My Friends in Christ,
Our readings this Sunday are very applicable for our time. We hear from both Saint Paul in our Epistle and Saint Matthew in the Gospel of the mercy of God. Paul recalls for us the fact from salvation history that while the majority failed, a remnant was preserved. Because of this, salvation is open to the gentiles, to all of God’s people. In the Gospel, Jesus goes to Gentile territory and comes across a Canaanite woman. The Caananites were long gone by Jesus’s time but Matthew uses this older term to help his Jewish audience know that Jesus was in Syrian territory along the Medderteran sea and that she was of Gentile origin. This can seem like a puzzling Gospel account. It seems that Jesus is refusing to help someone in need because she is not an Israelite. Jesus points out that he was sent for the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but because of her great faith, because of the steadfast resolve she shows when that faith is tested, Christ shows mercy upon her, and grants her request. This illustrates for us what Jesus’s mission accomplished. He came for Israelites, the chosen people of the old covenant, but by his sacrifice on Calvary and his resurrection, the grace, mercy, and salvation of God are now available to people of all nations.
One of the greatest spiritual masters in our great Catholic Tradition is St. Ignatius of Loyola. According to Ignatius the spiritual life can be summed up as either moving towards God or away from God. If we are moving away from God, we can fall into the trap that there is no way off of the path I am on. That there is no way that I can change or be forgiven for the things I have done. A lot of times this situation is made worse by depression, anxiety, and addiction. However, no matter what we have done and no matter how far we may have strayed from God, we can always turn back towards him.
One of the greatest examples of this is the life of Venerable Matt Talbot. Matt Talbot was born in Dublin in the 1850s. He was the 2nd oldest out of 12 children who grew up in the impoverished northside of the city. His father was an alcoholic, and so were most of the men in his family. He rarely attended school and dropped out altogether by the time he was 12. He took a job in a wine merchants shop and it wasn’t long before he began to sample the products. By his 13th birthday he was a full-fledged alcoholic. His father’s only effort to change his son’s behavior involved beatings and this further drove Matt down the path of addiction. He worked numerous jobs and spent all his money and free time on drink. When he lost his job and ran out of money he sold his boots, his clothes, and then begged for pennies just to buy himself a pint. He later was so desperate for a drink he robbed a blind man of his fiddle. One evening at the age of 28 when he was out of things to sell, and not a penny left to his name, he sat in front of a pub waiting for one of his friends to offer to buy him a pint. One by one he saw his buddies go into the pub, but not one of them offered to buy him a drink. He was disgusted by this and went home early that night. He told his mother that he going to take the pledge and give up drinking, well for 3 months. He went to confession and soon started attending daily Mass.
Those 3 months became 6, and those 6 became a year, and that year turned into a lifetime. Matt became a Third Order Franciscan and donated all of his extra money that he would have spent on alcohol, to the poor. He stopped carrying money around since it was a temptation to buy alcohol. He dedicated his life to helping others who struggled with addiction. He once said: “Never be too hard on the man who can’t give up drink. It’s as hard to give up the drink as it is to raise the dead to life again. But both are possible and even easy for our Lord. We have only to depend on him.” Like the Canaanite woman in the gospel today, Matt took those steps towards the Lord, and even though he was at the lowest point in his life, the Lord showed him love and mercy. My friends, God will never be outdone in generosity. If we make a sacrifice for him or for our brothers and sisters it will be repaid to us 100 fold. If we just take those initial steps towards him, he will pour out his love and mercy upon us. No one is too far away from God, that they cannot turn back towards him and receive his loving embrace, just as Matt Talbott did.
So friends, no matter where we find ourselves in the spectrum of the spiritual life, let us keep moving towards God, and take the time to help others who stumble upon the way. We are all in this together. In the words of Padre Pio “Place your heart gently in Our Lord’s wounds. Have great confidence in His mercy for He will never abandon you.”
Hound of the Lord 