Third Sunday of Lent: A Woman, a Well and a Wedding

Readings for the Third Sunday of Lent

Post-moderns have a variety of ways of thinking about God. God can, for some, be a distant watchmaker who wound up the cosmos and let it loose to self-assemble.  For others, God is like the force in Star Wars, an impersonal force that binds everything together.  God can also be an invisible superhuman hero, who is there to right wrongs and make sure it all comes out good in the end. If he doesn’t cut the mustard, it is probably that you didn’t believe enough.
 
A first-century Jew like Jesus of Nazareth would have seen God in a very different, but much more intimate way. From an ancient Jewish perspective, the one God—“the LORD” or “He Who Is” (Hebrew YHWH) (Exodus 3:15)—is not just the Creator, but the Bridegroom, a divine person whose ultimate desire is to be united to his people. Salvation is a relationship that is so intimate, so permanent, so sacrificial, and so life-giving that it can only be described as a marriage between Creator and creatures.
 
Marriage is the only human experience that comes close to describing the nature of our relationship with God. That is one reason why a sacramental marriage is the image of Christ’s relationship to his bride, the Church. ”  This is the season of Lent – a time when we examine our sinfulness. If our image of God is as the divine bridegroom, this colors the way we see the Creator; sin is not the breaking of a rule, but is an adultery. Sin is the betrayal of our relationship with God. Hence, Psalm 106, ““Shedding innocent blood, the blood of their own sons and daughters, Whom they sacrificed to the idols of Canaan, desecrating the land with bloodshed.  They defiled themselves by their actions, became adulterers by their conduct.” Ps. 106. The idea of the mystical marriage between God and Israel is at the heart of the prophetic book of Hosea. It is not the only image of God in the Old Testament, but it is the image that Jesus is relying on in today’s story of the Samaritan woman at the well.
 
The Gospel today is about a well, a woman and a wedding. Let’s consider each of the elements.
 
First, the Importance of the Well:
The well is the place where man meets woman and a marriage is arranged. Why, because that is where people go to meet. Today we have classrooms, social clubs, singles bars and online dating. But the well at the center of village life used to fill this function.

1. Some scriptural examples of true love and village wells are
   1. Abraham sent his servant to find a wife from among his relatives back home. That servant met Isaac's future bride Rebecca at a well in Genesis 24;
   2. Moses met his future bride Zipporah at a well in the book of Exodus 4 after he fled Pharoah,
   3. Jacob, in the book of Genesis 29, met Rachel, his future bride, at a well, where he moves the stone and waters her flocks in a show both of his strength but also his charity and concern for her.
2. The Well and Living water has at least three overlapping meanings.
   1. First, living water is a stream, moving and bubbling, rather that water from a cistern or well. This is why the woman misunderstands.
   2. Second, living water was used in the cleansing of brides before their wedding in the book of Numbers 19.  A bride would prepare herself for her wedding by washing in living water. When Jesus promises to give this woman the living water, he is inviting her to become a bride. Not an ordinary bride but a spiritual bride to the bridegroom Messiah.
   3. Third, Jesus uses the metaphor to mean a special kind of water that will give eternal life. The phrase prefigures the water that will flow from Jesus’ side on the cross.

Secondly, the bride:
Samaritans and Jews were not on good terms. The Samaritans are the mingling of Assyrian colonists imported into Israel in the Eighth Century. They intermarried with the Israelite survivors of the Assyrian conquest still living in Israel. 2 Kings 15-17. They built their own temple on Mount Gerizim and where they worship the God of Israel to this day. They have their own canon of scriptures, priesthood and are remnants in some sense of the lost ten tribes of Israel. This story of Jesus at the well is a prophetic sign of God gathering his lost people.  
 
Thirdly, the Wedding. 
Jesus introduces sin into the conversation.
In the Old Testament, adultery was a metaphor for sin. (See Hosea). God’s covenant with Israel was like a marriage covenant. Jesus introduces the presence of sin when he says to the woman,

“Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.”

 We have become used to divorce. Elizabeth Taylor was married eight times. That is a lot of pain. We are more accepting than the Judea of Jesus’ time. The woman in this story, was a pariah because she is an adulteress. She is alone at the well because she is avoiding other women.
 
She is trying to change the subject to religious issues between Samaria and Jerusalem that are ten centuries old. Why? Her own personal life is pretty painful. Lets talk about something else Jesus!
 
 Jesus follows the shift in gears to talk about worship in spirit and in truth. Worship will no longer be tied to a building but, instead, to a people.

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

  Spirit and Truth:

1. Spirit:  We worship God at church, home, in the car and at work. We don’t make a pilgrimage to Mecca or Jerusalem. When we pray at home, that is our personal prayer and worship. When we pray here at St. Mark, we pray as the body of Christ.
2. Truth: We worship God in Truth when we know God and love him. You cannot love or worship a God that you do not know. You can’t avoid the pain in life in order to avoid God. The Messiah will show us the journey of faith up Mt. Calvary to reveal the truth about God.

Jesus then identifies himself at the Messiah, that is, the Divine Bridegroom.

The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, he will show us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

John tells this story because he recognizes that in it the woman at the well is like a bride, that is Israel and the Gentiles, and that Jesus is the divine bridegroom who come to enter into a supernatural marriage.  St. Augustine said, because she's not just Israelite, she's also pagan, so she kind of represents all of humanity in herself, both the Jews and the Gentiles, both the Israelites and the pagans, who are waiting for a savior to come and to save them. From what? To save them from their sin.
 

God is not a distant God to his people, but comes is part of an intimate relationship with his people and each person, like a marriage. The image of Jesus as the Divine Bridegroom is in the Wedding at Cana in John 2.  Jesus refers to himself as the bridegroom in John 3, "He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice So this joy of mine has been made full.” The image of Jesus as the Divine Bridegroom is also at the root of the stories told by Matthew and Luke about the great king’s wedding banquet. All of this is rooted in the Old Testament image of God as the bridegroom of Israel. The Catechism teaches that,

“The entire Christian life bears the mark of the spousal love of Christ and the Church. Already Baptism, the entry into the People of God, is a nuptial mystery [in other words a marital mystery, a bridal mystery]; it is so to speak the nuptial bath. which precedes the wedding feast, the Eucharist.” CCC 1617

This woman’s sins aren't an impediment to his love, but they are an impediment to her being able to love him back. She has to deal with her sin first, and in a sense come clean, so that he can wash her and make her into his bride.

Sin, disordered love and St. Augustine’s pears
You might remember St. Augustine’s story in the Confessions about stealing pears as a kid. I talked about it the first weekend of Lent. Let’s look at it again:

“Close to our vineyard there was a pear tree laden with fruit. This fruit was not enticing, either in appearance or in flavor. We nasty lads went there to shake down the fruit and carry it off at dead of night, after prolonging our games out of doors until that late hour according to our abominable custom. We took enormous quantities, not to feast on ourselves but perhaps to throw to the pigs; we did eat a few, but that was not our motive: we derived pleasure from the deed simply because it was forbidden.   Look upon my heart, O God, look upon this heart of mine, on which you took pity in its abysmal depths. Enable my heart to tell you now what it was seeking in this action which made me bad for no reason, in which there was no motive for my malice except malice.” St. Augustine. The Confessions (1st Edition; Study Edition) . New City Press. Kindle Edition.

 Augustine’s heavy emphasis on this this seemingly insignificant episode from his life seems like overkill to some. He saw it, however, as more than a teenager’s prank. He depicts it as sin, rebellion against God’s law, with no mitigating motive other than lust for the wrongness itself. He is concerned about drawing a link between his experience and the story of Adam and Eve and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The parallel is obvious. Here is a symbol of the fall in his own life; his participation in the world described in scripture.  
 
Augustine thought sin was a disordered love. In this case, his disordered love of self.  Augustine describes love as having four grades of goodness or beauty in descending order:

1. At the top, moral goodness and beauty  (justice and prudence),
2. Next, intellectual goodness and beauty (mind and intelligence),
3. Next, sensuous, and organic goodness and beauty;
4. Finally, the sham of beauty. Lust of male for female versus love and commitment between man and woman

For him malice or sin is the love of a sham, a simulation, of beauty that fades almost to nothing.  Some sin for us is venial, just human weakness. Other sins are knowing, intentional and, in some sense, voluntary which we call mortal. In any event, sin is a lack of freedom for a creature meant to be free to participate in God’s love.  We are meant to love a pear as God’s pear and another as the image of God. Salvation is, in part, seeing Creation as God sees it.

The Significance of the Jesus, the Divine Bridegroom
Salvation isn’t just personal, or escaping hell, or self-help, or a really nice condo.  Salvation is a full participation in God’s divine life made possible only by grace. To participate is the experience of heaven, even now, we must, like lovers, respond to God’s grace. To close God out is hell. A permanent state of spiritual adultery. We are made for more. When Jesus offers ‘living water’ he is offering the grace filled abundant life in God’s spirit.
 
The adultery of Israel is our malicious love of our own autonomy. Autonomy is to be a law unto ourselves, literally. We make the rules. What Augustine was concerned about in his story of stealing pears, is that he didn’t want anybody else in charge or for anyone else, not even God, to set boundaries. His sin was the seizing of complete independence to decide good and evil for him. That is the opposite of the relationship offered in mystical marriage. It is the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden who wanted to be like God. The temptation to be godlike is based on a parody of what God. It is to see God as the divine rule maker, not the divine bridegroom. Augustine saw the fall in the garden of Eden for what it is, malice. What we seek in love is intimacy – with one another and with God. That is why this story of the Women, the Well and the Wedding is Jesus’ image of salvation – an intimate, divine union between God and us.