What is your legacy? Homily for Thursday, February 12, 2026

Beginnings and Endings. The two most important times in most anything. Solomon started well, but ended poorly. The woman’s faith was a great beginning, and presumably a great ending. What will your legacy be? Readings for Today.

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What is your legacy?

When I was a young reader, a little kid, sometimes when reading a book, I would cheat. That is to say, I would start the book, get curious, and then skip to the end of the book to see how things were going to turn out, and then go back to the beginning of the book, reading everything, knowing how things were going to end.

I did this specifically with the book “Jaws,” which in fact is quite different than the movie. “Jaws,” like the movie, the book was kind of tense for a young little boy, and I wanted to know who was going to live and who was going to die. And so I went to the last chapter and read. It calmed me a bit. It was still a tense book, but it calmed me a bit, knowing that some characters whom I had grown fond of were going to be alive at the end of the book.

As an educator, I learned that the two most important moments in teaching are the beginning and the end, knowing how to start well and knowing how to finish well. And in many ways, that’s the story of our faith life too, getting off to a good start in following Jesus and finishing well so that we can live with Jesus forever.

We get two examples in the readings today about endings. For Solomon, the ending was not good. He had a very good beginning. When asked what he wanted, when God said you can have anything you want, he wisely chose the gift of wisdom. He knew his youth and inexperience. He understood that he could only be successful as king if he dedicated himself to seeing the world as God sees the world.

But it didn’t end well. Despite all of the blessings that Solomon had in his life in building the temple, he had plenty of resources because his father, King David, had worked to secure them all for his son so that this temple could be built successfully. Despite asking for wisdom, Solomon went astray.

If you want to kind of summarize the history of the kingdom of Israel, one summary could be that the people in the northern kingdom struggled with fidelity. They always became tempted and often gave in to the temptation to want to be just like everyone else. Unfortunately, everyone else was practicing a religion that was horrific indeed. Among many things that were perverse, the people in the northern kingdom sacrificed their children to appease their gods. Solomon himself did so.

The ending in the gospel, though, is quite different. We don’t know really why Jesus wanted no one to know about it when he went into this particular house. It could have been a desire to speak deeply with a particular individual or something as simple as he knew he needed a break. But nonetheless, he’s known. They came to notice him.

And a woman who in some ways we could say was not the target audience for the Messiah to come, a Greek woman, she becomes the legacy of Jesus. Now, the saying that could seem a little rude, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not right to take the food of the children and throw it to the dogs,” was actually part of a saying about managing a household. The adults ate. Then there was the next level of importance, the children, who were barely more important than the dogs. And so the key was to make sure that the children were fed, and whatever happened to be left over was given to the dogs.

Jesus is not suggesting that this Greek woman gets only what is left over. It is her faith and persistence that gives us a foreshadowing of what the church that Jesus founds is going to become. It’s going to be a church where everyone is invited to join. It is going to be a church where everyone can have a relationship with Jesus. That regardless of how things begin, the end is clear, that Jesus chooses to found a church where everyone can belong, if they accept his love and accept his invitation. How will things end for us?

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