Years ago, during my conversion of faith, I was sitting at work one Friday when a whimsical thought suddenly took hold of me: I will go to a Catholic church. Spurred on by this mysterious impulse, I drove out to the Catholic church on the other side of town. I had no plan of what I would do once I arrived there. I approached the front doors of the church but found them locked. I knocked at the door, no answer. Perhaps it had been foolish of me to come here on my own, I thought.
The Door Opens
As I turned away and began to walk back to my car, a voice from inside the church called out, and the door was opened. I stepped inside the near empty church, and almost from the first moment, I knew that I had come home.
I have never forgotten that simple but beautiful moment when the doors of the church were first opened to me. Up till then, I had assumed that churches were only open to those who already belonged. Happily, though, that day I discovered that the treasure-house of this faith is open to all who seek it.
Even the Dogs Eat the Crumbs
The story of the Syro-Phoenician woman from today’s Gospel reading thus strikes a special chord with me. We read of how this woman comes and falls before Jesus, asking Him to heal her daughter from an evil spirit. He rejects her request with seemingly abrasive words, saying, “It is not good to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.” One recoils at these words; is Jesus really comparing this poor woman to one of the dogs, just because she is a foreigner?
Yet the power of this passage resides not so much in what Jesus says, but in the woman’s remarkable response of faith. She replies with perhaps the best comeback line in the Gospels: “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat of the children’s crumbs.” One imagines Jesus must have smiled in admiration. With these words of courageous faith, the woman wins her request, and her daughter is healed.
What can we learn from this woman? Firstly, all are welcome at the table of the Lord, even those outside the fold. No matter where a person comes from, he is called to partake of Christ, our bread of life—even “the crumbs.”
Humble Confidence
Secondly and most importantly, she exemplifies humble confidence. This woman fully accepts her lowliness, but in the very same turn, entrusts herself whole-heartedly to the generosity of the Lord. She knows the One to whom she is speaking, and it is through this certainty that she persists in supplication.
We are all called to this practice of humble confidence; to be joyful in our littleness, abandoning ourselves to the mercy of our Lord. In the same vein, we may learn the virtue of self-forgetfulness. The woman does not try to protect her ego, but happily forgets herself for the sake of truly encountering Jesus.
The more we reflect upon this story, it becomes apparent that Jesus actually desires us to engage with Him, even wrestle with Him, in a real and tangible way. Why does he speak so disparagingly to the woman? He has put forth a challenge to her in these words; and she is invited to rise to the challenge. Often in the spiritual life we face an obstacle that is meant to bolster our confidence in the One who has called us.
This encounter with Jesus, which may at first glance seem off-putting, even disturbing, can blossom into something very beautiful. He invites each of us into a kind of dance with Him. At the beginning we may not know where or how He is leading us; we may fear being thrown off-balance, being made to look foolish to the world. Yet if we can forget ourselves, we can enter joyfully into the rhythm of the dance with our Lord, allowing Him to lead us as He wills.
