The Jews looked down on the Samaritans as religious and racial half-breed heretics. It’s hard for us to understand the animosity that existed between these two groups. If you think of the Bosnians and the Serbs or if you think of the Palestinians and the Israelis, you’ve got the right idea.So why did Jesus “have to” go through Samaria when the Jews either didn’t go there at all or passed through as quickly as possible? The answer is simple and profound: Jesus went because he intended to meet this woman. He knew she would be coming to the well at precisely the moment he was sitting there weary from his journey. Nothing happens by chance in this story. Every detail is part of the outworking of God’s will. The woman isn’t looking for Jesus. All she wants is water. But Jesus is looking for her.It wasn’t the normal time, and it was unusual for a woman to come to a well alone. But this woman was different. The Bible says she came from the tiny village of Sychar. We know basically where Sychar was. It was in Samaritan territory, nestled between Mount Ebal and Mount Gerizim. Sychar was built at the confluence of two trade routes, one that came up from Jerusalem on its way to Capernaum, and one that came west from the Jericho region toward the Mediterranean Sea. Sychar was thus located at a very strategic point in central Palestine.The well was about one-half mile outside the village near the point where the two trade routes came together. It was called Jacob’s Well, after the patriarch who had first dug it some 2000 years earlier. In every way, it is part of the story of Jesus. Weary travellers from throughout Israel knew it as a place where they might drink from the spring flowing some 150 feet below the surface.As the woman looks at Jesus and he at her, four invisible walls stand between them. There is a religious wall, a gender wall, a racial wall, and a moral wall. Yet our Lord found a way through all of them. He found her … and then she found him!The desire for God is written in the human heart. We are created by him, but also for him. As the psalmist writes, like a deer that yearns for running streams, so my soul is yearning for you, my God. The search for God is universal. Every human heart seeks God, but God is not outdone — he also seeks us. He draws us to himself like a thirsty woman going to fetch water from a well. She is going about the sixth hour when the sun is high in the sky noon. She is a woman of Samaria — a pagan place.She is surprised to find a Jew there, already waiting by the well, without a bucket. He says to her, “Give me a drink.” She is startled by this gesture. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? The romance begins.The woman is a world of her own — a universe of the heart, thirsting for love, looking for it in all the wrong places! She has had five husbands, and the one she has now is not her husband. Somewhere love has died — along the way, her bucket is empty. Love comes to meet her at the well — the thirst of the Father coming to meet us in Jesus Christ! If you knew the gift of God and who it was saying to you, “Give me a drink,” you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water. It is an eternal love; it never ends! As Isaiah prophesied:Oh, come to the water all you who are thirsty; though you have no money, come! Buy corn without money, and eat, and, at no cost, wine and milk! (Is 55:1)The waters of God’s thirst flow through the heart of Jesus Christ! The woman at the well has met the heart of love! She will never be thirsty again: She has entered the bridal chamber. She has found what she was looking for all her life. He thirsts for our love. The woman has met love — love who would hang upon a cross that she would never thirst again, that she might have eternal life with him in the Father’s house. It is a wonderful love — a love the world has never known and it is yours in Jesus Christ! Come to the waters and never be thirsty again.The world is a wedding. Christ has come to bring us to the wedding banquet. Are we willing to give him one drop of our love, to enter into relationship with him, to begin to draw water from the well who is Christ, to continue the dance that this woman joins, this outcast of the outcasts who He searches for and finds? To search for more people to love and to be loved by them as well?
There are themes in Lent of course. Quieter music, a lack of flowers, greater options for prayer and reflection, and I hope, a great amount of admittedly restrained joy at the Easter season fast approaching. Each year the second Sunday of Lent story of the Transfiguration of Jesus comes as the Gospel, taken in turn from each of the Gospels. But we may, because there is only so much that we can take in, and we can be less then attentive at times, not have noticed that the first reading is always about Abraham.This year we heard how Abraham was called by God to leave his own country and travel into a strange land, which God would give to his descendants. The next year we hear of the sacrifice of Isaac, and then the promise that God makes to Abraham. This link between Abraham and the Transfiguration is no accident. The Transfiguration, like Lent, is a frozen, out of time moment in history. It takes us out of our familiar narrative of the life of Christ and then throws us back into it just as abruptly, as the slightly chilling ending has it, suddenly, they were alone. The Transfiguration is about the brief dramatic revelation of the glory of Jesus to the three Apostles on the mountain. It associates him with Moses and Elijah who represent the Law and the Prophets. In other words it is saying that Jesus is the expected One to whom Law and Prophets pointed. The story that began with Abraham finds its goal in Jesus. An ending is reached of the labour of Abraham and it points to the ending we will find on Good Friday, when the labour of God to redeem us ends the exile from the garden.The One who called Abraham and who promised that he himself would be among us, has now fulfilled his promise. The ‘Beloved Son’ is Emmanuel, ‘God with us’, and we behold His glory on the mountain, and we will do so again in a few weeks on Calvary, and this mountain should prepare us for hope in the face of death on that mountain, and for hope in the face of our own death as well, for this is what the transfiguration is about. All this takes place on a mountain because, in Biblical imagery, mountains are places of revelation, above all with the self-revealing of God at Mount Sinai. Matthew’s Gospel mentions three mountains: the Mount of the Sermon, where Jesus teaches the New Law; the Mount of Transfiguration, where he is seen as the Beloved Son; and the Mountain in Galilee, where he appears triumphant in his risen life and sends his disciples to preach the Good News to all people, which is I am with you always. I am with you in the Mass on this calvary, I am with you in heaven on this mountain and I am with you in the Sermon on the Mount when you follow my teachings, for then you build my Kingdom, and I will dwell with you as I promised Abraham, and his line forever.So by linking Abraham with the Transfiguration, our liturgy clamps together both the beginning and the crucial turning-point in the history of God’s dealings with us. Jesus came to be the focal point of human history, a history of which we are part, which gives our lives a meaning, a sense of purpose and a goal.Perhaps, too, the stories of Abraham and the Transfiguration are linked because they are both about the journey of faith. The Apostles likewise were called from their homely fishermen’s life to follow Jesus; and though it was exciting at first, it soon became scary and bewildering. Where was it all heading? Where is our pilgrimage heading? I suggest that in the three peaks challenge of the mount, of the transfiguration and of calvary, we do not need to worry, because those three peaks build the Kingdom, and if we build His Kingdom, He will dwell in it, so we are already at the destination, and our current task is to make as many people aware of that as possible by rejecting whatever is contrary to it. As we follow in the footsteps of the Beloved Son, our journey of faith will often demand of us the constancy of Abraham.Jesus touched them, saying: Get up, do not be afraid. And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. Jesus, who had been seen conversing with Moses and Elijah and whose Father cried out from heaven, is again found alone, as He will be found alone in the Garden, on the cross and in the next garden. We listen to the words as a community, in shared attention but we also hear them alone, as words addressed to each of us alone, invited on a journey into personal freedom that no one else can take for us. Like the disciples, we need silence to digest their import.Yet they do not travel to Jerusalem alone. They walk with the Lord and each other. Our journey is also towards the shared freedom and joy of the Kingdom, for which we struggle now. Embracing freedom is costly. If we support the cause of freedom, even though it is but a tiny foretaste of what is promised, it will be costly for us too. Let us weigh the cost and set out.
We can see some beautiful things in the course of our lives. I think particularly of a field in Alsace on a blazing hot day, with the heat making the corn shimmer, or sailing into Stralsund harbour and seeing a townscape largely untouched for centuries or walking into Kykkos monastery for the first time and taking in the sheer opulence. Last summer I climbed to the top of the central cathedral in Berlin and was rewarded with a stunning view of the city. This urge to climb or sail seems to have been present in human beings for thousands of years, and the experience of looking down at the earth from a great height or seeing things from a fragile ship in deep waters is one which takes us beyond the physical. We can be struck by the wonder of creation in the smallest and closest things, but there is something awe-inspiring in looking out to the horizon and seeing the world down below, or far away.When you float on the ocean, or fly in the sky (and I recommend very much being in a small jet with only a few seats to see how flying really feels, and the knowledge that there really is very little keeping you up there), or ascend a great tower, the experience can raise certain questions or emotions in us. It would be a very worrying person who did not pause to think what am I in this vast world? How small I seem in comparison to the great expanse below and the vastness of the universe above. Is my life here just a chance event or is there something beyond all change and decay; something which I can hope in despite all that might befall me in life? The sea beneath me is so deep, the mountain so high and the heavens above so infinite that I am, to all practical measurement, insignificant.In the Gospel today St Matthew tells us how Jesus is set by Satan on a very high mountain and offered the kingdoms of the world in return for worshipping him. The picture is a vivid one, and it powerfully engages our imagination. From the great height Jesus is tempted with the question which is put to each of us, if you could hold the world in your hand what would you do? If it was all given to you in its entirety, what would you do with it? Would you want it to know that you had power over it? Would you want to force it to love you?On the mountain of our religious imagination we can open our lives to that which is beyond us, or we can close our grasp on that which lies beneath. Not all of us are great rulers, surveying the extent of our kingdom, but each of us has been entrusted with some share in God’s creation. The temptation is this: through pride, greed or fear to hold fast to that portion of the good things of this world we have been given. It is this temptation which Adam and Eve succumb to in the garden. They grasp for the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, but rather than rising to be like the gods they fall and lose their innocence. They try to be like Gods, as the Devil does, but fail to grasp that Gd does not grasp, or make us love Him, or make His power known, but becomes man that we might find Him in the familiarity of the flesh.In the second reading, which is from the letter of St Paul to the Romans, we are told that ‘as one man’s fall brought condemnation on everyone, so the good act of one man brings everyone life.’ Here St Paul is referring to the cross; it is the crucifixion of Jesus Christ which brings life, where the grasping of Adam had brought death as the grasping of Satan does as well, and as our grasping, or attempts to force power or love will also die. We are brought to another tree, one set on a hill, from which Jesus looks down upon the world. Jesus has rejected the temptations of Satan and now he completes his victory over Satan. Whereas Adam and Eve grasp at the apple, Jesus opens his arms in his great prayer of thanksgiving to the Father. Whereas the Devil grasps at humanity, we trust in love and surrender ourselves to it and therefore to God and to each other.On the cross Jesus Christ utters his great ‘yes’ to the father, to the gift of creation, a ‘yes’ that he makes on behalf of each one of us, and he invites us to share in this prayer of thanksgiving – to live our lives in the hope of the resurrection, not the despair of our own desires, not the fulfilment of our own need for attention or control.At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus made the journey that no-one had made before, through the wilderness and into the Promised Land. And then, having forged a path through the desert of sin, he turned around, and came back to fetch the rest of us. His victory over Satan whose beginnings we hear about today was won for us, to break the bonds of sin that hold us in weakness and death. So today let us remember our sins and remember that they have no more power over us. Let us remember death and remember that its sting is gone. Let us remember Satan, the Evil One, and remember that his house has been plundered, his kingdom is destroyed, his dominion is ended; and let us rejoice in this holy season, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.
I wonder what we should believe. I don’t mean in terms of the faith – that has been handed down to us, and we have the Bible and the church fathers to go back to if we encounter a new situation in which to apply it. People like to moan about the church ‘changing’ but it has remained astonishingly the same for two thousand years, just applied to a whole variety of contexts, all of which it makes sense of and informs. I mean in terms of people and what they tell us and even what we see – pictures are doctored or fabricated completely, news can be fictitious, either through design or incomprehension, and there is, terrifyingly, often no way of knowing if what we see, hear or indeed smell is real, the latter in the case of supermarkets who pipe in the smell of fresh bread around the bakery section when, often, nothing is baked there at all. It is sometimes asked of patients by psychiatrists ‘do you see or hear anything which nobody else seems to’ – but now, I would hesitate to tell the truth, because AI and social media is quite capable of showing you ultra tailored content which nobody else sees and which is often entirely fictitious. Let your ‘yes’ be a ‘yes’ and your ‘no’ be a ‘no’ might well be the best advice the readings today gives us, and it is the ridiculing of faith and Christianity which has led us to this point, and the church, to her eternal shame, apes the monument to its own decline that so often threatens to consume us.So what do you believe? Who do you believe? Do you really think that Farage will be better able to rearrange the deckchairs than Starmer or Johnson have been, or to resolve issues that, when thought through and not painted onto roundabouts, are a perpetual stalemate until the world order is changed and the fantasy of a world united under anything but Christ has finally been discarded – there is nothing except faith that will save us, and people seem to be realising that. But it has to be true faith, lived fully and understood and taught well, not the fantasy of a man in the sky or pet hamsters in a heavenly park.I think this hope in a time of doubt may be a good starting point for understanding those strange words of Jesus in today’s Gospel, “I tell you solemnly, till heaven and earth disappear, not one dot, not one little stroke, shall disappear from the Law until its purpose is achieved.” The dots and strokes are the vowels of the Hebrew alphabet, the language of the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament. The basis of Hebrew writing is just the consonants – but the vowels are needed for the words to make a sound. Furthermore, the Jewish Scriptures, in which the Law is contained, are to this day sung in Jewish services. Reading was not enough – singing is needed for the full sound to be present. And really to sing, we have to believe in and be truly present to the words and the music. We need to be open to their deepest meaning. We need to let the words abide in us, disturb us, change us.So this is not Jesus imposing the Jewish Law on the first Christians in all its details. It is Jesus taking us to the heart of the Law of God, the observances of which (such as abstaining from pork) were signs only relevant to a particular time and place. Jesus confronts us with the terribly destructive effect unjust anger can have. He challenges us with how we look at others: do we look at them in love, rejoicing that this child of God exists, or do we ultimately see them as simply for our use? Do we take with our hands what we need, or whatever this consumer that is me happens to want at this particular moment? Is our yes really yes and our no really no?This is obviously a huge challenge, and Jesus uses deliberately shocking language about tearing our eye out or cutting off our hand if they cause us to sin. And of course, often we’re thoughtless rather than malicious, but thoughtlessness is damaging to those who we are not thinking of, and love is never thoughtless.Perhaps this is why St. Paul, in today’s second reading, is critical of the wisdom of his age, just as we should be of the apparent wisdom of our own age, when we see where it is leading us. In the verses just before the ones we hear today, Paul says to the people of Corinth – a smart, upwardly mobile place – that when he came to them, he did not use “lofty words or wisdom” to proclaim the mystery of God, but rather decided “to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified”. This is the only hope for our time now when Satan has so changed society and the world as we see, hear and smell it that we do not know what is true and what is false. Hold therefore to your faith, prepare for Lent on Wednesday with joy and the firm resolve to move closer to God and to let your yes be a yes and your no be a no, so that people may see God in us and, in the end, the world may be saved – not saved from war or terror, not saved from bombs or division, but saved through faith and the unswerving knowledge that the cross gives us – death is not the end. There is a ‘yes’ that resounds through history, and it is the ‘yes’ of the cross, the ‘yes’ that says God loves us, and through death, we find life. Say yes to it. And say no to everything else.
