13 February 2020
Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time
Jesus’s banter with the Greek Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24-30 is not the only point in the Gospels where Jesus insists that he was sent first to the nation of Israel, even if in John’s Gospel Christ’s universal mission to all nations becomes increasingly explicit as Jesus’s passion approaches. After his resurrection from the dead, Jesus clearly sends the apostles to proclaim the good news to all nations, even if, as we see in the Acts of the Apostles, the early Church must struggle to be faithful to the universality of this mandate.
In today’s gospel, however, Jesus focuses still on his first mission to the house of Israel in initially declining to heal the Greek woman’s daughter. And yet, the gentile woman persists with the extraordinary retort, “Lord, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s scraps” (Mark 7:28). Of course, Jesus’s ultimate mission will be universal, and this was already prefigured by the Magi at Jesus’s birth and by Simeon’s declaration at the presentation, but it did not seem to Jesus when he spoke to the Greek woman that that hour had come. That is, until she offered him this retort and Jesus responds by offering her the healing she seeks for her daughter.
In his Regina Coeli message of 11 May 2014, quoting saint Caesarius of Arles, Pope Francis encourages us to come to our pastors in the Church with an attitude that is similar to that of the Greek woman. The image that St. Caesarius and Pope Francis use is more colorful: that of a calf nudging his mother’s udder so that she might give him milk (http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/angelus/2014/documents/papa-francesco_regina-coeli_20140511.html). If we ask with insistence for the good things that Christ promises, then God will be sure to provide them, even if we might have to ask all the more insistently before they come.