“The Benevolent Trading Post Manager” by Brian Flanagan

“The Benevolent Trading Post Manager” by Brian Flanagan

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

For eight summers of my life, I worked at a Boy Scout camp. I mainly worked in the Health Lodge treating cuts and scrapes and giving out Advil. Two summers ago while I was between youth ministry jobs, I went back to the camp for a ninth summer; only this time I wouldn’t be handing out Pepto Bismol; I’d be handing out candy.

I spent that summer running the “Trading Post”, our little camp store where campers could come and buy not only snacks, but hats, t-shirts, hammocks, and other reasonably items they couldn’t live without (shameless plug for the Summer 2015 Trading Post…). My staff and I shared a favorite time of day: 8:31pm. We closed for the evening every day at 8:30pm, and once the doors were locked we commenced our feast.

You see, the pretzels revolving in the pretzel warmer wouldn’t be any good the following day, so they had to be eaten. Same for the fresh-baked cookies. We were really doing the campers a service by eating them and making new ones in the morning…

We of course weren’t allowed to eat the pretzels during the day (well I suppose we were if we wanted to pay for them…). But I ran a tight ship, so there was none of that. Most of the time.

Sometimes staff members from other departments would come and ask for free pretzels and I would have to explain to them how the purpose of our little establishment was not to be a free-snack-shack for the staff, but rather a service to our primary customers, the campers.

Yet sometimes they would persist and would even be offended, and I would eventually give in and “accidentally” break a pretzel or a cookie that I couldn’t then in good conscience sell to a camper. If the staff from other departments would simply wait until 8:31pm, they could join us for the feast.

In this week’s Gospel, Jesus has a very similar encounter with the Canaanite woman with the demon-possessed daughter. She asks Jesus to heal her daughter, but Jesus explains to her that the primary purpose for his coming was to seek out and save the “lost sheep of Israel”, the Jewish people. The woman (a Gentile, a non-Jew) understands this, just like deep down my camp staff friends understood the reason for the pretzels; the campers.

Yet the woman persists and uses the analogy that even dogs eat the scraps from the master’s table. She could have similarly said, “But even the staff members eat the broken pretzels”. Jesus commends her for her faith and heals her daughter, just as I would sneak a cookie across the counter to a friend when my staff wasn’t looking.

This passage is often misunderstood because it seems like Jesus isn’t interested in helping the woman or healing her daughter, but he’s making the point that he came primarily to fulfill all of the Old Testament prophecies as the Jewish Messiah. After Pentecost, the Gentiles would get in on this deal as well, but they would need to wait until Jesus elevated the Old Covenant to the New and Eternal Covenant – just like the staff members were free to swing by at 8:31pm to feast with us on delicious soft pretzels.

Instead of focusing on all of that, in this reading we should focus on the woman’s persistence and her faith, and seek to imitate these in our own lives of prayer. And who knows, maybe Jesus will let us go behind the counter and eat whatever we want before closing time.