Standing Under the Scriptures
March 2, 2008

Dear Fellow Voyagers,

Our readings for this week are,

1 Samuel 16.1-13:  At the Lord’s direction Samuel passes over Jesse’s other sons to anoint David as king in place of Saul.

John 9.1-13, 28-38:  Jesus, in giving sight to the man blind from birth, runs into the opposition of the Pharisees.

In last Sunday’s passage from Romans (5.1-11) we saw Paul dealing with the fundamentals---justification, salvation,  above all reconciliation---which come to us through Christ’s offering of himself for us even as sinners.  And we expressed confidence that for Paul they were not just intellectual abstractions but instead the existential realities on which his life had come to be based (as ours needs to be too).

Regarding our Gospel (John 4.5-26), Sunday’s sermon turned out to be in large part a commentary on it (the reading in the service stopped however at verse 15).  Thus it gave us a point of reference for the interpretations we came up with---a reality check if you will.  Insofar as sermons are not intended to be the final word anyway but rather a stimulus to our own discussion and reflection, it is fitting to avail ourselves of this opportunity.

In the passage St. John recounts the encounter of the Samaritan woman with Jesus at Jacob’s well.  The burden of the sermon, as I understood it, was that Jesus, who had disclosed to the woman his awareness of her background---her previous five husbands and of her present cohabitation with one not her husband [in this she perhaps represented Samaria with its history of infiltration by five alien tribes]---conveyed to her that she was loved as she was.  And thereby he fulfilled the deepest human desire, for her and all of us.  Going on from this point, we may be led to two questions.  Firstly, what is this passage, not just the first part but the whole of it, which in the lectionary goes all the way to verse 42, really about?  And secondly, is being loved as we are indeed our ultimate desire?

On the first point, given the subtleties of John’s style (contrasting with the relative simplicity of Matthew, Mark, and Luke), the passage may be taken to have its complexities.  To begin with, the woman takes water in a literal, physical sense while for Jesus it represents the free gift of the living water of eternal life.  Her persistence in this recalls the bafflement of Nicodemus in the previous chapter over being born from above/again (the Greek can mean either, or both) as the condition of entering or even seeing the kingdom of God.  It may put us in mind also of our difficulty in understanding our faith.  As came out in our class, whereas Nicodemus, although a teacher of Israel remains baffled, whereas the woman by the conversation’s end arrives at an understanding of Jesus and his free gift.

Another element of complexity, to which the passage gives prominence, is the division between Jews and Samaritans, arising as noted out of the Exile and its aftermath.  It rendered Jews reluctant to associate with Samaritans, as reflected in the woman’s question to Jesus: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”  Yet Jesus is here associating with a Samaritan and a woman to boot (rabbis were not supposed to deal much with women).  And he goes on to speak of how the differences in worship between Samaritans and Jews will be transcended (neither on Mount Gerazim nor in Jerusalem) through the true spiritual worship which he brings.   Thus the overcoming of divisions in Christ might seem what the passage is really about.   This after all is what is celebrated in Ephesians (cf. 2.14).

But before undertaking to answer this question, it would be well to go on to the second, namely is being loved as we are really our deepest human desire?  It is a deep one, certainly.  But it leads to the further question: loved by whom?  The love of other humans, even spouses or parents, can never be counted on fully, for in their humanity they are liable to failure.  Only God’s love is truly reliable; thus the formulation needs to be extended to being loved as we are, by God.  But even this may not be enough.  Indeed I desire God to love me as I am but still not to leave me as I am.  For I am all too conscious of my woeful shortcomings and strayings.  On this basis our deepest desire is not so much to be loved by God as to be reconciled to him.  Indeed, the overcoming of divisions as between Samaritans and Jews in the Gospel passage involves reconciliation.  And as we saw, it is evidently the key element in our Romans passage.

Faithfully, Fr. Ted