How Not to Read the Story of the Syrophoenician Woman

Friends, in our second reading this Sunday, Paul tells the church of Philippi, “Have no anxiety at all.” It’s hard to imagine that Paul—who was shipwrecked many times, beaten within an inch of his life, threatened and harassed and persecuted and opposed, and finally arrested, dragged to Rome, and decapitated—never experienced any anxiety. So what does he mean? What he says next is the clue: “But in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.”

Friends, our second reading, a passage from the second chapter of Paul to the Philippians, is one of the master texts in the New Testament. It’s not only ancient and poetic but also substantive; indeed, in some ways, it lays out the whole of Christianity. Adapting an early Christian hymn, Paul presents the answer to Adam’s grasp at divinity—namely, the self-emptying love of God.

Friends for this Twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear a story from Jesus that tends to bother everybody: the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. We’re meant to hear our own voices in the complaint of these workers. Dealing with God, we often think things are unfair. Why does he do what he does? I’d like to get at this with a clarification that comes out of the heart of the spiritual tradition: You don’t fall in love with the benefits of God; you fall in love with God.

Friends, our Gospel for this Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time is the familiar story of Peter asking the Lord how many times he should forgive his brother: “As many as seven times?” Jesus responds, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.” I want to get at this passage by looking at the second reading, taken from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, which sheds distinctive light on it. When we are clear about our mission—when we know that we belong to the Lord—we can let go of resentments and harms done to us, and get on with the business of our lives!

Friends, for the wokeist philosophy that dominates today, empathy—feeling the feelings of the other and not harming those feelings—is treated as a supreme value. But while empathy is perfectly good and decent, the Bible teaches that love, not empathy, is the supreme value. And love does not mean, primarily, feeling the feelings of the other or not hurting those feelings; it means willing the good of the other—and that can be, as Dostoevsky said, “a harsh and dreadful thing.”

Friends, for this Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to begin with our very brief second reading from Paul to the Romans. It opens, “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Here we see Christ’s cross and resurrection—the supreme sacrifice fulfilling all the offerings of the temple—extended to all the baptized. The Church is now the place where divinity and humanity are reconciled.

Friends, for this Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church brings us once again, with Jesus and the disciples, to Caesarea Philippi, and to a famous question: “Who do you say that I am?” The main characters in this endlessly fascinating scene are Jesus and Peter, and whenever the focus is on Peter, we’re talking about ecclesiology, the study of the Church. So we learn something very important here about both Jesus and the Church, and it has to do with the Rock upon which the former builds the latter.

Friends, for this Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear the story of the Syrophoenician woman. Jesus famously puts off this woman—first by ignoring her, then by dismissing her, and finally by insulting her—and she offers one of the most famous comebacks in literary history. A common reading of this story is that Jesus is cranky from a tough day of ministry, and a plucky woman from Syrophoenicia straightens him out. But this turns Jesus into a sinner—and the whole structure of Christianity falls apart. The Church Fathers had a much better, more convincing, and spiritually more helpful interpretation.

Friends, in my evangelical work online, I often encounter people who are skeptical of religion and dismissive of its claims. I usually ask them: How do we explain the intelligibility of the world or our ability to understand it? How about objective values and our ability to recognize them? Our first reading from 1 Kings reflects, I think, a great breakthrough in Western consciousness about how we’re able to identify right and wrong—just as we’re able to identify patterns in the physical world.

Friends, on this Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to focus on the Second Reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The eighth chapter of Romans represents the culmination of an argument Paul’s been making, and the reading for today is the rhetorical high point of that conclusion. This is the first great theologian of the Church naming what is essential to Christianity—so we have to pay attention!