I grew up in a big extended family that at the time 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 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. If someone failed or went off the rails, people would buzz about it behind their backs, but they didn’t get thrown out. The family was the family.
This feeling of a community bonded together in a circle like a family is a good thing. It’s what we all want, people you can count on and who accept you. But it turns out that desire is also something that is filled with temptation. This same family of mine was not particularly accepting of all sorts of people outside the circle. They had no use for the nationalities their ancestors fought for years in the Balkans, and later, they focused anger on the other races who moved into the adopted hometown they thought should always stay theirs. In this world of insiders, there were lots of outsiders who were a problem.
In the gospel today, the Canaanite woman who approaches Jesus is an outsider. Not just a non-Jew, it’s that there was a long history of conflict and oppression between Jews and their former Canaanite overlords. Canaanites were called “dogs” in day-to-day conversation, casually dehumanizing them, in a way that should sound familiar even to 21st-century people like us. Even Jesus at first seems resistant to helping her. He has focused everything so far on reaching out to the people of Israel first, the people to whom his presence was so clearly promised. But somehow in speaking with her he is moved by her need and her humanity, and perhaps he was even reminded of the passage from the prophet Isaiah that we heard first, about how it is actually possible for foreigners to join themselves to the Lord. Maybe even this foreigner in front of Jesus with a sick child can do that, perhaps she is ultimately no different from all the other mothers with sick children who have been following him everywhere.
What does this scene mean for us? All this talk about Jews and non-Jews can seem like it was settled a long time ago. It is one of the glories of being Catholic, we think, that all over the world we see people of every nation and place in this church 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 all strangers as equals, people of every faith and place, that is still hard work. But for Catholics, it turns out this is really an indispensable part of what we are asked to do.
Maybe you have heard that recently Pope Leo issued a new teaching encyclical about artificial intelligence. Maybe hearing that it is about artificial intelligence led you to believe that it will be so complex that it’s not worth your time to read. But what you’ll find if you look at it is that most of what he says is centered on helping us understand in great depth one of the foundations of what we believe: that every single human being is equal in dignity. This dignity is not based on where you are from, whether you are productive, whether you have made mistakes or even whether you are a good or bad person. If you are alive you are entitled to be treated as a human being, and spoken about as one, and you have the same right to try to live a decent and thriving life as anyone else.
This kind of statement sounds obvious, until we realize how accustomed the world is to assuming otherwise. Every day, somewhere, we hear people dehumanized, the poor, migrants, prisoners, sometimes in obvious and even violent language and actions, or sometimes simply by shrugging off their situation as less important, or as people somehow just getting what they deserve. And yet they have great dignity in God’s eyes that nothing takes away. The title of the pope’s encyclical in English is Magnificent Humanity. It’s his attempt to remind us that God sees creation much differently than we do, not divided into winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, the deserving and the undeserving.
We can all debate endlessly the specifics of who deserves what in this world, or what justice is in any situation. But what we can’t do is create two classes of human beings. The English cardinal Timothy Radcliffe likes to say that our Christian faith has good news and bad news. The good news is that God loves us, more than we will ever be able to understand. The bad news is that God loves everyone else in this world just as much. That means everyone with a little daughter who needs healing is equal in human dignity. That way of seeing the world makes all of our lives a lot more demanding. But it is also the only vision of the world that is worthy of the God who created everyone in it.