Jesus’ comment in this Sunday’s Gospel of, “Great is your faith,” is quite a contrast to Jesus telling Peter in last Sunday’s, “You of little faith.” We might think Jesus is being mean to this poor lady who is in such desperate need. I think He is using her great faith to teach the Apostles something. The descendants of Cain, the Canaanites, were thought of as dogs. Yet, here is one who is not put off, she wants faith, she want God’s blessing. Before this encounter, Jesus is talking to the Pharisees, the great religious of the time, and all they can do is reject Him and find things wrong with Him, and here is the rejected embracing Jesus. The Apostles are being corrected – the ones on the inside don’t want Jesus and the ones on the outside are clamoring to see Him. This is happening today. Often the ones in the faith find it an imposition and our greatest enemies are baptized Catholics, such as our own Prime Minister, and our faith’s greatest supporters are the ones coming in to the faith. It is crazy to think of. We Catholics are bent on attacking each other and destroying the faith, just as the Pharisees were wrecking the faith in their time. We spend our meetings looking in and picking on each other, rather than gazing outward and looking at our mission. Look how zealous our enemies are in attacking us. Everyone is against our faith, at least we should be for it.
When I was in Charlottetown two weeks ago, my hotel room was cancelled, I hadn’t slept for over thirty hours and while I was walking up the street to find my new hotel there was a man who had a sign that read, “Our God is a jealous God,” then quoting Galatians, “It is a sin to be jealous, therefore God is a sinner.” He asked me what I thought of that. We had a great chat and I showed him where he was wrong, on many levels, and it ended friendly, but the point I am making is this guy had no faith, he was a Christian at one time and now he boldly proclaims his message of hate. We could say great is your hate.
The haters have more zeal than the lovers Look at us. How many of us are gazing outwards with love to the world around us and seeing it as our mission to love and zealously go forth into the world and proclaim Jesus’ resurrection over all our problems? Jesus is the answer. Like the rest of the world, but totally different, we need to have something to love. We need to focus our love on the world around us. The problem is we can’t do that if we are not experiencing love. Whose love? The love of Jesus. We need to come here to be filled with that love. Many times we have come to Church and expected others here to love us and so we walk away sad. We need to ask for the Divine Love here. How do we do that? We ask, “Lord, fill me with love.” Each time we are feeling empty we need to ask, “Fill me with love.” Love, like faith and hope, are supernaturally infused gifts. If we don’t ask, we won’t get them. Think of how often you are hungry and decide that at least three times a day you are going to sit in the presence of God and ask for His love.
When you don’t believe in the love, you will ask for faith and when you despair you will ask for hope.
You see you don’t earn supernaturally infused gifts, you receive them because you ask for them. Just as the Canaanite women didn’t stop until she got what she came for, if you feel you can’t go on, ask for faith, the faith of the woman in today’s Gospel. We have the remedy for the world’s problems and we hide in here as though we are a plague on the earth and hatred lives on. We need love and the world needs love to combat the hatred. We need great faith and to make great acts of faith, to daily be learning to put our trust in God. We need to look at each our lives and ask how we can daily experience God’s love. Ask how you can put time aside in your life to experience that love.
In the, “Lord of the Rings,” when they are at Helm’s Deep and the walls are getting breached, Théoden asks Aragorn, “What do you do against such reckless hatred?” and Aragorn says, “Let us ride out to meet it.” We have a mission and that is to show God’s love and mercy to the world. Let us stop attacking each other and look outward to our great mission.