18th Week, Wednesday, August 9
Numbers 13:1-2, 25 - 14:1, 26-29, 34-35 / Matthew 15:21-28
The Israelites complain; The people wailed in the night.
James Du Pont, of the Du Pont Company, tells this story. One night in his boyhood he woke up to the sound of his mother crying. He had never heard her cry so uncontrollably His father was trying to comfort her. That night Du Pont learned a big lesson: "Life is not all hearts and flowers. It's hard and cruel for most of us much of the time. We all have our troubles— they just differ in nature." What counts in life is not our troubles, but how we respond to them. They can make us bitter or better. It's up to us.
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Do we complain and even cry out against God when trouble comes our way? Or do we try to use trouble as an opportunity for growth? "The same fire that purifies gold destroys straw." Author unknown
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As any great military leader would do, Moses sent his people for a reconnaissance. Ile must get the facts clear, locate the position of the possible resistance, see the strategic features and plan. For this he chose Joshua, his lieutenant and successor. Moses trusted him. As always: a man grows with his task. Moses chose one man from every tribe, knowing that the people will trust their own. In addition, he deputed Caleb, the faithful leader of the tribe of Judah. These twelve went into Canaan. The ten representatives of the tribes gave a negative report. The two (Joshua and Caleb) tried to encourage the people to trust in the promises of God, but Israel rejected their pleas and sought to kill them. For their faith and courage, the Lord permitted only Joshua and Caleb to enter into the Promised Land. The importance for the people then and now is to get the facts corrected, to make them known. Good communication is the secret of co-operation. It has no substitute.
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Whenever we desperately need a favour from someone, the most obvious word that will be needed in our request is the word "help". Obviously, we are not just asking for a favour. We need that person to help us and we need that help desperately. More so if the other person is not obligated to help us or that we are not so deserving of the help from that person, then something more needs to be done. We will have to appeal to the mercy and compassion of that person.
That was what the Canaanite woman did. When she said "Son of David, take pity on me" she knew that Jesus was not obligated to help her but she appealed to His mercy. Of course, we may be astonished or amused by the conversation between Jesus and the Canaanite woman, the point is that Jesus eventually gave her what she requested for.
But in the 1st reading, we heard about the people raising their voices and cried aloud and wailed all night just because they were told that the opposition that they were facing were just too much for them. They disparaged the country that the Lord was going to give them, and yet they did not turn to the Lord for His mercy and help. And for that they had to pay the price of a generation who will have to be buried in the desert.
In life, we have our desperate moments and urgent needs. We can worry and fret and be over-anxious. But let us turn to the Lord and appeal to His mercy. We just need to say, "Lord, have pity on me, and help me". We don't need to spend 40 years in the desert just to learn this.
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We need a “discernment of spirits” to distinguish between wrong contestation and contestation that bears witness (con-testari) to what is just and right. When the Hebrews revolted in the desert, they protested against the demands of the covenant and the risks they had to take to make God’s future a reality. It was a resistance to conversion. But there is also a kind of contestation that is necessary: a sign of vitality and lucidity that is a call to conversion and rejection of complicity in evil.
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There are some obvious problems with the story of the Canaanite woman. The words of Jesus sound harsh and discriminating against non-Jews. Some exegetes see in it an exchange of wits between the woman and Jesus, reflecting the prejudices of their time and yet fundamentally revealing that salvation is for all without discrimination and prejudice wherever faith is found. The way this story is told reflects the problem of the primitive Church whether to accept non-Jewish converts. Everyone who believes may eat from the Lord’s table and is fed more than crumbs.
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Prayer
Father of all, long ago you chose the people of Israel to make your name known to all the nations. Your Son Jesus Christ made it clear that forgiveness and the fullness of life are the share of all who believe in him. Make your Church truly a place of encounter for all those who grope for you, that all obstacles and barriers may be removed and that the riches of all nations and cultures may reveal the thousand faces of the love you have shown us in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
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Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)
Feast Day August 9
As she was growing up, Edith prayed at home with her family and went to religious services. While this could be said about many Catholic saints, Edith’s family was a little different. She was from a devout Jewish family. Then when Edith was about 13 years old, she gave up faith in God altogether. Edith grew up in Breslau, Germany, the youngest of seven children. Her father died when Edith was young, so she became very close to her mother. Edith was a very intelligent girl. She was so smart that the teacher sent her home from kindergarten; there was nothing for her to learn there. Edith didn’t just study when there was going to be a test in school. She studied because she loved to learn. She always got high marks in everything except math. Edith continued her studies at the university, where she earned a doctorate degree in philosophy.
Then as an inquisitive young woman, she picked up the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Ávila. Edith was so captivated that she couldn’t put the book down, and she completed reading it in one night. The next day she bought a Catholic catechism and read it. Edith felt that she had finally found the truth she had been looking for since she was 13.
When Edith was baptized, her mother cried. Edith did not have the heart to tell her mother that she also wanted to be a Carmelite nun. So she waited. She taught school, translated books, and gave lectures—and she prayed. Finally, in 1934, she entered the convent and received the name Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She shared in the domestic work of the nuns but also continued to write about philosophy. In 1938 the persecution of Jews became so intense in Germany that it became dangerous for the rest of the sisters in the convent. They could be killed simply for giving shelter to a Jewish person. Edith and her sister Rosa, who had also become Catholic, went to Holland.
Four years later Holland was occupied by the Nazis, and one day, without warning, soldiers came to the convent door. They gave Edith and her sister 10 minutes to pack before they put them on a train to Germany. From there they were sent to the concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Two days later, on August 9 or 10, Edith and Rosa died in a gas chamber. Edith was canonized in 1998. One of her favourite sayings was “Far be it from me to glory except in the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Edith found her glory on the cross.
