Buliding Bridges: The New Testament Models

Matthew 15 presents a courageous mother who builds bridges between religions (Jews and Gentiles), cultures (Jewish and Canaanite) and genders (men and women). The woman's gender and non-Jewishness render her intervention with Jesus insignificant and marginal in the Jewish world of that time. She is, however, praised by Jesus for her "great faith" required of all true disciples of Jesus. This great faith consists in her ability to interpret her faith in response to the needs of the emerging situation or new context. She is reading the “signs of the times" and building bridges by making non-Jews recipients of God's blessings and bringing them into the family of God’s chosen people. At the beginning of the story in John 4, there existed no dealings between the Jews and the Samaritans, but by the end of the episode, they have become one covenant community. The confession of faith in Jesus as the Saviour of the world, and not just of the Samaritans, confirms the movement to a communion which transcends all sectarian boundaries. The Samaritan episode thus projects a world in the process of a dynamic movement from personal alienation, social discrimination and religious exclusion to human solidarity, liberative communion and transformative integration. The passage instructs us that the breaking down of all barriers will bring about a radical egalitarian understanding of the presence of the Church in the world today