Sister Madeleine Tacy, OP

"Lord, Son of David, take pity on me. My daughter is tormented by a devil."

Women in scripture as we are well aware do not fare very well at the hands of homilists. Only recently is the figure of Mary Magdalene, revered by the ancient Church as the Apostle of the Apostles, being rescued in the Latin Church - but that is another topic for another time. In general, women are ignored. When they could not be ignored, i.e. at the crucifixion and resurrection, their experience was demeaned or brushed aside as a "private" revelation. We have all heard about the lost sheep but what of the parallel parable of the woman and the lost coin?

The gospel accounts of Jesus' interactions depicts an obvious difference between his encounters with women and with men. Jesus teaches the men and when he does attempt a dialogue with Nicodemus it ends in failure and he closes the meeting with a teaching. In contrast he engages the women in dialogue. The Samaritan Woman Jn 4: 4-42 is a fine example. Sandra Schneiders' exegesis in The Revelatory Text moved the encounter beyond the shallow sexual explanation that has haunted homiletics for centuries. She invites us to read the text as it is without our present day cultural overlay. It is Jesus who initiates the conversation and who responds to the religious and theological questions of the woman. Jesus reveals himself to her as the expected one. The woman in her joy leave the stereotype of her place in society, her jug, and goes back to her village with the good news of Jesus' identity. Jesus does not stop her.

Keeping in mind the questions about the place of women in the gospel and in Jesus relationship with them we can refocus how we look at the story of the Canaanite woman and her request of Jesus. The usual and rather surface approach is to focus on the nature of the demon, the pushiness of the woman, the dog under the table, or her faith. The real question is what happened to Jesus.

Two healings take place in this story. First, there is the obvious one of the woman's daughter. Second, there is the beginning of the healing, being made whole as a truly human being for Jesus. At the beginning of the story, Jesus as well as the disciples are blinded by their cultural biases. As members of the chosen race they believe they are truly chosen of God and that everyone else is excluded. The book of the prophet Jonah takes issue with this belief but it persists. In other words they believe God speaks only to them and that they are in total control of God's revelation. This perspective makes God manageable and controllably, an attitude we are familiar with.

How does this meeting with the Canaanite woman affect Jesus? His faith journey as a human is much like our own journey. He meets a new idea in the form of the woman's request with silence. How do we meet God? How do we meet those experiences that threaten our worldview? We tend to be silent and hope they will go away which is exactly what Jesus does in his silence. It is disciples in their effort to protect themselves from "What will the neighbors think" who push the issue. In doing so they elicit an interesting response from Jesus. A response, through which Jesus says, "I cannot do what you ask because I am bound by my cultural and religious traditions." The woman is not impressed and presses her cause politely but firmly and is rebuffed with an insult which she turns around and in doing so is the catalyst for change in Jesus. He finally begins to understand his mission is broader than religious and cultural biases and prejudices of his time and he chooses to respond out of this new insight by doing what the woman asks. This metoina for the human Jesus continues and comes to fruition at the end of Matthew's gospel when Jesus tells the disciples to, " Go and baptize all nations," Mt 28:19-20 a major cultural shift from, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel MT 15: 25."

This gospel account, like so many others, can fall victim to the hazard of the familiar, Do we really listen to the gospel or do we allow our mind to wander off into "Dickey's meadow" since we know how the story will turn out and we are no longer able to be surprised by it. The saying "familiarity breeds contempt" can be rephrased to " familiarity breeds apathy." None of us wants to give up our cozy and comfortable world of a benign gospel and a sweet Jesus. The thought that Jesus had to struggle with his identity as a human being makes us uncomfortable as individuals and as a Church. We want to be able to say this is how things always were and why should there be any change since how things always are is how God wants them. Today's gospel points in another direction as we meet a Jesus who struggles as a human being to understand who he is in relationship to his mission of preaching the kingdom. As we hear and respond to the gospel can we do less!

The history of the Church shows a real struggle to define who Jesus is. Is Jesus God, human or both? The experience of the People of God was that Jesus was both. But, several centuries and heresies later theology caught up to belief at the Council of Ephesus, 431, when Mary was declared the Theotokos, the God bearer. The definition was a Christological definition concerned with replying to the Arian teaching of the time.

As humans we have a difficult time maintaining the tension between these two natures. It is much easier to see Jesus as divine and give lip service to his humanity. Thus the importance of Jesus' meeting with the Canaanite Woman is clear. We see the human Jesus, unsure of his identity but open to a new possibility.