Please read the passage before the homily.
In times of persecution of Jewish people and Muslim people in Spain, neighbors would invite people suspected people of being Jewish or Muslim and feed them ham. Those who refused were then persecuted for being Jewish or Muslim. Such was the antimony against some non-Christian people in our history.
Today we have a non-Jewish person, a Roman centurion, a leader of the pagan people that harshly occupied the Jewish homeland. He had a slave who was “valuable to him” and who was dying. While some see the relationship between the slave and master as questionable, he was held in high esteem by the Jewish people, and he himself had funded the building of the synagogue for them. The centurion respected the Jewish people’s reluctance to enter a pagan’s home, so he asked Jesus to heal the slave from a distance.
Jesus responded by praising the faith of the non-Jewish person and sent the centurion home with his servant healed from a distance,
Now it is time for us to go on a scavenger hunt. We are to look for a modern-day centurion, someone of a different culture or language or way of living. For example, many of the gay community are very good at caring for others. We are challenged to see the faith in God that some people we may not like have. We tend see goodness primarily in people like us. We are challenged to see goodness in others as well.