Conversion and Trust

Homily for Wednesday of the Eighteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Today’s readings challenge us with considerations of two important virtues if we are serious about belonging to Christ and want to participate in the Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven. We are called to change or conversion of life as well as trust in God.

In the first reading we are continuing through the Torah readings that we have been pondering for some weeks now.  In the book of Numbers, we hear some of the stories of Exodus in more or different detail, as different writers ponder their oral tradition.  Today we hear a reason why it took forty years to cross the desert.  An understanding of biblical numerology is necessary in order to understand the significance of the forty-year sojourn in the desert.

The children of Israel refuse to enter the land that had been promised by God. God punishes them for their lack of trust by declaring that they shall wander through the desert for forty years. The number of forty years is rooted in the observance that it takes forty weeks to bring a human child from conception to birth.  In this case, the lack of trust of the princes of the people (symbol for the whole generation) is a kind of dying that will bring the new birth of entry into the land.  The death of the faithless and cowardly generation of leaders is God’s “cause” for bringing His people to an entirely new life in a new land.  A life of courage and hope is their promise.

In the Gospel, a woman not even of the Jewish people, brings Jesus and his followers to see once again that God is making something new.  God is going to the whole world with the message of the Kingdom of Justice, Mercy and great love.  The Canaanite women is not part of the Jewish promise, and yet her courage in challenging Jesus on her behalf and that of her daughter brings an entirely new message to the community of Jesus’ followers.  God is concerned about the whole human race, especially those who are trapped in despair.  The language of demonic possession covers illness and attitudes that today we more frequently identify as mental illness, and who suffers more of a sense of death and loss than one who suffers the hopelessness of a world that is meaningless and unloving.

These readings, therefore, call us to conversion – to change our way of life, to enter a new life, just as God had promised the people by giving them a new land, a land flowing with milk and honey. However, conversion implies trust in God’s promises. Our prayer of faith today is to strengthen our faith so that we can trust God’s promises and conform our lives to that of Jesus.