Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

 Lectionary: 118 

She said, "Please, Lord, for even the dogs eat the scraps
that fall from the table of their masters." 
Then Jesus said to her in reply,
"O woman, great is your faith! 
Let it be done for you as you wish." 
And the woman's daughter was healed from that hour.

Who is my neighbor?” the lawyer demanded when Jesus announced the second Great Commandment, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” You remember the Lord’s reply; he told the parable of the Good Samaritan. He used the word neighbors; the English word comes from Old English meaning near-dwellers. Their homes are very close together. Although they did not live next to each other, and had never met, their proximity like that of neighbors obligated the Samaritan who found the man who’d been left for dead.

The French Jewish philosopher Emmanual Levinas said in an interview,

“There is a commandment in the appearance of a face, as if a master spoke to me… Unlike other parts of the body, the face is open and vulnerable. It reveals much about us. It may be destitute and demanding. It may be that of a poor man for whom I can do all and to whom I owe all.

And me? Whoever I may be, I am the person before that face. I am the one who finds the resources to respond to the call.

Ethics and morals, Levinas says, begin in a face to face encounter of one person to another. Even warriors admit that it’s hard to kill a man while looking in his face. No one wants to kill a man or woman or child who looks directly in their face. To do so they must kill their own humanity; it is an act too evil even for savage beasts.

In today’s Gospel story, Jesus has withdrawn from Jewish territory to the pagan regions of Tyre and Sidon. He knows no one in these territories; he does not worship their gods or eat their food. He apparently needs a rest and some distance from the constant demands that his own people make on him. But there he is met by a Canaanite woman who begs him to deliver her daughter from a demon. He refuses her, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."

But that means nothing to her and so she gets in his face. Saint Mathew says “she did him homage” much as the magi, who were also foreigners, had done homage to Jesus many years before. And she persists in saying, "Lord, help me."

His next word to her sounds sarcastic and severe, "It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs." But that is an excuse and not a flat refusal and she persists. “Okay; you want to talk in a riddle? I’ll answer your riddle: Even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters."

Access to the face, Levinas says, is access to God; and when humans meet face to face, they see the face of God, and they must respond.

Our God has come to us in a neighborly fashion. He has seen us in distress, as he said to Moses from the Burning Bush:

I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt and have heard their cry against their taskmasters, so I know well what they are suffering. Therefore I have come down to rescue them from the power of the Egyptians and lead them up from that land into a good and spacious land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

The Prophet Isaiah, in today’s first reading, reminds us that, as human beings, we already have a strong, spiritual knowledge for what is right and wrong. He says:

Observe what is right, do what is just;

for my salvation is about to come,

my justice, about to be revealed.

From time immemorial, the Catholic Church has taught that doing what is right and just for our neighbor is to embrace the Natural Law. But some people want to argue with that spiritual instinct. They tell us there are animals who act differently; and there are many nations in the world with many different customs and expectations of how people should behave. With their comedies and tragedies, movies and sitcoms they ask, “What if we change the paradigm and, as Steve Jobs said, “Think different?” Star Trek once proposed that modest people on other planets never eat in the presence of strangers, but breed babies quite openly. “Keep an open mind!” they say. Despite their idle proposals and theoretical what-ifs, we believe there are certain basic principles of natural law built into our human nature. We know them and we must observe them. And one of them is, "Love your neighbor.” We must do to others as we would have them do to us. That only makes sense.

And we must respect the dignity of every human being, regardless of their appearance, disease, disability, age, nationality, race, color, or smell. Anyone with a human face looks like God to us and commands our respect.

The German, Catholic poet Rainer Maria Rilke described the sadness of not knowing and caring for a neighbor who lives so close to us, in his famous poem, You, Neighbor God:

You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night

I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so

only because I seldom hear you breathe;

and I know: you are alone.

And should you need a drink, no one is there

to reach it to you, groping in the dark.

Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.

I am quite near.

Between us there is but a narrow wall,

and by sheer chance; for it would take

merely a call from your lips or from mine

to break it down,

and that without a sound.

The wall is builded of your images.

They stand before you hiding you like names.

And when the light within me blazes high

that in my inmost soul I know you by,

the radiance is squandered on their frames.

And then my senses, which too soon grow lame,

exiled from you, must go their homeless ways.

Rainer Maria Rilke

– Translated by Babette Deutsch