You, too, daughter of Canaan, conquered the Unconquerable One by boldness for that justice. The Just One set a boundary for the land of the Gentiles that the Gospel might not cross over. Blessed are you who broke through the fence fearlessly.
The practice of exorcism by rituals and prayers was common in the ancient world, among Jews, pagans, and Christians alike. Today we are blessed to have other means of treating the physical and mental ailments that our ancestors termed “possession.” But I doubt that this is the whole story; I suspect that exorcism still has a place in our lives.
This is one of the Scripture passages that fall under the category of “The Hard Sayings of Jesus,” those recorded moments when he doesn’t behave as we think he should. Who wants a Savior who acts like a New York waiter?
Human love for God progresses through four stages, Bernard says. We begin by loving ourselves only, a sterile love that produces nothing and leads nowhere. But in time we notice that we cannot survive alone and that God graciously meets our needs. We then begin to love God, but only because of what God does for us.
Over and over, God’s call to us means pushing old boundaries, embracing outsiders, giving up the notion that there is not enough of us to go around. We may resist; we may even lose our tempers, but the call of God is insistent, as insistent as the Canaanite woman who would not leave Jesus alone.
DuBose urges that Jesus’ humanity was not merely the humanity of an individual man, but rather “the common and universal nature of us all.” Therefore Jesus’ human holiness, righteousness, and life possess a “universal” significance. Accordingly, Jesus “can be nothing less than God our holiness, our righteousness, our life.” Jesus was no mere sample or example of human salvation: “it was not one man but humanity that He was.”
This passage from Matthew describes one of those difficult moments in Jesus’ life that we might skip altogether if the lectionary did not direct us to deal with it. What makes it so difficult is how harsh Jesus sounds, how harsh and downright rude. . . .
In the end, Jesus raises Peter up from the water (still without having calmed the storm) and climbs into the boat with the other disciples. It is only now that the wind drops and the sea is calm. In the boat, gathered around Jesus, there is calm and peace. Peter and the others have been saved from the storm, not through their own efforts and abilities or their skills as fishermen, but by the presence of the Son of God in their boat.
All of eastern piety, according to Vladimir Lossky, consists of the celebration of what is the goal of our salvation: overcoming the abyss between God and man. This is why there is added to the Christians’ devotion to an incarnate divine hypostasis, Jesus Christ, a deified human hypostasis, Mary, whom Gregory Palamas calls: ‘the boundary between the created and the uncreated’.
As soon as [ESCRU’s executive director, the Rev.] John Morris learned of Daniels’s death, he made arrangements for the body to be flown back to Daniels’s home in Keene, New Hampshire, for burial. In place of a formal eulogy at the funeral service, excerpts from Daniels’s theological writings were read aloud to the mourners gathered at St. James’ Church.