Fr. Nestor Watin
Watch the Homily
Listen to the Homily
In this homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Father Nestor Wattin reflects on the faith of the Canaanite woman and God’s desire for His house to welcome all people.
Through Isaiah, Saint Paul, and the Gospel of Matthew, we are reminded that there are no strangers in God’s Kingdom. Christ calls us to recognize one another as brothers and sisters, respect those whose experiences differ from our own, and live together as one Church.
Read the Homily
I pray that as we go through the readings, you will also make your own journey, like the journey of that woman from Canaan. And I wish to present the readings of today as if this is a gift, wrapped by the beautiful responsorial psalm, Lord, let all the nations praise you. That’s the wrapper, and the gift is inside.
Isaiah’s reading, Paul’s letter to the Romans, and Matthew’s gospel. So here is the offering of the church for us, in order to kind of catapult us into a greater height, saying, people who don’t worship the way I do are my brothers. People whom I consider enemies of my religion are actually invited by God to be under his house of prayer.
If you take a look again at your missalets, and see what Isaiah said there, that is the desire of the Lord put into the mouth, or into the hands of Isaiah, saying, may the temple of God be a house of prayer for all nations. Imagine if this was told by the Lord Yahweh to Isaiah, and put into writing, and spoken through his mouth, and at that time, there were no other religions yet, but the theocracy. I repeat, the theocracy of God, not democracy, not parliamentary.
Here is now the Lord saying, those who have not heard yet what Isaiah is saying are part of my people. Then came religions, and then as the Jewish nation grew, of course, there was also the big, big group of those who haven’t heard. I don’t call them pagans, I don’t call them Gentiles, just people who haven’t heard of the prophecies of the prophets, and of course, the old ancient religions.
Now comes the time when Isaiah’s prophecy will be activated and lived out in the case of Jesus. If the gospel started this way, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. He didn’t withdraw.
He purposely went there. If this is the Lake of Galilee, at the bottom to the west is Tyre and Sidon, purely pagans, and center of commerce for Gentiles, center of Baal worship, and of course, the promiscuity. I don’t talk long because of their kids.
Yeah, because of the promiscuity. So here is now Jesus going into a hostile territory, approached by one resident. Remember, he’s from Nazareth.
He grew up in Nazareth. Here is now Jesus going. He may have gone around the cove or crossed by water of the lake, and going into that region of the Gentiles, an insider approached him, a Canaanite woman, saying, son of David, have pity on me.
My daughter is tormented by a demon. There was complete silence. I’m sure you could imagine that Jesus permitted that silence because he wanted the apostles hearing the title that the woman gave to Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.
It rang a bell. It struck a chord in the heart of Jesus. The woman, a pagan, an outsider, called him the title that he was sent for, the Messiah, the anointed, the coming Savior.
There was silence. Who broke the silence? The apostles. Send her away.
She’s pestering us. They didn’t pass the first test of the Lord. They broke the silence with a negative comment.
Send her away. She’s not part of us. And the Lord continued his silence.
And then he said, I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. That triggered the woman to approach him more nearly and said, Lord, help me. Here is the woman who said, son of David, Messiah, and now saying, help me.
That means here is an outsider, outside of the chosen people’s race, approaching the Messiah, recognizing him as the son of David, and saying, help me. Help me, Lord. Don’t let my ethnic origin kind of erase me from the fold of God, because I’m asking you now to behave as your Father has sent you for, the Messiah.
So I’m asking you to help me. And the Lord, calculating his moves in order to awaken the faith of the apostles, insulted her. Quote, unquote, insulted her.
It is not right to give the food of the children to dogs. And the woman said, yeah, it’s true. But even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the master’s table.
Oh, bingo. Voila. You hit the nail right on the head.
And he said, great is your faith, oh woman. This very hour, your daughter will be healed. The apostles failed the first test.
They broke the silence. The second, they failed miserably again. Because they did not apologize, thinking that they did a favor to Jesus, shielding him from being pestered by the woman.
They didn’t apologize to the woman either. Look at that. I guess we are part of the crowd.
I guess in our former lives, we were there. Perhaps applauding, saying, oh, she was put into her proper place. No, she was not.
That was the test of the apostles. Because the woman knew what to say, inspired by God the Father. So here is the woman, an outsider, knowing that she belonged there, despite her ethnic origin.
This gospel is for us. And since Paul absorbed and imbibed the gospel, he preached that way. To Gentile converts, from paganism to Christianity.
From Judaist Jews to Christianity. They are not comfortable sitting together in the temple. Former Jew, former pagan, coming into the Christian temple.
So here is Paul saying, I urge you, people of faith now, you Gentiles, you should thank the Jews for having disobeyed God, rejected His invitation. Now you are in, hoping that by your entry, they will become envious, they will be provoked, and they will invoke God’s blessing for them. So that one day, we will all be together in the same church.
If you go to the Holy Land, you are facing the wailing wall. Does the wall weep? Does the wall cry? No. It’s the Jew who cries.
And some indecent journalists take pictures of Jews doing this way. And they say, oh, look at the Jew. Literally, worshiping God with a total mind, total heart, with all his strength.
No. The Jew is not shaking his knees because he is doing the worship of the entire body. No.
Those are obnoxious, indecent journalists. The truth is, the prayer of the Jew is, send us now the Messiah. Until now, they didn’t accept Jesus as the Messiah.
That’s a problem. So here we are, contemplating on a bitter reality. And we go there, you are told, oh, you’re a woman.
That side. You’re a man. Have the yarmulke to that side.
Perhaps they are kind of unwelcoming, but they also need the tourist money, the pilgrim’s money. So they’re just saying, woman, that way. Oh, gentleman, that way.
But their desire also to receive the fullness of grace from God, which they have rejected, and still are hoping to have the Messiah drop from heaven. No. He came already as an infant, as a helpless babe, born in the manger.
Angels, this is Christmas. Angels looking down on the infant Jesus, and the Jesus looking up to heaven, and listening to the angels’ choirs. The Messiah has come.
We only pray that those who rejected him will awake, will be awakened already, that indeed, the Lord Jesus, their expected Messiah, is here already. And it is the prayer of the church today, 20th Sunday of the liturgical year, that we will become inclusive, that we will live inclusion, so that we will be able to say, my neighbor who is a Catholic, who worships God in a way different from mine, is my brother, is my sister. Because there are no strangers in God’s kingdom.
Friends yet to know each other. There are no enemies in God’s kingdom. These are allies we still have to meet in the future.
So today, the Lord God is asking us, through Isaiah, through Paul, through the Romans, and through Matthew in the Gospel, to have a serious look at the way we worship God. We worship Him, they worship Him, but do we respect each other? And that’s the problem. So today, the invitation is from Paul, in his letter to the Romans.
Treat each other as if you belong to one entity, God’s church. Amen. I am Father Nestor Wattin.
44 years, going 45 soon in the ministry. Retired early from the diocese of Rockville Center in Long Island, New York, because I had COVID. I have a problem with memory.
I lose my wallet. I forget my wallet. I lose keys.
And what my problem was, before I retired, if there’s a sick call from the nursing home or from the hospital, I’m going to my room to get the keys. It’s not there. I find my keys in the laundry room, because they were in my pants, the soiled ones.
It gets crazy. The moment I get the call, before I could respond to the call, it takes seven, eight, nine minutes already. And so I retired early.
I am back to the Philippines, where I used to be a professor of the seminary. I was one of those who built that seminary, and that’s the reason why I came here. It is because the piping system, the plumbing system of our seminary is in disrepair, totally disarray.
Because when I was young, I opted to have cheap GI pipes made in China. Gauge 20. I think you call it schedule 20.
The thickness is called gauge or schedule. Thin and, I would say, substandard. But it went well until the 15th year of our operation.
In the 17th year, we began seeing that the water in the tabs were getting ridiculous. That was rusty. We still did some kind of repair, thinking that the problem was in the tank.
No, it was not. It was in the pipes. Getting rusty, plus the water from underground going into the open tank, and then filtered into a better closed tank going to our kitchen.
We saw that every day, despite cleaning the open tank, it’s reddish. And then, when I started working in the U.S., I understood that my mistakes were kind of expensive mistakes because I wanted to economize. I was cheap, and now I have a problem.
The brother of the bishop is an architect. The wife is an engineer. They checked the system, and they said, why don’t we knock down a wall and check the pipes? They are so thin.
So thin with the entry of salty water coming from the underground. We are not near the sea, and yet there’s calcium and salt in the water. So no wonder there was a faster oxidation.
And the wife and the husband were telling us, we will use plastic pipes. We consult people and say, no. Not PVC, but PPR.
I don’t really know what is PPR. I know the first piece, pulley, something, fane, pulley, whatever. It ends with fane.
That is what we are going to buy. Help me buy them. The faithful of my diocese of Romblon belong to that typhoon belt of the Philippines.
Whatever simple hurricane, simple, I would say, strong wind in the Pacific, when that enters into my province because of the position of the islands. We are on a capillago. Seven islands, four islets, and one uninhabited island.
If it’s high tide, it gets lost. If it’s low tide, it is seen. And here we are, asking our people to help us.
They could help us only in putting the tower. So I intend to put up a tower just beside the kitchen so that from that open tank, the water passes through pulverized carbon, pulverized charcoal. That’s the first filtering process.
Gets into the steel, stainless steel tank. Gets out, another filtering process, pulverized charcoal before it gets into the RO. I’ll be coming home with reverse osmosis tubes and perhaps extra filters.
I need your help. But in helping me, don’t reduce what you normally give to the parish. Just put your donation today or next Sunday, but don’t you ever reduce your regular weekly collection for the parish.
Your electric company is not your friend. Neither is the phone company. The parish still has to pay its bills.
So just put whatever your heart dictates, and I’ll be grateful and I’ll be happy. I’m going to transfer to Father Brian Lentz Parish in Holy Family. On Thursday, I’ll be giving, again, the same talk.
And I will feel kind of comfortable because I didn’t steal from the parish. So please maintain what you put normally. That’s for the parish.
Whatever your heart dictates, give it to the envelope. Thank you, and may God repay you 100 fold. ♪
(Transcribed by TurboScribe. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)