OMELIE / Omelie EN

16 ago 2020

16/08/2020 – 20th Sunday in O. T. - year A 

16/08/2020 – 20^th Sunday in O. T. - year A 

Reading 1  IS 56,1.6-7  Psalm  66/67  Reading 2 ROM 11,13-15.29-32  Gospel  MT 15,21-28

To be able to recognise ourselves as sinners! Saint Paul is talking about the disobedience to God lived by the Pagans and that of the Jews: sinners the former and sinners the latter. The Jews' disobedience had caused Jesus' death, and the latter had obtained mercy for the Pagans. Now, the Jews as well will get mercy from God and will recognise that Jesus is their saviour. All of us need the Father’s mercy, all of us are saved thanks to Jesus: we cannot take the glory of anything. Since all of us is a sinner, we cannot judge anyone, even less condemn. In fact, God can use the mistakes and the sins of others for our benefit: He can write straight on our wobbly lines, as a famous proverb says, which our eldest have often repeated.

Already Isaiah had foretold that also the pagan foreigners would have come to love and seve the Lord. And the Lord has promised for them the joy of His temple, a joy that is a sign and the fruit of the communion with Him. “I will make joyful in my house of prayer”! The confiding prayer to the true God is source of joy: the man who is in communion with God is fully fulfilled, is complete, is not missing anything. Prayer is necessary for men in order to be fully fulfilled, to be complete. Men, alone, are not even human beings, they become so when they live in a healthy and true relationship with the living God.

Not for nothing the gospel keeps showing us examples of prayer. Today we can see the pagan woman who addresses Jesus with her prayer. Nobody has taught her how to pray, but the necessity she finds herself in, the love for her suffering daughter, her ineptitude in front of pain, have put her in the right disposition for praying. She begs Jesus, addresses a request to Him, with the same confidence with which you would address God, the only God. For a good while Jesus ignores the request, and only after having seen the insistence and the humility of the woman, He answers her. Jesus cares about the humility of the prayer and in prayer: this is why He Himself wants to test it. Is the woman accepting to be compared to the small dogs? For the Jews dogs were impure animals, so the word dog was fit to describe the Pagans, the peoples without God. The woman is not ashamed of this comparison, she is not even rejecting it, on the contrary she uses it herself aswering the Lord. Her immutable insistence lets understand that the woman thinks Jesus the only one able to grant her wish, saving the little girl from the demon that possesses her, and therefore she does not even dream of turning to anyone else, let alone witches, fortune tellers or mediums. The humility is also sign and guarantee that she is not trying to judge God. These characteristics make her prayer into a sign of a “great” faith, as the Lord Jesus Himself declares.

The faith is great because it meets God's heart, who, attentive towards the suffering man, is lead to grant the wish. Insistence and humility let us recognise in the woman the attributes of a son. She, even if she is pagan, poses as a daughter in front of God, and for God any of His children is “great”.

We are sinners, but the faith makes us great: we will try to scrutinize our faith, in order to recognise truly in Jesus our only saviour, and to always recognise his wisdom and his best decisions regarding our wishes.