Sometimes We Beg on Our Knees, and We Should Receive that Way As Well
20th Sunday of Ordinary Time
There is a piped spring on Hamburg Road out in Frederick County at the base of the Catoctin Mountains that gets a lot of attention. It’s just a pipe jutting out of the side of the hill, with some busted up wooden pallets laid down on the ground so can get your fill without getting your feet wet. The water there tastes alright—it’s nothing special. I’ve stopped there for water many times while on long bike rides, and most times I drink the water and think that there is definitely better spring water to be found. Some of the locals out there even say that it isn’t a spring at all, just a pipe run into the ground diverting water from a nearby creek.
Most days, if you drive up Hamburg Road, you will see long lines of people there at the spring, with gallon jugs or even water cooler containers. I was out that way yesterday on a bike ride, and there were maybe five or six families there filling water, parents and children waiting to take their turn, some with wagons nearby to move the water from the spring back to their cars.
You wonder why so many come there for the water. Maybe just because some people really want for themselves what they believe is free spring water. But someone once told me that as many as 30% of the residents in Frederick County lack access to safe, clean drinking water. I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. Many of the families you see there on Hamburg Road are immigrant families who don’t seem to have too much money. They aren’t there for spring water; they just need water, any water, for their families. And even though the water available on Hamburg Road is not all that special, and might not even be real spring water, for the person desperate for water, just about any water will do.
There is a lesson there about desperation that I think matters: if you’re desperate, really in need, there is a goodness to taking whatever you can get. I think that is what we see in the Gospel today. Christ performs many miracles in the Gospels, and usually these miracles are preceded or followed by Christ giving an assessment of a person’s faith. He tells the Canaanite woman today: “Great is your faith.” He will tell many others: “Your faith has saved you.” Many times, it is faith that moves Christ to perform a miracle, to heal a person or deliver someone from demonic possession or sometimes to even raise a dead person back to life.
Most of us, I imagine, have asked God for a miracle at some point or another. I think I was maybe 11 years old when I knelt by my bedside for the first time, offering to give God whatever he wants if he would just help me pass a test or finish my homework or whatever it was that I wanted from him. Most of us have asked God for a miracle. We ask, sometimes we negotiate, we bargain with God, trying to establish so many quid pro quos: God if you do this for me, well, then I will do this for you. And there is nothing wrong with asking for miracles. Christ tells us to bring our needs to God, and sometimes what we need is a miracle.
The problem for us comes when we do not receive the miracle for which we ask. We need something from God, and sometimes what we need is a matter of life and death, or something that really matters, and when we don’t receive the miracle we need, we start to ask questions about faith. Maybe we start by looking at the miracles of the Gospel and saying to ourselves: “Well, I have real faith, just like the centurion with the sick servant or the woman with hemorrhages or the man born blind, so why isn’t God giving me what I need?” We start to wonder if our faith isn’t good enough, isn’t strong enough. Many people don’t get the miracle they need and start to experience doubt: is God real? Does he love me? Many people lose faith when God starts to look to them like someone who doesn’t care, who isn’t invested, who stands by and does nothing in the face of tragedy.
I think the Gospel today and the account of the Canaanite woman can help us. The woman comes to Christ and asks him to heal her daughter, to deliver her daughter from a demon. Christ says nothing, and then this strange exchange takes place between the woman and Christ’s disciples. But eventually the woman speaks to Christ herself, asks for her miracle. And Christ makes it clear that for now his mission is to the people of Israel, and this woman from Cana is not a Jew. It isn’t time yet for him to perform the miracle for which she asks.
But the woman won’t give up and responds: even the dogs eat the scraps that fall from the table of their masters. What does she mean? My sense is that the woman means that she will take whatever she can get from Christ. The woman has faith in Christ, and the woman is desperate. And the combination of her faith and her desperation makes her open, radically open to Christ. The Canaanite wants Christ to heal her daughter, but she will take the scraps from the table of Christ and be grateful for whatever she gets. For the person who needs a miracle, just about any miracle will do.
What I want to say is that the combination of faith and desperation in our lives does not always make us so radically open to Christ. We want what we want from God, and when we do not get it, we start to ask hard questions. We live faith on our terms, try to live in relationship with Christ through the lens of our needs, what we want comes first and what Christ offers comes second, and suddenly we find ourselves closed off from the Lord. The woman from Cana is open, vulnerable, broken down. Her desperation has brought her to her knees. And not just because she falls to her knees begging, but because the combination of faith and desperation in her life has brought the woman to her knees receiving. The woman will take the scraps from the table of Christ, she will take whatever Christ gives her.
I think that what is at stake for us, really, is forgetting the reality of what a miracle is. A miracle is God at work in the world, the supernatural making itself present within the natural world, an in-breaking of the divine in our lives or in the life of someone we know. A miracle is Christ showing up and doing something, anything, in a broken and busted up world. And by that standard, miracles happen all the time. People die, but families are drawn together in the face of death in a way that reveals the love of Christ amongst them. People suffer, but their perseverance in the face of suffering is unnatural—supernatural—evidence of Christ sharing the burden, carrying the Cross with them. There is evil in the world but then there is goodness that comes out of the evil that makes no sense at all, the proof we need that the victory of Christ means that sin and evil and death no longer control the world around us.
Miracles happen all the time. Christ is at work in the world around us. He labors in the vineyard of your life. He labors in the vineyard of the world.
What goes wrong for us is that we do not see Christ at work because we change the definition of a miracle to something far more closed off and mundane: a miracle is no longer an in-breaking of the supernatural in the natural world around us, but now a miracle is us getting what we want from God. That kind of thinking about miracles won’t help us find Christ in our lives or find Christ working in the world around us. Our thinking about miracles becomes too narrow. We look at the world on our terms, and the combination of faith and desperation in our lives does not make us open, radically open to Christ. We start to question, and we start to doubt.
The Gospel today gives us an important lesson: sometimes the combination of faith and desperation should bring us to our knees—in our begging and in our receiving. The scraps from the table of Christ are enough for us. For the person really looking for a miracle, just about any miracle should do.
Homily delivered on Sunday, August 20th, 2023 at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary