Holiness Requires Humility and Persistence: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost & Seventeenth Sunday of Matthew in the Orthodox Church

 

2 Corinthians 6:16-7:1; Matthew 15:21-28

 Unless we are very careful, it is easy to fall prey to the temptation of defining holiness in ways that serve our preconceived notions, which may have very little to do with finding the healing of our souls by sharing more fully in the life of the Savior by grace.  We often see righteousness through the lens of our own sensibilities about worldly divisions and disputes in ways that have more to do with serving our own passions than with serving the Lord.  Today’s Scripture readings challenge us to wake up from such delusions and to see ourselves clearly before His infinite holiness.   

In order to understanding these readings, we must remember that as Gentiles we would be complete strangers to the promises to Abraham apart from the coming of Christ.  It is only by faith in Him, as the One Who fulfills those promises, that we are now heirs to the great spiritual heritage of the Hebrews.  We read today about a Gentile woman from the region of Tyre and Sidon who wanted the Lord to cast a demon out of her daughter.  She was likely of higher social class than were the Jews of the area and there was a history of severe tension between these groups.   That surely colored the scene when this Canaanite woman called on the Jewish Messiah as “Son of David” to deliver her daughter.  At first, He did not answer her at all.  Then the disciples made the situation even more tense by begging Him to send her away.  That is when the Savior said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”  Then she knelt before Him and simply said, “Lord, help me.”  Christ then put her to the test by saying, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”  As a pagan, she and her people were thought by the Jews to be as unclean as dogs and spiritually inferior.  The Lord spoke to her in terms that pressed the point of her presumed vast distance from the God of Israel as a Gentile.  The same thing, of course, would have been presumed about us and our ancestors. 

 With those stinging words, He challenged her to state a revolutionary theological truth that hardly anyone else at the time understood.   She responded with these words: “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table.”  With that statement, she acknowledged that, if God’s blessings applied only to those of Hebrew heritage, she had no more claim on them than dogs had to the food of their owner. Nonetheless, even they could lick up the crumbs that fell from the table.  This Gentile woman knew better than our Lord’s disciples that the ancient promises to Abraham were ultimately for the salvation of all.  The Lord then praised her great faith and healed her daughter.  He had spoken harshly to her in order to challenge her to see and articulate the shocking truth that His salvation extended even to Gentiles with humble faith in Him.  That was not only for her benefit, but also for His disciples, who needed to see that His salvation extended even to a hated foreigner and includes people like you and me.

 The church in Corinth was composed primarily of Gentiles like this woman.  St. Paul’s correspondence with them is filled with admonitions to stop living like pagans and embrace their identity as God’s temple, the Body of Christ.   He had to address matters including: political divisions within the church; members suing one another; tolerance of incest; men having relations with prostitutes in pagan temples; abuses in the celebration of Communion; arguments over which spiritual gifts were most important; and denial of our hope for bodily resurrection.  The Corinthians were in a complete mess, hardly being a shining example of holiness.  If you ever wondered why there were spirited debates about what to require of Gentiles who became Christians in the first century, the problems in Corinth are your answer.  Even when the apostles decided not to require circumcision and obedience to dietary and other Old Testament laws, they did insist that Gentile converts abandon sexual immorality and any involvement with the worship of idols.

 It is in this very broken context of a compromised Gentile Christian community that St. Paul reminds his readers that they “are the temple of the living God.”  Despite their many failings, he calls them to embrace their identity in fulfillment of Hebrew prophecy: “[A]s God said, ‘I will live in them and move among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Therefore, come out from them, and be separate from them…and touch nothing unclean; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters…’” Pointing to this foundational point of their identity, St. Paul declares that “Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”

 Christ did not require the Canaanite woman to convert to Judaism as a condition for delivering her daughter.  We know nothing about this woman’s life, but as a Gentile she may well have participated in rituals and behaviors of the sort that corrupted the Corinthians.  The Lord’s mercy to her was not something that she had earned by following religious laws.  She was able to receive His mercy because of her humility, which enabled her to confess the truth about where she stood before the Lord.  She offered herself fully and without excuse, kneeling in humility before a Jew and pleading for the blessings of the one true God, which was a completely absurd thing to do according to all the common assumptions of that time and place.  That is how her spiritual vision was clarified to the point that she knew the truth about how our Lord’s mercy extends to all with faith in Him, even the despised Gentiles.  She is a very different character from St. Symeon, but like him she recognized that Christ is the salvation “of all peoples, a light to enlighten the Gentiles and the glory of Thy people Israel.” 

 Likewise, the mercy of the Lord is so great that He enabled even the notoriously confused Gentile Christians of Corinth to become “the temple of the living God.”  Their ancestry and imperfection were not the point; what was important is that they had received Christ in faith, putting Him on like a garment in baptism.  Likewise, whatever heritage or culture we claim, whatever struggles and failures we have had, whatever wounds we bear, however our hearts are broken for those we have wronged or for the suffering of our loved ones, we must remember our true identity in Christ and “cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, and make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”  Forgetting the past, we must focus on doing what we can today to live as God’s holy temple as we offer ourselves, especially the weak and distorted dimensions of our lives, in humility for Christ’s healing. 

 To do so does not mean feeling sorry for ourselves or becoming paralyzed by hurt pride when we confront how we have fallen short, whether in the past or today.  It does not mean despairing of healing in the future.  It does not mean giving up when we fail to resist any temptation or when we do not seem to be progressing on a schedule that we have set.  It means instead that, as we come to see with a measure of clarity where we stand before the Lord, we refuse to stop calling for His mercy from the depths of our hearts as we undertake the daily struggle to turn away from sin and share more fully in His salvation.  It means that we let nothing keep us from embracing our true identity as God’s temple, as members of Christ’s Body.  In Him, we are no   longer strangers and foreigners but beloved sons and daughters of God called to “make holiness perfect in the fear of God.”  Let us live accordingly.