The Gospel reading this weekend gives us a rather strange image of Christ and he even seems, at first, to be outright offensive.  Christ is approached by a woman whose daughter is ill.  And she, as hundreds of others had done, asked Christ for his help to cure the girl.

But Christ says to the woman, “My concern is not with you.  Only with the people of Israel.”  But the woman does not give up, she presses her plea.  And then Christ says something that seems very harsh.  He says, “It would not be right for me to take something that belongs to God’s chosen people, the Jews, the sons and daughters, and throw it to the dogs, to someone like you.”

The woman was a Canaanite, a member of one of the tribes that the Jews had conquered when they took over the promised land.  And that ugliest of human emotions, outright prejudice, was the force at work in this Gospel scene. 

In the minds of the apostles, the woman was not one of the chosen people, she was “not one of us,” and as such she had no right to even make a request of God, let alone assume that he would do anything about it.  And so Christ’s attitude, the role that he seems to be playing, was really much more directed toward the apostles than it was toward the woman. 

By himself being so much a man of his time and culture, by recognising, even verbalising, the prejudicial attitude of his followers, Christ sort of picks up this intolerance and holds it up in front of their faces and then, by his final loving acceptance of the woman, condemns it, contradicts it, begins to turn it around.

But the smug, self-satisfied righteousness of the Hebrews was a deeply ingrained thing, and the controversy between those who believed that Christianity should be a sect of Judaism, such as Peter, at first, and those who believed that the Church must move to the world, open new horizons, be in fact missionary.

Unfortunately, the word “missionary” for most of us, conjures up exotic images of South America or Africa or Asia.  It is too bad that the word doesn’t sometimes conjure up images of our own dinner tables, our own living rooms, our schools, our business places, the streets of our own city.  There is a great deal of missionary work to be done right in our own community.  To be missionary means to find the places where Christ is not known, or not known well, and to bring him there.  And doing that is not the kind of missionary work that is done by teaching Christianity.  Rather that is the kind of missionary work that is done by being Christian.