Homily for Wednesday, Week 18 of Ordinary Time

Homily for Wednesday
Week 18 of Ordinary Time

Aug. 4, 2021
Num 13-14
Matt 15: 21-28
Ursulines, Willow Drive, New Rochelle, N.Y.

In today’s readings the children of Israel are contrasted with their pagan neighbors.  In the desert the Israelites voice their fear of the people of Canaan, while Jesus calls a Canaanite woman a dog and hesitates to help her (Matt 15:26).

Yet Jesus does help her, recognizing her great faith (15:28).  He professes to have been “sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (15:24), and in this desperate woman he comes to see a lost sheep of the new Israel that he’s creating, based on his 12 apostles as the old Israel came from Jacob’s 12 sons.

Old Israel, unlike the Canaanite woman, lacks faith in what God wants to do for them.  Only Joshua and Caleb are faithful.  Only those 2 are confident that Israel can “go up and seize the land” (Num 13:30) that God means to “give to the children of Israel” (13:2).  The other 10 scouts and all the people who listen to them measure what Israel can do only by their own power, or lack of it:  the inhabitants of Canaan “are too strong for us” (13:31).

Caleb and the Returning Scouts (William Hole)

In this the faithless scouts are like contemporary Christians who don’t believe in the power of the Gospel to conquer human hearts.  In the face of the powerful currents of contemporary culture—its various forms of amorality and even the promotion of immoral practices as positive goods—the faithless quail and urge the Church to accommodate herself to popular desires, to equivocate or compromise on divorce, contraception, and other matters of sexual morality, on end-of-life care, capital punishment, sacramental practice, etc.  The faithless forget whom the Church belongs to, who remains with the Church till the end of the ages.

St. John Vianney [whose feast is today] never forgot who is Lord.  So he was able to turn around the indifference and lack of faith in Ars and draw people from all over France and beyond back to faith in God and in his Son Jesus.  The Gospel retains its power today.  It will effect salvation in those who listen to it.