Week 18 Wednesday (Year 1)

Readings: Numbers 13:1-3a,24 - 14:1,26-30,34-35; Psalm 105(106); Matthew 15:21-28

One of the most difficult parts of the Bible to read is the Book of Joshua with its accounts of genocide perpetrated by the invading Hebrews against the people of the land of Canaan. All happening, so we read, with the blessing of God and at his insistence. Whether it happened in exactly the way it says is not as important as the moral and spiritual violence it nevertheless glorifies. God remains strange, beyond our normal categories.

Today's first reading from the Book of Numbers tells of the apprehensions of the Hebrews after their reconnaissance of the promised land. 'They are giants and we are grasshoppers', they say, and they once again give themselves up to wailing. Enough, says God. For the forty days of the reconnaissance they will now wander forty years in the wilderness so that the generation that left Egypt will not now enter the promised land. The generation that finally enters it will be the one born during those years of wandering, and they will be the ones to carry out the destruction of the cities of Canaan ordered by God.

A high point of the campaign of conquest is when Joshua hangs the king of Ai on a tree and leaves his body hanging there until the evening. It has to evoke for us the strangest of parallels, when another king is hung on a tree and his body only taken down in the evening. That second king we believe to be the Lord, the God of Israel, who now suffers in exactly the way the enemies of the people suffered many centuries before. Beyond strange.

What kind of tension is there also in the gospel, as the Jewish rabbi form Nazareth meets the Canaanite woman from Tyre and Sidon? Who is now the giant and who the grasshopper? Jesus compares her rather to a dog but, in no way fazed by this, she engages in the banter and in the process she effectively invites him into her land. Even the dogs get the scraps from the table, she says, at which Jesus expresses admiration for her faith and heals her daughter. He is a giant in power, of course, but she is a giant in faith.

Is it some kind of reconciliation of Hebrew and Canaanite? Is it that faith is the infallible instrument that penetrates through to the heart of God so that he cannot resist it? Enough of weeping and wailing, wherever it comes from. Put faith instead, whoever you are, and then you are immediately in communion with him and he with you. The old nationalist boundaries dissolve, all man-made boundaries dissolve, before universal human need on one side and the universal power of faith on the other.

Can we say that Jesus is being led further into his own kingdom by the faith of this Canaanite woman? For by the end he cannot say, as he did before he met her, that he has been sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Read on in Matthew's gospel and we hear that he cured all who came to him, with no distinctions, and 'they praised the God of Israel'. A local, tribal god? No, the Lord, the Creator of all things and the Redeemer of all people.