Wednesday in the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time
Feast of St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD, (Edith Stein)
Num 13,1-14,1; Mt 15, 21-28
On the one hand, the chosen People of God. They experienced God's power and might in their saving from slavery in Egypt. It was God who led them safley through the Red Sea from the power of the Egyptians, who led them through the desert through Moses, and who provided them with manna and with quail. Yet, they are discouraged before entering the Promised Land. They are overcome by fears and doubts. It is as though they have forgotten all the good things that God had done with them.
On the other hand, the Canaanite woman. She was not even a Jew, nontheless, she places her faith in Jesus. She does so not for what she has experienced first-hand , in contrast to the Israelites, but for what she has heard about him. She places her trust fully in the Lord such that she is almost certain that what she asks will be granted. Her faith is life giving to herself, to sick her daughter, but also to all those who were watching this whole scene. Indeed, she is life-giving also to us. An unlikely hero who would be considered with the outcasts, with those unworthy to receive grace. Yet she becomes the example par excellence of trust in God.
Closer to our time, St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross, whose memorial we are celebrating today, too can be considered as an unlikely hero and yet is also life-giving to one and all. Up until her baptism in her mid 30's and her subsequent entry into the Carmelite Monastery, like the Canaanite woman in the Gospel, she too can be considered at the outer peripheries of the Church. She was born into a Jewish family and at the age of 13 stopped practicing her faith and pronounced herself atheist. As she progressed in her professional life, she became a renowned philosopher working with some of the most important German philosophers of the time.
However, at her conversion, which probably happened while reading the Autobiography of St Teresa of Avila, she did what the Israelites did not do: she looked back at how God has worked through her life, even in those times when she thought that God was absent and they became the bulk of her faith. In other words, she managed use her life experiences to place her trust in God.
Edith Stein could have just remained simply a good person and continue doing the valuable work that she was doing, offering a ssynthesis between traditional Catholic theology and contemporary secular philosophy. . Instead, she wanted to give her life completely to God, knowing that the political situation of the time can quickly cause her death, which she accepted out of her love for the Cross.
The Canaanite woman and St Theresa Benedicta of the Cross have some important lessons for us today. First, to look back at how God has walked with us as individuals and as a community and place our trust afresh in God. Secondly, not nothing can be so strong as to detract from our faith in the Lord, neither being on the peripheries of society, not illness and not even death.
And as St John Paul II prayed at the canonisation mass of St Theresa, by her intercession may we grow in our commitment to serve freedom, serve unceasingly for truth and help build a bridge of mutual understanding between Jews and Christians
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