Then, this Gospel that I just read is supposed to upset you—I hope it did. Because Jesus himself appears not to be saying “all.” In fact, for a moment, he reveals his own cultural racism. The Canaanites were the group that the Jewish people fought for centuries. They were like dogs to them, sorry to say. They were inferior human beings. They were monsters. They were evil. You see we learn racism basically from our family and our culture. No one is born hating black people. No one is born hating Mexicans. That’s something somewhere some stupid person taught you that. But when the whole group agrees on it, it’s very hard to resist it. When everybody’s saying it, well I guess they must be right. I know. I grew up in Kansas where we Catholics thought we were the only ones that God loved and we felt sorry for the poor Protestants, you know. I don’t know if we thought they were all going to hell or whatever. But we were the saved church and everybody else God didn’t care about too much. It’s the same. It persists in every age. That’s why we were able to treat the native peoples the way we did when we came because we from Europe and Spain thought we were the superior ones and these poor native peoples were pagans. Just like Jesus initially thinks of this Canaanite woman…

So we have racism gradually overcome. But it takes a while. It’s a conversion. So let’s go back to my first point: The way people grow up: They start with self-care. And a certain percentage never move beyond just taking care of me. Me, me, me. It’s all about me. Most of us move to the second stage: Family care, group care. We can at least care for people like us. And that’s the group that Jesus is most preaching to—the Jews who just love the Jews.

And I’m sad to say it’s only a minority of people who move to real conversion: Universal care, that we’re all equally created in the image of God and the only basis for loving anybody is that we’re all equally children of God.

Every time you label in your mind—up/down, in/out, black/white, Catholic/Protestant, gay/straight—you’re not seeing. I’m going to repeat it. Whenever you’re labeling, you’re not seeing. Because if you would see truthfully, you’d see those distinctions mean nothing. Nothing. NOTHING to God…

So you are the lucky people who are called not just to group care or family care but universal care, universal love. That’s called the gospel.

The words of Richard Rohr