A Samaritan woman at the well

Address given at St Michael's, Limerick City on Sunday 19 March 2017, the 3rd Sunday of Lent, year A

I must begin by giving credit to Canon Patrick Comerford, the new Priest-in-Charge in Rathkeale & Kilnaughtin – in this address I have drawn heavily on a reflection of his.

Today’s Gospel reading (John 4:5-42) about the Samaritan woman at the well is a charming story, isn’t it?

To begin to understand it we need to know something about the Samaritans and their relationship to Jews like Jesus and his disciples in the NT period.

The Samaritans are strangers to the Jews. Although these two peoples share the same land, the Samaritans are outsiders, seen as ritually unclean by pious Jews. Although they share faith in the same God and share the same Torah (the first five books of the Bible), the Jews see the Samaritans as having a different religion. But Jesus tries to break down those barriers.

For example, the Good Samaritan is not a stranger but is the very best example of a good neighbour (Luke 10: 29-37). Among the Ten Lepers who are healed, only the Samaritan returns to give thanks, and this “foreigner” is praised for his faith (Luke 17: 11-19).

In the story of the Samaritan woman at the well, the disciples are doing something surprising.

They have gone into the city of Sychar to buy food. But this is no ordinary city – this is a Samaritan city, and any food they might buy from Samaritans is going to be unclean according to Jewish ritual standards.

While the Disciples are in Sychar, Jesus sits down by Jacob’s Well, and begins talking with a Samaritan woman who comes to the well for water. And their conversation becomes a model for how we should respond to the stranger in our midst, whether they are foreigners or people of a different religion or culture.

The Samaritans accepted only the first five books of the Bible – the Pentateuch or Torah – as revealed scripture. For their part, Jews of the day pilloried this Samaritan refusal to accept more than the first five books of the Bible by claiming the Samaritans worshipped not the one God revealed in the five books but five gods. Jesus alludes to this – with a sense of humour – when he says the woman has five husbands.

A Jewish man like Jesus would normally have refused to talk to a Samaritan woman or to accept a drink from her hands; any self-respecting Samaritan woman would have felt slighted by his behaviour and walked away immediately. Instead, the two continue in their dialogue: they talk openly and humorously with one another, and listen to one another. Jesus gets to know the woman and she gets to know Jesus.

All dialogue involves both speaking and listening – speaking with the expectation that we will be heard, and listening honestly to what the other person is saying rather than listening to what our prejudices tell us they ought to say.

When the Disciples arrive back they are filled with questions.

But they are so shocked to see Jesus talking to a Samaritan woman that they remain silent. Their silence reflects their inability to reach out to the stranger.

But their failure and their prejudices are shown in another way: the woman gives water as she and Christ talk, but they fail to return with bread for Christ to eat and they fail to join in the conversation about faith and about life.

They are still questioning and unable to articulate their faith, but the woman recognises Christ as a Prophet. They made no contact with the people in Sychar, but she rushes back to tell the people there about Jesus. No one in the city was brought to Jesus by the disciples, but many Samaritans listened to what the woman had to say and came to believe that Jesus is truly the Saviour of the world.

Jesus was thirsty, he asked the Samaritan woman for water, and she gave it to him.

But in return she received much more from Jesus: he gave her the ‘living water’ which became in her ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’. She believed in Jesus, and because of her many Samaritans believed in him. His thirst led to her and their conversion.

‘I am thirsty’, is the fifth of the seven last words of Christ from the Cross on Good Friday, and in response he is given wine with bitter hyssop (John 19:28-30). Many people have compared the thirst of Christ on the Cross with his request to the Samaritan woman, ‘Give me a drink’, and the promise that follows, ‘Those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty’.

In expressing his thirst out loud in that cry from the cross, Christ shows his humanity and his humility. In expressing such a basic need, he shows his solidarity with all those people, living or dying, healthy or sick, great or small, who are in need, and who in humility are forced to ask for a cup of water.

St John tells us Christ said ‘I am thirsty’, ‘in order to fulfil the Scripture’. The dying Christ echoes the words of Psalm 22: ‘My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death’ (Psalm 22: 15). And again, later in the Psalms, we hear the words: ‘and for my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink’ (Psalm 69: 21).

In his thirst on the Cross, I think the dying Christ seeks something much more than water or vinegar. He is thirsting for a new humanity to be formed and shaped through his incarnation, life and passion, death, resurrection and ascension. His thirst is for our salvation.

So to finish:

Let us give thanks for the openness and trust of the Samaritan woman.

And let us pray that Christ will give us, as he gave her, ‘living water’ which will become in us ‘a spring of water gushing up to eternal life’.

O God, living and true,

look upon your people,

whose dry and stony hearts are parched with thirst.

Unseal the living water of your Spirit;

let it become within us an ever-flowing spring,

gushing up to eternal life.

Thus may we worship you in spirit and in truth,

through Christ, our deliverance and hope,

who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

God for ever and ever. Amen.

Jesus & Nicodemus

Address given at Templederry, Nenagh & Killodiernan on Sunday 12th March 2017, the 2nd Sunday of Lent, year A

Today I want to reflect on Jesus’s conversation with Nicodemus as recorded by John in the Gospel reading (John 3:1-17)

Jesus uses that conversation to teach Nicodemus – and through him ourselves – some great truths, which are crucial for the later development of our Christian faith and Trinitarian theology.

Nicodemus finds it hard to understand what Jesus is saying – and we may too – because Jesus is speaking in the language of metaphor. It is as if Jesus is speaking in riddles! ‘Being born from above’; ‘entering the kingdom of God’; ‘the Son of Man’; ‘serpents being lifted up’; ‘having eternal life’: What in heaven’s name is Jesus talking about? Let me try my best to tease out what his words mean to me.

We should start with the kingdom of God, I think – what did Jesus understand by it?

The key I think is in the prayer he taught us: ‘Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.’ I feel sure we enter the kingdom of God when we do God’s will here on earth, as it is done in heaven. But that ain’t easy – we have to resist our human impulses to do what we want, not what God wants. We can’t do so unless something changes us to be immune to human wilfulness. That change is like being ‘born anew’.

Jesus tells Nicodemus that ‘No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above’.  Now the Greek phrase translated as ‘born from above’ can just as well be translated as ‘born anew’ – and that is the sense in which Nicodemus correctly understands it. He understands the need for it, but he does not understand how to achieve it. ‘How can anyone be born after having grown old?’ he asks. ‘Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?’

So Jesus explains, ‘No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit’. We need to be washed clean of our sinful natures – that is what baptism symbolises. But we cannot by ourselves surrender our will to God’s will. For that we need God to take the initiative through the power of his Spirit. Only then can we entrust ourselves to God completely, without reservation.

In Greek the same word ‘pneuma’ is used for both wind and spirit. Jesus says, ‘The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.’ He is telling Nicodemus that he doesn’t need to understand how the Spirit works, he just needs to know that it does work.

There’s nothing very difficult about any of this from Jesus’ point of view, I think. This is just how human beings are made psychologically – it is a plain observable fact, an earthly thing - not a deep truth, a heavenly thing. But Nicodemus just doesn’t get it. ‘How can these things be?’ he says in exasperation. And Jesus chides him, ‘Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? … If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?’

But I think Jesus likes Nicodemus, and is enjoying their conversation.

Because Jesus does indeed go on to tell Nicodemus – and through him us too - about deep heavenly truths, theological truths.

‘No one has ascended into heaven’, says Jesus, except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man’.

‘The Son of Man’ is a typically Jewish way of saying ‘a representative man’. Jesus is saying that for a representative man to go up to God, he must have come down from God in the first place. And he clearly understands himself to be the Son of Man, the representative man, who has come from God.

‘And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness’, says Jesus, ‘so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.’

Moses lifting up the serpent refers to a strange story in the Book of Numbers (21:8-9). On their journey through the wilderness, the people of Israel complained about their hardships since they left Egypt. God sent a plague of deadly serpents to punish them. When the people repented and cried for mercy, God instructed Moses to raise an image of a serpent on a pole in the centre of the camp, which healed those with snakebite when they looked at it.

Jesus is saying that he, the representative man, is destined to be lifted up – on the cross and to God in heaven - to bring eternal life to those who believe in him, just as the image of the serpent healed those who came to it.

But what does Jesus mean by ‘eternal life’? We must distinguish it from ‘everlasting life’, I’m sure, which might just as well be hell as heaven. Duration doesn’t matter - eternal life is surely to participate in God’s life, full of the joy and peace and love that can only be found in God’s presence.

‘For God so loved the world’, says Jesus, ‘that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’

In these comfortable words, Jesus reveals to Nicodemus – and to us – that Jesus the Son of Man, the representative human being, is also the only Son of God. The breadth and depth of God’s love for the world – for you and for me and for all creation - is shown by the gift of his only Son.

‘Indeed’, Jesus continues, ‘God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him’.

Our loving God seeks to save us through the gift of his Son, not condemn us. He makes it possible for us to reconcile ourselves with God by aligning our will with God’s will, in imitation of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.

These words of Jesus surely do express a deep heavenly truth!

John does not tell us what Nicodemus makes of all this.

You might expect Nicodemus to have taken umbrage when Jesus chided him. But he didn’t. John goes on to tell us (John 7:50-53) that Nicodemus defended Jesus in the Jewish Council when there was a move to arrest him. And after the crucifixion Nicodemus helped Joseph of Arimathea to bury Jesus, contributing the expensive embalming spices (John 19:39-40). Nicodemus may even have become a disciple of Jesus, and he is considered a saint in both the Orthodox and RC churches.

So to finish

Let us give thanks for the insights – the heavenly truths - that Nicodemus prompted Jesus to reveal about the relationships between God, his Son, his Spirit and human beings like you and me. They are at the heart of our Trinitarian faith.

And let us pray that the Holy Spirit may instil in us trust in God’s promises made through Jesus:

‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’