7 August, 2019
Today Fr. George asked me to preside at Mass here at San Gregorio. We were only
three here for it, but since I have spent this week brushing up on my Italian I
decided to preach due
parole–“two words” anyway. It’s no doubt much more comprehensible in English. It’s on the story from Mt.15:21-28, the
Canaanite woman who asks Jesus to heal her daughter and Jesus tells her that
it’s not right ‘to take the food of the children and feed it to the dogs.’ And
she says, “But even the dogs get to eat the scraps.” Jesus does heal her
daughter, he says, because of the woman’s faith.
When I was in seminary I
had a friend named Pete. One day Pete had had a pretty bad day and decided he
was going to take a long drive. I saw him when he came back and I asked him
what he had been doing all day. He said, “I was out wrestling with God.” I
said, “How’d it go?” And he said a line I’ll never forget; “Terrible,” he said.
“I won!”
There are times in the
spiritual life when we wrestle with God; or at least it feels like we are
wrestling with God. Think of the famous story of Jacob in Genesis 32. God wounds
him in his hip socket, but the text specifically says, he did not prevail against Jacob. And then there’s the story of
Abraham, also in Genesis, that we heard recently at Mass, negotiating with God over the
destruction of Sodom. Abraham wins that one, too! (Of course in the end God did
destroy Sodom in the story but still, in that first moment Abraham got the
better.)
It seems to me that God
likes it when we wrestle with him, and likes it even more when we win. As a matter
of fact a rabbi told me once that this is how the Jewish people think about it:
that God likes us to wrestle and is delighted when we win.
I would like to have
seen the expression on Jesus’ face during his encounter with this Canaanite
woman; I would also like to have seen the expression on her face, and hear the
tone of their voices. You could easily see this scene as an
ugly thing, where Jesus seems to insult and humiliate this woman. However, from
everything that we know about Jesus’ character he was never that way,
especially to the poor and the suffering. I think the most important word in
his response to his disciples was “lost.” He doesn’t just say that he was sent
to the “sheep of the house of Israel” but the lost sheep. And this woman and her daughter were certainly among
the lost, if not of the house of Israel.
And so I like to think
that in this meeting there is a little battle going on, a battle of wits
between the two of them in which she has to articulate what she wants––and how
much she wants it. And the good news is that she won the battle! She was pretty
darned clever. And in that moment I imagine a smile break across the face of
Jesus, and a smile across her face too when she realizes that her daughter has
been healed.
Back to my friend Pete:
things didn’t go terrible because he was wrestling with God, not even because
he won. They went badly because he asked for the wrong thing and he knew it.
There’s a saying, “You get what you pay for.” But I have also heard it said, “You
get what you pray for!” (I use this line every time a crowd sings the line
wrong in my song “Lead Me From Death Into Life, because the order of the words
change––“‘Lead me to hope from despair’,” I have to remind them.
“Be careful, you get what you pray for.” And so for us, let’s pray that we
might be ready to identify and name what we really want, but also pray that God
would help us to purify our desires.
We have to be careful: it might just
happen that we win the battle when we wrestle with God.
Tomorrow I get to celebrate (in English, thanks be to God)
with Mother Teresa’s sisters who share this property with us.
