In
Dante’s comedy, after traveling through hell and purgatory, our hero eventually
finds himself being taken on a tour through heaven. Heaven, for him, is ordered, there’s lower-heaven
and various grades of upper-heaven, each granting its residents an even more
intense closeness to God from the last.
But, in a sense, the order is irrelevant, for all the inhabitants of
heaven are incomparably blessed. Dante
starts his tour at the Moon, the lowest level of heaven. Upon its pock-marked surface the first person
he meets is Piccarda. It takes him a
while to recognize her, as her happiness has rendered her more beautiful than
she ever appeared during her life on earth.
She is completely aware that there are higher levels of heaven above
her, but she suffers not a jot for it.
She is happy. Not just content,
she lives a life of bliss. She has been
purified of all jealousy and wants nothing but what she has, for she only
desires that God’s will be done.
The
Canaanite woman is not yet where Piccarda is, but she’s on her way. She does want more than what she has. She wants healing and wholeness for her daughter. Like Piccarda, she desires that God’s will be
done. Unlike Piccarda, she lives on
earth where God’s will does not yet fully reign. She responds to that tension in the most
virtuous way possible: fervent prayer.
Like Jacob wrestling with God at Peniel, her unflinching crying reveals
both the magnitude of her distress and of her trust and confidence, what Jesus
will call her “great faith.”
We
heard last week Jesus talk of St. Peter’s “little faith,” which is in itself a
marvelous gift. The two stories are not
quite back to back in the Bible, unlike in the lectionary, but they’re pretty
close. Sandwiched between them is a
story of the hostility of some of the Pharisees towards Jesus, who not just
show no faith in Jesus, but actively work against him. This is a bold and shocking claim Matthew is
putting before us: little faith is shown by the fisherman disciple; no faith is
shown by the religious leaders; great faith is shown by this mother, doubly
invisible to the disciples, on account of her gender and her ethnicity. But never invisible to God. They say hunger is the best chef, and need is
the best teacher: of faith, and of fervent prayer.
Jesus
paints a picture of a banquet, the kind of banquet we know God has prepared for
us, and what he says is true, so far as it goes. It would be wrong to take the food from the children and give
it to the dogs (what are described here are household pets, not wild dogs). But the woman points out that while what he
has said is true, it ignores another possibility. It’s not necessary to take anything away from
the children. I imagine some of you may
have seen a room in which children have been eating … some of you regularly
clean such rooms! Children’s eating is
hardly a surgically precise procedure.
There are crumbs aplenty (and, of course, there are those children who
give some of the most nutritious things on their plates directly to the
dogs!). Nothing needs to be taken away
from the children for the dogs to be able to receive food during the banquet
itself. Excited, jubilant, messy eating
naturally leads to crumbs. And the woman
knows that all she needs is a crumb.
This is the greatness of her faith, that she sees how lavish the feast
God has prepared is, that she knows that but one crumb will work wonders, will work
God’s purpose out, will heal.
Here
in this place, we are invited to the feast.
Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say
the word, one word, one speech-crumb, and my soul shall be healed. We, the baptized, come here as true daughters
and sons of our heavenly father, adopted into God’s family, gathered around the
table and fed. But one crumb, that’s all
we’d need, that’s how rich the fare is.
And
that’s all the woman wants. Her will is
conformed with God’s already, like Piccarda she doesn’t want more. She just wants enough.
In a
way, we are all the daughters of this woman, all of us, that is, who are
Gentiles. We are the second wave of
comers to this feast, the wave Isaiah spoke of, the foreigners, the Gentiles,
joining ourselves to the Lord. And in all
that we have received from God, nothing has been taken from his first children,
the Jews. As St. Paul exclaimed in last
week’s readings: “theirs [is] the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the
giving of the law, the worship, and the promises.” And as we heard from him this week (just a
little further on from his letter to the Romans), “God’s call and promise are
irrevocable.” Nothing has been taken
from them. We have been enriched, not at
their expense, but at Christ’s, who willingly, lovingly impoverished himself
for us.
I said
we are the second wave of comers to this feast.
I should have said, I hope we are. Because Isaiah describes what this second
wave do: they love the Lord, they hold to the covenant, they make joyful in the
house of prayer and offer sacrifice.
They make fervent prayer, like the Canaanite woman; they seek God’s
will; they ask for healing, and wholeness; they act in wonder, love and awe of
how great a gift sits on the table.
Maybe we’re not there yet. Maybe
we’re still on that pilgrimage, streaming toward the holy mountain. But one crumb will bring us healing.
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