The Lost Sheep of the House of Israel
Gospel Reflection for August 16, 2026 - Matthew 15:21-28
21 After this, Jesus left those parts and withdrew into the neighbourhood of Tyre and Sidon. 22 And here a woman, a Chanaanite by birth, who came from that country, cried aloud, Have pity on me, Lord, thou son of David. My daughter is cruelly troubled by an evil spirit. 23 He gave her no word in answer; but his disciples came to him and pleaded with him; Rid us of her, they said, she is following us with her cries. 24 And he answered, My errand is only to the lost sheep that are of the house of Israel. 25 Then the woman came up and said, falling at his feet, Lord, help me. 26 He answered, It is not right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs. 27 Ah yes, Lord, she said; the dogs feed on the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. 28 And at that Jesus answered her, Woman, for this great faith of thine, let thy will be granted. And from that hour her daughter was cured. (The Gospel of St. Matthew 15:21-28 Knox Translation)
Despite what you might hear from your priest this Sunday (hopefully you’ll be spared from it), Our Lord didn’t “make a mistake” in this reading by referring to the Gentiles as “dogs”, and He certainly wasn’t “corrected” by the Canaanite woman. Christ could not and cannot err; He said exactly what He meant to say, and what He said is the truth, here and throughout Scripture. The more important questions are: why did He say it, what did He mean, and how does it relate to St. Paul’s words in the Epistle?
First off, it’s important to note that only St. Matthew calls the woman a “Canaanite”. St. Mark uses the Roman technical term “Syrophoenician”, since by this point in history the Canaanites were no longer a distinct culture. But St. Matthew calls her this to recall the historic Canaanites, one of the great enemies of the Israelites in the Old Testament, from whom her ethnic group descended. She is meant to serve as a symbolic representative of those farthest from God and His covenants given to the Israelites – and yet one who, through faith in Jesus Christ and humbly worshiping Him as God, receives His mercy, thus prefiguring the opening of His messianic mission to the Gentiles in the Great Commission (Mt 28:19) and the evangelical missions of the Church.
But there is another element to this as well, one which the Epistle highlights: what has historically been called “the Jewish question.” Specifically, this question asks, how do the biological descendants of the historic Israelites and God’s covenants to them through Abraham, Moses, and David stand in light of Christ? How should Catholics understand and relate to Jews today?
Fr James Mawdsley has recently released the first volume in his series addressing precisely this question, entitled “Know Thy Enemy,” and his very politically-incorrect answers, taken from Scripture, Tradition, and the historic teachings and actions of the Jews themselves, will not be easy to receive, just as Our Lord’s words in today’s Gospel can be challenging. The consistent failure of the Jews to follow God and preserve the faith of Christ is starkly obvious throughout the Old Testament from beginning to end, and it culminated in their instigation of the Deicide of Christ and finally ended in the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD.
And yet, as St. Paul reminds us, God never revokes His covenants and never abandons His people, so that one of the clearest signs of the End Times will be the wholesale conversion of the Jews to Christ, in whom all of their covenants, sacrifices, laws, and messianic longings are already fulfilled. The modern Catholic tendency to downplay these truths, those reclaimed so courageously by Fr. Mawdsley, to act as though faith in Jesus Christ and incorporation into His Mystical Body the Church, the true Israel and the unique successor to the Church of the Old Testament, is somehow unnecessary for Jews’ salvation, and that therefore we should no longer try to evangelize and convert them to Christ, is not the way taught by Scripture and the saints.
To deprive the Jews of Christ is not mercy, much less is it the only way to avoid another Holocaust (one motivated, like most historic anti-Jewish pogroms, by racism and greed, not Catholic doctrine), and it betrays the evangelical program of St. Paul, who plainly said, “Inasmuch as I am the apostle to the Gentiles, I glory in my ministry in order to make my race jealous and thus save some of them.” How did he save some of them? By leading them to Christ – not by abandoning them to error and to the damnation which is the inevitable end for anyone who rejects Christ.
Our Lord, like St. Paul, shows that the Jews are still and always will be beloved of God, with the distinct privilege of having received His covenants and direct guidance for millennia before the Incarnation of Christ. But this is all the more reason why they should be led voluntarily into the Church, not left in the incompleteness of their ancestors – not to continue in their denial of the ancient Israelites’ faith in Christ, which they held even before His coming, but to give them the Answer that their ancestors now enjoy in Heaven. This is why Christ said, “And, believe me, there have been many prophets and just men who have longed to see what you see, and never saw it, to hear what you hear, and never heard it” (Mt 13:17).
Today and every day, may we pray unceasingly, through the intercession of Our Lady of the Assumption who was herself a Jewish woman, that the Jews will come to faith in Christ, recant their errors and empty rituals, and enter into the communion of saints in the Catholic Church.
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