard prejudice of his people towards the Canaanites. Identifying the people with an animal has been fairly standard form of racist abuse in the course of history, even till today. But she stands up to him. She isn’t humiliated. She is not put off. She is not ashamed and she comes back right on it.

“But Lord,” she says, “even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table.”

What a clever response! She is saying to Jesus that the house dogs, like herself, can benefit here and now, from God’s favour to Israel revealed through Jesus.

With her response, and this is important, with her response, the racial boundary between herself and Jesus completely collapses. He pays her a compliment that is unique in the Gospels. “You have great faith.” In fact some authors even say he apologises that way. And during, if you know in that time, the man doesn’t apologise. I wonder whether they still do today. They don’t. So it was a revelation. And Jesus shows the way. He pays this compliment that is unique in the Gospel:-

“You have great faith” and Jesus identified only two people in his earthly ministry who he said had great faith – A Roman Centurion in Matthew 8:5-13 and this Canaanite woman that we have today.

Both of these people were outside the covenant God made with Israel, “I am your God, you are my people” which was the hallmark, the main thing in the Old Testament. they were out of it but both of these people, they understood something that the Pharisees, the Seducees and the Jewish Nation could not see or comprehend that God was a great God. God was a good God.

This Gospel incident foreshadows the breaking down of racial barriers that will characterise the early church. The early church. Within the early church, there was no distinction between Jew, Samaritan or Pagan or whatever nationality. As Saint Paul would say in his letter to the Galatians:

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female for all of you are one in Jesus Christ.

So my dear brothers and sisters, what are we missing here, especially in the church today? Indeed in today’s Second Reading, Paul says just as the Jews have received God’s mercy or Jews have received God’s mercy, the pagans are now receiving God’s mercy because God desires to show mercy to all humankind. That is the message of all three Readings this Sunday. The embrace of God is not conditional. The embrace of God is not limited. All have the mercy of God available to them.

And in the words of today’s First Reading: God’s house is to be a house of prayer for ALL. For all the peoples. If God does not discriminate as the Readings have revealed, then what are we waiting for? What are we waiting for?

We have erected so many walls. Let’s take these walls down now. Let’s break down the walls that divide us. Let’s break down the walls that have become barriers in our community, in our church, in our society. The walls of racial and religious discrimination. The walls of gender discrimination. The walls that discriminate in relation to socio-economic factors. The discrimination because of sexual orientation. Discrimination among families and in families. Even the walls that discriminate in the church and they are very dangerous.

Besides all that I have mentioned, there is an important wall that is very discriminatory in the church. And the wall of sanctimony, holier than thou and moral superiority must be destroyed. We are all here as equals before the Lord.

Perhaps we need to take those steps that Father Richard Rohr described, from self-care to group-care and universal care, especially to move from the second. I think most of us are very comfortable in the second step but we pray today that we move from group and family care to universal care.

So my dear brothers and sisters, may the courage, humility and the sheer persistence of the Canaanite woman in the Gospel today accompany us as we strive to live as God designed us to, as children of the universal God, the loving Father of all creation.

Let us just remain silent for a short while.

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