Father Nestor Watin
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There are no strangers in God’s Kingdom—only friends and allies we have yet to meet. This Homily Short challenges us to examine whether our worship of God is reflected in how we respect, welcome, and treat one another as brothers and sisters united in Christ.
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So here is now Jesus going into a hostile territory. An insider approached him, 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 struck a chord in the heart of Jesus.
The woman, an outsider, called him the title that he was sent for, the Messiah. There was silence. 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.
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, Lord, help me.
And the Lord, 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, true.
But even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the master’s table. And he said, great is your faith, O 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.
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. 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 to the Romans, and through Matthew in the Gospel, to have a serious look at the way we worship God. Do we worship him, but do we respect each other? And that’s the problem. So today, the invitation from Paul in his letter to the Romans, treat each other as if you belong to one entity, God’s church.
Amen.
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