I grew up in a big extended family that had only recently arrived in the United States, and like a lot of people with that kind of a history, my world growing up was divided into two parts. There were the people who were in my extended family and the people who weren’t. The people who were in the family were the people you were told you could trust, they were the people you helped before anyone else who might need helping, they were the people you spent all your time with, whether you wanted to or not. And as I got older, some of them definitely fell into the not category. But you had a bond with them, a history, that you were told was greater than the bond you’d ever have with someone who didn’t share your past.
This feeling of a community bonded together in a circle like a family is a good thing. We can all identify with it — it’s what we all want, people you can count on, where everyone knows your name. But that desire is also something that is filled with temptation. That is what we hear about in all three of these readings today, all of them focused on what it means to be God’s chosen people.
In the first reading, long before Jesus came as the Messiah, we hear the prophets challenging the people of Israel to remember that what matters to God is not where you were born, whether you are from one of the twelve tribes of Israel. What matters to God is service and justice and a desire to believe; if you have those God doesn’t care where you are from. That was a difficult message for Jews to hear, because it violated their sense of family and their sense of history. Because what’s the point of being an Israelite, of being singled out by God, following so many traditions, if everyone else, everyone, is just as able to be God’s chosen ones? How are we supposed to treat these people who suddenly are able to be our equals, and members of our family?
In the gospel, too, the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus is a pagan, an outsider. They were called “dogs” in day-to-day conversation, demonized as outsiders so often are. But here too, Jesus himself allows this woman’s need to overcome his own seeming resistance to helping her. What matters is that she has faith that Jesus can help her daughter. Ultimately Jesus decides that his disciples need to learn something, that this outsider can’t be pushed outside the circle of God’s grace.
You could forgive the people of Israel for having a deep suspicion of foreigners and strangers. At the time of Jesus, Israel had spent more than a thousand years being beaten up and betrayed in its relationships with foreigners, first slavery in Egypt, then invasion and exile from their promised land, now occupation by Romans. They could feel that foreigners had never brought them any benefit, that they couldn’t be trusted, they had to be kept at a distance. Jesus had the difficult job of convincing them otherwise, that God sees the world differently than we do.
But what about convincing us of that? All this talk about Jews and Gentiles can seem like it was settled a long time ago. It’s a non-issue to us, at least we think it is, whether anyone can join us in this church of ours, because of course we know they can. It is one of the glories of being Catholic, we think, that all over the world we see people of every nation and place who are our brothers and sisters in some way, eating at the same table. That’s all true. But when it comes to the issue of genuinely seeing strangers as equals, treating outsiders as our family, whose appeals for help we allow to enter our heart, unfortunately we are still humans, and as humans we think we need barriers to protect us from those we can’t count on.
That self-protective reaction always tempts us to draw a small circle to define the people we are personally invested in. We have to do that, we think, or the world will overwhelm us. We think that there are people whose problems are so foreign to us that we couldn’t begin to help them, and in addition, maybe they are simply not to be trusted, we don’t know them, we are suspicious of their stories. Why have they come here? They haven’t earned the place we think we have earned.
That is where Jesus comes in, and of course as he does in this reading today he comes to point out the way humans demonize the outsider. But he is also here to make us some promises. Jesus’s message is not that we are obligated at all times to do anything for anyone who comes our way. But his message is that as a chosen people we are all much stronger, individually and together, than we think we are. Jesus had to convince the people of Israel that keeping their circle small would not protect them — in fact, it would lead to their destruction. And that is the message to us, too.
What God is telling us, over and over, that if we are living in the kingdom of God we are part of something large and all-encompassing, a house that encompasses everyone. Maybe it’s harder to see it in these days of a pandemic when we are all so separated, and we’re all facing so much stress and change. But the house God wants us to live in is a huge one, we are a community that can offer enough love to this world to heal all of its damage, if only we can see ourselves as fellow outsiders, or maybe fellow insiders, with the same need for God and the same need for healing.
So the lesson of Jesus in today’s gospel isn’t that community doesn’t matter. Instead it’s good news that requires some real confidence to believe, that God’s circle of chosen ones is a bigger and also a safer place than we ever imagined.