This Lenten challenge is from the second Thursday of Lent reading in Walter Brueggemann's Lent devotional, A Way Other Than Our Own...
Matthew 15:28 "'...woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.' And her daughter was healed instantly."
"Jesus reached beyond his people, beyond his perceived mandate, beyond his tradition, extending himself to the 'other'. Notice that something powerful happens to Jesus in this narrative...She is the outsider who instructs the insider. She explains to Jesus his larger vocation that he had not yet embraced. He is willing, in turn, to be instructed by her...we can watch while Jesus rethinks his vocation and his mandate as Messiah...
"...this is the big issue for us in our coming world. All of us, to some extent, hold the line against the 'other.'...It is clear in these texts that the good news of God's love and God's healing and God's justice cannot be kept just for us and people like us...the pull of God's largeness summons all of us, often through the words and presence of 'the other.'
"The old teaching of exclusion cannot fully protect us from God's pull to be a neighbor..."
Dear Lord, help me identify who 'the other' is in my world who I have decided should not be included in your family and who I won't listen to, thereby entrapping myself in my small world of small doctrines and small heartedness. Amen.
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