DOG-TALK

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Mt 15:21-28

I make a public confession: I am very afraid of dogs. Even before I was assigned chaplain at the San Lazaro Hospital (popular as the only hospital in the Philippines where anti-rabies vaccine and effective cure for dog bite are available) I was already very terribly afraid of dogs. When I go to visit the sick and the aged in their homes, I never go inside their compounds unless I am assured that there are no dogs or, if there are, that the dogs are securely chained to a post or locked up inside a dog house. It is terrible in the Philippines, dogs roam around freely in the streets! Thus, in the Philippines many die of simple dog bite.

I am terribly afraid of dogs. I run away from them before they run after me. But sometimes, running away from them does no good. They just keep running after me. Thanks be to God, I have never been bitten by a dog.

But Jesus was! Today, a “dog” bites him. It was Canaanite by breed. And a bitch! A Canaanite woman “bites” Jesus and Jesus bleeds. However, instead of Jesus getting rabid from the “bite”, the Canaanite woman gets the antidote for the demonic rabies killing her daughter.

The verses preceding the Gospel today tell us Jesus’ confrontation with the scribes and Pharisees who criticized Him for allowing His disciples to break the tradition of their elders regarding ritual cleanliness. It seems that today, Jesus wanted a break from His nagging critics. He left Gennesaret and withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. If He thought that He could run away from the issue of the “clean and the unclean”, He was bound for a surprise. The issue, like a dog, ran after Him and even overtook Him. For behold, right in front of Him today is a woman, a gentile, and therefore, as far as the Jews are concerned, an unclean person, confronting Him. The issue of the “clean and the unclean” once more stares at Jesus straight to the eye. The Canaanite woman crystallizes the issue. She is the issue in a larger form. She is the issue personified.

But instead of the usual “Jesus-meek-and-mild” we always knew, Jesus seems to be quite arrogant and overbearing today. He projects the image of one who enjoys humiliating others in public. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs,” Jesus said. What is that again? Jesus calling someone a “dog”? Did we hear Him right? Was it really Him?

I believe that this particular episode in the Gospel is a good example of the claim that the Gospels are faith-testimonies. They are not all necessarily historical. Not being historical does not mean fictional though.

The Gospels are faith-declarations of the early Christian community about Jesus. They are the Good News of their encounter with Jesus. They tell us who the Jesus they came to believe in. They tell us who Jesus is more than what Jesus did. In doing so, the early Christian communities continue to hand down to us the Kingdom that Jesus came to inaugurate in this world and will come to fully establish in heaven. The story about the encounter between the Canaanite woman and Jesus is a perfect example of this.

By including today’s Gospel in the whole proclamation of the Kingdom, the early Christians tell us a lesson they themselves learned and wish to teach us in bold strokes: For the Lord no one is a “dog”. No one deserves to be called and treated like a dog. Jews and Gentiles alike, slaves and freemen, men and women, circumcised and uncircumcised – all of them – they are no dogs, but children of God. Early Christians as they were, they learned this lesson early enough. Acts 15:5-29 gives us an account of the very first council convoked by the Church: the Council of Jerusalem. And the issue settled by this first council of the Church was on circumcision. Some Jewish Christians, coming from their former view that Gentiles were unclean because, among other things, they were uncircumcised, demanded that the Gentile converts submit themselves to circumcision. Some Gentile converts and some Jewish Christians voiced their dissention. The issue was settled in the Council of Jerusalem. The apostles decided not to impose to the Gentile converts the Jewish Law of circumcision because the Lord Himself has spoken thus when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Gentile converts during their baptism.

Who would think, in these days of the solemn and illustrious Second Vatican Council, that the first ecclesial council was occasioned by circumcision? O, how trivial can we be!

But we can be forgetful, not only trivial. Thus, the Gospel today. It is the faith of the Church that Jesus is for all, not only for believers but also for those, as the Second Vatican Council (Lumen Gentium, 16) gives expression today, “who through no fault of their own, have not heard the Gospel…” they, too, can be saved by following the voice of their conscience. This echoes an earlier teaching of St. Paul in 1 Tim 2:3-4, “God wants all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of truth.”

In the Father’s house there are no dogs, only children. Thanks be to Him because I wish to live in His house forever but I am terribly afraid of dogs.

But there is something I forgot to confess: I am afraid of dogs, but only of dogs that are not mine. I used to have 16 dogs of different pedigrees.

This Canaanite woman may be looked down upon by others as a “dog”, but she certainly is Jesus’ too. Her faith in Jesus betrays her breed. Will our faith reveal our breed, too?