If you liked Christopher Nolan's repentant Odysseus, you'll love Jesuit Thomas Reese's Jesus, who repents of his un-Christian ways

  

We Should Treat Foreigners Like Jesus Did 

Thomas Reese, Religion News Service 

(RNS) — This past Sunday (Aug. 16), in the Gospel read in many churches around the world, Jesus comes across as a real jerk. He sounds like President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. 

The Gospel was Matthew 15: 21-28, the story of the Canaanite woman who comes to Jesus pleading for him to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon.

Jesus at first ignores her, pretends she is not there. But she keeps following him, calling out to him. She ignores the disciples’ attempts to get rid of her. They finally ask Jesus to send her away.

He replies that he was sent “only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” His mission is to Jews, not Gentiles. But the woman keeps coming and begs him, “Lord, help me.”

Jesus responds in a very un-Christian manner: “It is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs.” In other words, he calls her a bitch.

I prefer to believe that this unflattering story was made up by Matthew. But why would Matthew make it up? Perhaps because he had an important message to teach the early Jewish Christians — and us.

This Gospel story reflects the reluctance of early Jewish Christians to accept Gentiles into the Christian community. ... Peter changed his mind when he saw that Gentiles had received the Holy Spirit. ... Jesus at first rejects the Canaanite woman because she is not from the house of Israel. But he changes his mind when he sees how much faith she has. He changes his mind when he sees how much she loves her daughter. The Gospel is telling the early Jewish Christians that, like Jesus, they must change their attitude toward the Gentiles. ...

Of course the text doesn't say that Jesus actually "changed his mind" about accepting the foreign woman, which is what repentance would have to be to be repentance.

Only that Jesus makes an exception in the case of the foreign woman's request, while not repudiating his Jewish chauvinism.

It bothers us that Matthew is a co-conspirator in this offensive bigotry that the Gentiles aren't even an afterthought in the mind of someone who is supposed to be their Saviour.

It evidently bothers Reese because it's his job to worship Jesus, so he prefers to state that Matthew must have put the bad words in Jesus' mouth in order to convey a deeper meaning.  

Unfortunately that deeper meaning is foreign to this text, and the bad idea turns out to be part and parcel of  Jesus' very parochial eschatological message in Matthew. A lot more is at stake than just this one pericope from Matthew 15.

To wit: that the Son of Man was imminently coming on the clouds with the angels to bring God's kingdom to Israel, who would save the few Jews who had repented, but who would also condemn the many Jews, who were guilty, he said ominously, of the blood of all the prophets who had come before him, going all the way back in time to Abel. 

The Gentiles might have been happy to learn that they were completely peripheral to all this.

Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into any city of the Samaritans enter ye not. But go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. ... Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel, till the Son of man be come. 

-- Matthew 10:5f., 23 

It is interesting that Homer's Odyssey bothers us for a similar reason.

We don't like Homer's Odysseus because he doesn't feel the slightest bit of remorse over what he did to the Trojans, to the Cyclops, or to the suitors. The hero is not humane in punishing the malefactors.

Instead film-maker Christopher Nolan now offers us a Pauline Odysseus, plagued by an introspective conscience like Paul had in Romans 7, admitting the fact of the evil that he had done at Troy but wishing now that he had not done it. The law of Zeus has become the law of Odysseus' mind, the sacking of Troy evidence of the principle of the evil inclination operating in his flesh.

This is more pathetic than funny if you have actually read the sources. Aristotle after all epitomized in his Politics the old Greek understanding that men who behave like Odysseus aren't normal, aren't part of the polis. They must be either gods or wild beasts. Nolan gives us neither a god nor a beast, just another ordinary man.   

What will never not be funny, however, is a Jesuit who offers us a Jesus who is also neither a god nor a beast, just a convert to the Pharisaism of a Paul who compasseth sea and land to make one proselyte.

Some of the finest casuistry in the business.  

In Hades Anticleia, mother of Odysseus, says she died of a broken heart, longing for her absent son

 

 "... So too fate brought me to the grave. It was not the clear-sighted Goddess of the Bow who slew me in the palace with gentle arrows, nor did I die of some disease, one of those that often steals the body’s strength, and wastes us wretchedly. No, what robbed me of my life and its honeyed sweetness was yearning for you, my glorious Odysseus, for your kindness and your counsels.”

So she spoke, and I wondered how I might embrace my dead mother’s ghost. Three times my will urged me to clasp her, and I started towards her, three times she escaped my arms like a shadow or a dream. And the pain seemed deeper in my heart. Then I spoke to her with winged words: “Mother, since I wish it why do you not let me embrace you, so that even in Hades’ House we might clasp our arms around each other and sate ourselves with chill lament? Are you a mere phantom royal Persephone has sent, to make me groan and grieve the more?

My revered mother replied quickly: “Oh, my child, most unfortunate of men, Persephone, Zeus’ daughter, does not deceive you: this is the way it is with mortals after death. The sinews no longer bind flesh and bone, the fierce heat of the blazing pyre consumes them, and the spirit flees from our white bones, a ghost that flutters and goes like a dream. Hasten to the light, with all speed: remember these things, to speak to your wife of them.”’

-- Homer, Odyssey XI 

The Odysseus of The Odyssey fears no apocalyptic end of the world, but looks forward to a comfortable old age as foretold by Teiresias in Hades

... And death will come to me far from the sea, the gentlest of deaths, taking me when I am bowed with comfortable old age, and my people prosperous about me. All this Teiresias said would come true.”

‘If the gods really intend a more pleasant old age for you,’ said wise Penelope, ‘there is hope this will set an end to all your troubles.’ ... 

-- Homer, Odyssey XXIII 

Odysseus' cleverest trick

 

... “Cyclops, you asked my name, and I will tell it: give me afterwards a guest gift as you promised. My name is Nobody. Nobody, my father, mother, and friends call me.”  

... Seized by terror we shrank back, as he wrenched the stake, wet with blood, from his eye.

He flung it away in frenzy, and called to the Cyclopes, his neighbours who lived in caves on the windy heights.

They heard his cry, and crowding in from every side they stood by the cave mouth and asked what was wrong: “Polyphemus, what terrible pain is this that makes you call through deathless night, and wake us? 

Is a mortal stealing your flocks, or trying to kill you by violence or treachery?”

Out of the cave came mighty Polyphemus’ voice: “Nobody, my friends, is trying to kill me by violence or treachery.” 

To this they replied with winged words: “If you are alone, and nobody does you violence, it’s an inescapable sickness that comes from Zeus: pray to the Lord Poseidon, our father.”

Off they went, while I laughed to myself at how the name and the clever scheme had deceived him. ... 

-- Homer, Odyssey IX  

The folly of strong drink

 

 The giant, gorg'd with flesh, and wine, and blood,

Lay stretch'd at length, and snoring in his den,

Belching raw gobbets from his maw, o'ercharg'd 

With purple wine and cruddled gore confus'd.

 

-- Joseph Addison

 

Thrice I brought and gave it him, and thrice he drained it in his folly. . . . and reeling fell upon his back, and lay there with his thick neck bent aslant, and sleep, that conquers all, laid hold on him. And from his gullet came forth wine and bits of human flesh, and he vomited in his drunken sleep.

 

-- Homer, Odyssey 9.360, 370

 

Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise. 

-- Proverbs 20:1

 

Lament of the Day: Rod Dreher calls Homer's Odyssey a "novel"

Here, also not realizing the epic poem was sung:

[Bob Dylan:]

Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.

[Rod Dreher:]

He goes on to discuss those three novels, and how they affected his understanding of the world, and in turn, his music. One of the greatest popular musicians of the 20th century, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start in what we now call classical education — one that gives the student “a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”

Here’s part of his description of The Odyssey. He makes it sound like a folk song. He makes it sound like real life . . ..

Dreher also seems blissfully unaware that after Paul's Damascus Road conversion he eventually disappeared for about 10 years, no doubt reassessing his new found faith in Christ against his native tradition in Pharisaism:

Isn’t this what all serious religious pilgrims and truth seekers do? After their epiphany, they submit to tradition — not just the more recent tradition, but big-T Tradition.