Sunday August 20, 2017
The Woman Who Converted Jesus
I wished that I was not there! I was on a bus in the south of Mindanao going to visit the mother of Brother Joe. Joe and I had been together in community for fifteen years. On his silver jubilee of Profession he had been given a trip to Ireland. There it was discovered that he had cancer of the liver. His family had been informed, but now I was bring the news that is was only a matter of days until the end. I felt totally inadequate to console his family because, inside, I was in turmoil myself. I myself could not make any sense of what was happening and felt angry toward our so-called good God.
When I arrived at the bamboo house in the middle of the rice fields, his mother said in the local dialect, "He's dead?"
"No," I answered, "but the news is not good."
She sniffled for a while and then, with all her quiet matriarchal dignity, said, "Remember this, lad, whatever happens is a gift from heaven."
After a little while she said, "He will be buried here?"
I explained how for many reasons it would be impossible to bring his body back to the Philippines. After another silence she said, "When you don't see the body, the pain is doubled. But, remember this lad, whatever happens is a gift from heaven."
I had gone to console and I was consoled. I had gone to bring faith but it was I who received it. I had gone to evangelize but it was she who evangelized me.
This is one of the richest concepts that have emerged in the post Vatican II Church. Mission is not just to evangelize the poor (whatever kind of poverty it may be) but also to be evangelized in the process by the poor.
I could go on and on giving examples of people who by their words and acts, especially by their reflections on the word of God in times of stress, challenge our assumptions, our righteousness, our structures which we assume are the only channels of God's presence.
The poor convert and evangelize those who believe they have more.
There is one clear example in the Gospel of how Christ himself was converted by the poor. In Matthew 15, today's Gospel, Jesus is met by the Canaanite woman who asks him to have pity on her because her daughter is troubled by a demon. The woman is poor in many senses. In the culture of her day being a woman was to be poor, and she was a foreign woman at that! She has no right to approach Jesus. She is poor also because of her daughter's plight.
When she approaches Jesus she puts him on the spot. By instinct he is a man of compassion but his self-understanding of his mission at this time is that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of Israel. He answers not a word; he pauses over his dilemma. He is pushed by the apostles to get rid of her and he tells her rather weakly that she is not included in his mission.
When she comes back at him again he tells her, with the aggressiveness of the insecure, that it is not right to give the food of the children to the dogs. She answers him back, "Even the dogs eat the leavings that fall from the master's table." Her rejoinder is the last straw. "Goodness gracious!" he must have heard from within himself, "this woman does have faith! These people can have faith. I am called to reach to her and her kind." His self understanding has been expanded by his encounter with this poor woman. He has been converted and evangelized by her.
We see the extent to which he was evangelized a little while later in chapter 20 of the same Gospel when he tells the story of the owner of the estate who went to employ laborers for his vineyard. Some he called at dawn, others at mid morning and others at the eleventh hour. But all were paid the same. In this parable Jesus was saying that the latecomers, the non-Jews, would receive the same reward, or place in his kingdom, as the Jews themselves.
What allowed Jesus to pause, what gave him the ability to reflect, the sensitivity to be affected by the woman on this occasion? I think it was the recurring theme, the background music that we hear so frequently during the life of Jesus. "He went apart to pray." From his presence to his Father he gained stillness, a poise, and alertness that enabled him to hear the Father's voice in the voices of the poor.
We too need to be open to being evangelized by the poor, to hearing the Lord speak through the poverties within us and around us, to question our assumptions, to soften our rigidities, to let go of our boxed in concepts of how God should act. We will be able to do this only to the extent that we have stillness within ourselves, a stillness that can be cultivated by saying the mantra for 20 to 30 minutes each morning and each evening.
