Homilies & Thoughts

This is one of the Lord’s many condemnations of hypocrisy. Here, I think, he condemns perhaps its most insidious form: the kind of hypocrisy that looks good.

Broadly speaking, in the time of Jesus, the Jews were divided into two large groups, the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees would have been the principal party among the priests and religious leaders at the time. They were not well liked. They were regarded as corrupt, and they taught things that the people did not like. The community at the Dead Sea—the community that gave us the Dead Sea Scrolls—left us a great deal of material expressing its hatred of the Sadducees. So the Sadducees were not liked by the average person. Many scholars understand the “Wicked Priest” of 1QpHab as the reigning Jerusalem high priest—Jonathan is the most common single identification—and the scrolls’ wider polemic as extending to the other Jerusalem priests who followed him. On that reading, the target is the high-priestly establishment associated with the Sadducean party. The precise identity of the Wicked Priest remains disputed. See 1QpHab VIII–XII; Timothy H. Lim, “Wicked Priest,” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, 973–76; Alex P. Jassen, “Persecution, Victimhood, and Storytelling in Sectarian Portraits of Present-Time Violence,” in Violence, Power, and Society in the Dead Sea Scrolls, 132–63; cf. Josephus, Ant. 13.288–98.

“Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah.” In these three answers, we hear both the hopes and the fears of the Jewish people.

Elijah was the great prophet taken up into heaven, and many traditions arose about his return one day to prepare the way for the Messiah. To identify Jesus with Elijah, then, was an expression of hope. People could see in Jesus the dawn of the Messianic Age—though perhaps not yet its full realization.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, in his commentary on the order of love—the order in which we should love—talks about these two commandments. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae II-II, q. 26, aa. 3–4. The first is very clear. But in the second, he points out something we can easily miss: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” That presupposes, as Saint Thomas says, that you love yourself.

For him, the order of charity is that you love God, then yourself, and then your neighbor. There is more to say about the order in which we love our various neighbors, but it is important that we hear this: you have to love yourself. And you have to love yourself in the way God intends.

I think most of us, if we were to hold a great party—a big banquet of some sort—and send out all the invitations only to have everyone say no, would simply cancel it. Yet that is not the image of God Jesus presents here. God sends out the invitation; everyone says no, and he continues to hold the party. He simply begins inviting new people. He keeps inviting until he finds someone who says yes.

Many times, when people hear this parable, they say it is not fair. But part of the point of the parable is to tell us that it is fair—that we are the ones who are not fair. No, it may not be good business advice, and living it out probably will not make you many friends in the world.

But it is a description of how the Kingdom of God works, and it is fundamentally fair. One of the challenges for us as Christians is to conform our minds to this image. The gift that God wishes to give others is not portioned out according to what we deserve, what we think we deserve, or any rules of this world. It is his to give freely, however he wishes.

When we hear this image—perhaps we could call it a kind of parable—of a camel passing through the eye of a needle, we hear the Lord’s criticism of wealth. And I do think it is intended to be a criticism. But I do not think that is the only thing happening here. It cannot be the only thing Jesus is saying, because the disciples are greatly astonished, and they respond, “Who then can be saved?”

I have preached on this text many times over the years, and I have found that, regardless of what I say, many people still walk away struggling to understand it. We hear something deeply disconcerting in this Gospel: the Lord insulting a woman—and insulting her deeply.

As I have reflected on why we struggle to hear this in any other way, I think there are two things going on. First, we do not really understand the text. We do not hear the Latin pun that Romans would have understood, In Latin, the demonym of Canaan, i.e. Canaanite, is Canaeus and the word for dog is canis. The similar pronunciation leads to the Canaanites being called dogs. and English has no compact, natural way to say exactly what the Lord is saying here. Matt 15:26–27, NA28: Gk κυνάριον (kynarion), here κυναρίοις / κυνάρια, is the diminutive of κύων (kyōn), “dog,” commonly rendered “little dog” or “puppy.” The woman answers with the same diminutive Jesus uses. And so we have to wrestle with the text as it comes to us.

I was struck by a comment our Holy Father, Pope Leo, made about the Assumption and the signs of aging. Pope Leo XIV, Homily for the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, August 15, 2026. That led me to reflect that, at the end of her earthly life, the Blessed Virgin had reached old age. According to tradition—and the traditions vary a little—she would have been somewhere in her sixties or seventies.

Taken together, the first reading and the Gospel are linked by the image of marriage. But something else stands out to me—a point I don’t think we often consider. The Lord says that Moses allowed the people to write a bill of divorce because of the hardness of their hearts.

That is important to understand. Scripture itself records Moses issuing, on God’s behalf, a law for his people that does not completely conform to what God wills for them.

The translation we heard obscures a little of the distinction between the two debts. In the first case, it says that the servant who is forgiven owes a huge amount. In the second, it says that another servant owes him a much smaller amount. But the text itself tells us what those amounts are.

The smaller debt is one hundred denarii. Matt 18:28, NA28: Gk ἑκατὸν δηνάρια (hekaton dēnaria), “one hundred denarii.” A denarius was the wage for one day of labor, so this man owes about one hundred days’ worth of work. That is a real debt, but it is genuinely repayable.

Many of the Fathers of the Church say that we have to read this passage alongside the encounter between the Lord and Saint Peter, when Peter asks him, “How many times must I forgive my brother?” The Lord tells him, “Seventy-seven times”—that is, an infinite number. No matter what happens, we have to keep forgiving.

They say these passages need to be read together because they complement one another. In that other passage, the Lord tells us that, for our own sake and our own holiness, we always have the obligation to forgive. Here, however, he reminds us that we also have obligations to one another. He intends to establish a Church, a community, and that gives us responsibility not only for ourselves but also for our brothers and sisters.

When the Lord tells us that we need to be like these children, many images may come to mind, often shaped by our own experiences of children. But I think his point is demonstrated in the scene itself. He calls out to the little child and says, “Come here,” and the child actually does it. In his innocence and his trust in the Lord, he walks into the midst of all these strangers—what should be a very intimidating scene.