Boom where you're planted

Today's first reading and responsorial psalm offer beautiful words of comfort to the lost sheep of Israel while in the Gospel, our Lord responds to a woman's pleas for her sick child by seeming to liken her to a dog.

The woman, of course, gets what she wants and her child is cured, but why would our Lord treat this woman with such apparent rudeness?

Listen to what our Lord says first, "I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." This gives us a clue about his primary intention. He may be talking about and with a gentile woman, but his target audience is the Jewish people.

Now take a step back and consider the attitude of the Jewish people at that time toward non-Jewish people, exemplified by the attitude of the disciples, "Send her away. She keeps bothering us." The descendents of Israel are the chosen people and everyone else is a dog.

In today's Gospel, our Lord is speaking from within that worldview with the purpose of expanding that worldview. He knows the faith of the woman and he knows that this is an opportunity to show his disciples what great faith gentiles can have and that it is faith that leads to salvation.

So too we live in an environment that is not morally perfect. This is not heaven. Although there may be much that is good and many of us who try to make things better, our families are not perfect, our workplace is not morally perfect, our culture is far from morally perfect, our nation is not morally perfect, nor are the human aspects of our Church perfect.

Like Jesus, we are to speak from within the place we find ourselves, speaking with a booming voice or firm whisper (whatever works) wherever we've been planted, with the purpose of making that place more perfect.

We cannot be content with the status quo, nor should we act totally as if we have nothing to do with the environment in which we live and work.

We too have a mission: to the lost sheep of the world right around us. We have an obligation to try to stretch the worldview of those around us to see the truth of Christ more clearly and to embrace it in their lives, even as we seek to understand and embody that truth more fully ourselves.