Unity among people

This is my homily for this past weekend, the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Cycle A.  The Sunday readings are here.

Earlier this weekend, I saw my sister.  She is visiting from out of town.  I hadn’t seen her for a couple of years.   She lives pretty far away, in Nevada, so I don't get to see her very often.  It was good to see her, but if I’m honest, I’d have to say: we’ve grown apart over the decades.  I grew up in a large family: I have four sisters and two brothers, so there were seven kids, plus the parents: a family of nine.  And I suppose we were a reasonably close family at one time, when the kids were all living at home.  But each of us kids has followed his or her own path as adults.  We’re scattered all over the country now.  We rarely see each other.  On Saturday, I was trying to recall the last time all nine of us were together in the same room at the same time.  It might have been on my wedding day, and that was 35 years ago.   

Imagine that situation from my parents' point of view.  What I've described, with the children dispersed all over, is not how they they wanted things to turn out.  They really wish their children and the grandchildren lived closer.  My parents have never given up on the ideal that all of us siblings and our families all could be together again.  In fact, on that same visit with my sister, my mother revealed that she's hatching a plot to have a family reunion next summer - another in a series of attempts on her part to try to get all of us together again.

What my parents are longing for is family unity.  Their view is that family members should stick together and should be together.  I can understand that longing, and I share it.  My own kids have mostly finished college now, and they’re starting to go off in other directions, too.  It’s hard for Therese and me to get our family together, too.

I’m told that the 2nd law of thermodynamics states that the natural tendency in any system is entropy: increasing randomness and disorder.  If you don’t keep your car or your vacuum cleaner in good repair, they don't improve; they start to break down.  Personally, I think the natural tendency toward less order extends far beyond physics – I think there is something analogous in human relations as well.  We don’t naturally stay together.  Left to our own devices, we drift toward fragmentation, disorder and conflict.  

Our Judeo-Christian spiritual patrimony understands the natural tendency toward human disunity very well.  In the book of Genesis, we find the strange myth of the Tower of Babel.  The myth states that, in the beginning, humans were united and all spoke the same language. But in our sinful pride we built a city and a tower to reach up to the heavens - to try to put ourselves on the same level as God.  God punished us for this sinful pride by confounding our speech, so we could no longer understand one another, and scattering us over the face of the earth.  And that's how we remain to this day.  But while we are divided from one another; there is a part of us that intuits that it needn’t be that way.  That part of us longs for unity among peoples, just as my parents long for unity in my family.  But unity seems difficult or impossible to achieve.  If my parents haven't been able to manage to get their seven children together over the last 35 years, how will we ever achieve unity on a grander scale?

So the world into which God sent his son wasn't united.  He came into a world that had been divided for many thousands of years.  The world in his day bore some of the same hallmarks of disunity we still see in our world today: division, distrust, misunderstanding, conflict, hatred and war.  Jews, Canaanites, Greeks, Romans: they may have dwelled alongside each other within cities such as Tyre and Sidon and Jerusalem, but because they lived and worked side by side didn't mean that they loved and trusted one another.  On the contrary, there were histories of conflict among and between all of them.

So in our Gospel story today, when the Canaanite woman in this foreign city reaches out to Jesus to beg his help, she’s doing something remarkable.  She’s reaching across multiple divides: historical, national, cultural, religious, gender.   

How does Jesus respond?  Does he open wide his arms, hurry forward, embrace her, reassure her that her faith has saved her, and that all will be well with he daughter?  Not exactly – at least, not at first.    In fact, when she first reaches out to him, he doesn't respond at all.  It's as if he simply ignored her.  And then, when eventually he does respond, it is to rebuke her. And his rebuke seems to reinforce all of the divisiveness of the status quo.  In effect, he tells her, Hey: my people are Jews, and that’s who I’m here to serve.  You’re different; you’re a Canaanite; and that makes you no better than a dog.

In the face of such a rebuke, perhaps many of us would give up, and go back to our old, divided way of life.  We’d tell ourselves, Well, we tried, but it didn’t work.  We might crumple in tearful despair.  Or we might become affronted and give Jesus a few choice words and gestures:  Hey, Galilean, come over here and say that to my face about me and my people, and see what happens.

But once again, the Canaanite woman is remarkable.  She neither crumples nor rages.  She persists in her faith that this Jewish man can save her daughter.  And finally we see the Jesus we know and love and expect: we see the son of God work a wonder on behalf of this faith-filled woman and her child, even though he is a Jew and they are Canaanites.

Because it turns out those old hallmarks and divisions don’t count in God’s kingdom.  What counts is that we have faith in Jesus – and sharing in that faith is enough to unite us, across all our divisions and disagreements.

This Canaanite woman teaches us that faith in Jesus can bridge many gulfs.  I wish we knew more about her.  I wish we knew her name, and what became of her and her daughter afterward.  Because I think she deserves to be counted among the ranks of the great, faith-filled people of the New Testament, alongside Mary and Elizabeth and Mary Magdalene and the Woman at the Well.  (I have to say: on the whole, the women seem to do better than the men in this regard.  She certainly does better than poor hapless Peter, who always can be counted on to say or do the wrong thing at the wrong time; or doubting Thomas, who won’t believe unless he can stick his fingers in the nail marks and his hand in the lance wound.)

Let this Canaanite woman be our role model.  Because we’re beset by divisions and gulfs, too, and they’re impeding our ability to follow Jesus.  For example: we’re not united religiously.  Christians are divided between East and West.  We Christians of the West are divided between Catholics and Protestants.  We Catholics are not always united among ourselves, either.

Nor are we always united in our personal lives.  I’ve described the less than perfect unity in my family.  I don’t doubt there are other families at St. Edna that struggle to stay united, too.  Not all our marriages work out.  Our friendships don’t always last.  The devil’s own entropy is at work, sowing disorder, pulling us apart, dividing us.

Our divisions are not what God wants.  He wants us to be united, in Jesus.  This is one of the reasons he sent Jesus to us: to reunite us.  And it’s why Jesus still comes to us today in the Eucharist, that great sacramental sign of unity.  Jesus died for all of us, of all races, all nationalities, all genders, all sexualities, all generations, all social classes.  And he did so that all of us may be one – that all may be united in him.

As we receive the Eucharist today, let our prayer be that Jesus heal the divisions in our lives.  You know, I could reach out to my siblings more than I do.  May the Eucharist give me the resolve to do so.  What about you: what divisions are in your life?  What can Jesus in the Eucharist heal and repair in your life?