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20st Sunday in Ordinary Time Mt 15/21-28 |
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| Background: Today’s story has a heavy theological overlay. It addresses
directly an issue which is no longer with us whether there was room in the church
for gentiles and indirectly a question which will always be with us, the problem of
diversity. The story is vivid enough that we have no solid reason to doubt that Jesus did
perform a healing for a gentile woman. However it is unlikely that the dialogue occurred
the way it is written. Probably the author of the Gospel wanted to make the point that
faith was not limited to Jews but gentiles had it too. The lesson for us is that we cannot
draw lines which set borders to God’s love. |
read the padre |
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Story: Once upon a bunch of teenagers had to go
to wedding. Now they were not bad human beings for teenagers, you know. The only thing was
that their male cousin who was the groom was marrying a young woman who was Greek. Well,
she wasn’t Greek exactly, she was some kind of Polish woman, though people said that
the Church was Greek Catholic. This made no sense at all to our young friends. There was
only one kind of Catholic – Roman Catholic and all Poles were Roman Catholic,
weren’t they? Right! Then they went into the Church and were horrified. It
wasn’t anything like their own parish church. There were some geeky paintings of
people who looked like they were frozen and lots of candles and a big screen in front of
the altar. It got worse. The priests came out and they wore very funny clothes and odd
hats and talked a very strange language. Is that Greek? They asked their father. No
it’s Slavonic. What? Are they Protestants? No, they’re Byzantine Catholics.
What’s that? Well it’s another name for
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