Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today's Mass Readings

We have all come to know Jesus as kind and loving, gentle, merciful, and forgiving. We expect to see these qualities when we read or hear about him in the Gospels. However, there are occasions in the Gospels when Jesus acts in unexpected and surprising ways, ways that seem out of character for him. When this happens, we are tempted to look away, or to explain away, to avoid seeing what we are seeing so that we don’t have to see that Jesus is behaving in this surprising way. But when this happens, we should not look away or make excuses for Jesus. Rather we should see and accept that Jesus is acting in this surprising way and try to understand why. When we do this, we will always learn something new and important about God.

One of these occasions occurs in today’s Gospel passage when Jesus meets the Canaanite woman. The thing that we don’t want to see, but that we should see, is that Jesus is rude to this woman. First, he ignores her, and then he rejects her plea. Rather than trying not to see this, we should try to understand why Jesus acts in this way because if we are lucky, Jesus will at some point treat us exactly the same way.

We begin to understand what Jesus is up to when we see Jesus’ response when he finally agrees to answer the woman’s request. He begins by exclaiming, “O woman, great is your faith!” What is actually going on underneath the surface appearance, is that Jesus has already noted the faith of the woman approaching him, and he wants to help her faith to grow even stronger. So at first, he waits to answer her prayer in the hope that she will be persistent because such persistence actually strengthens our faith. Jesus saw that the woman was ready for this and so he put her to the test. And she passed the test with flying colors and had an even stronger faith as well as the healing of her daughter, as a reward.

When we find ourselves being tested in a similar way, and we will be tested in this way at some point, we should remember the example of the Canaanite woman and follow her example.

Reflection by Fr. Aquinas Keusenkothen, OSB