February 26, 2005
Irrational
Lent 3A (Jn 4.5-42)
That pensive mystic and altogether lovely person Madeleine L’Engle once wrote about Christmas as “…the irrational season / When love blooms bright and wild. / Had Mary been filled with reason / There’d have been no room for the child.”
The story of the Samaritan woman come to Jacob’s well for a jar of water is about such an irrational season. Here’s a woman who is surely down to her last nerve in monotony, dipping once more after countless times into that all-too-familiar well with its long and tiresome history. Suddenly, she’s faced with almost a time warp in her history, a totally unexpected detour in her seemingly unending serial of one domestic and personal crisis after another.
In a rapid succession of shocks, a stranger, a Jew, a man speaks to her, a woman, a Samaritan. He speaks not only across religious and ethnic and sexual boundaries, but with an alarming candor and penetrating insight. Then he brings her back to earth and does a “guy thing.” He asks for a drink of water. But then he speaks to her of a living water that does away with thirst forever. Step by step, he lays bare her past and her present and sees right through her into her future.
In one stroke, the rigid sanctions of the kind of worship and religion and custom that she and her people have embraced for centuries are abolished. Jesus proposes a revolutionary new liturgy based not on the usual male-dominated, retrogressive system of exclusion and judgment, but a worship grounded unpretentiously and candidly in spirit and in truth.
As if all this is not enough, he commissions her to be a disciple to her own people and does not send “a member of his staff” or some other man to accompany her to make sure she gets it right. Obviously, the ordination of women is not all that novel, after all. Those who oppose it could well do to meditate on this story.
The Samaritan woman dares to accept her charge and returns to her townsfolk to tell them her tale. Never did she have to say, “He told me how sinful I was.” Rather could she say, simply, “He told me everything about myself.” One can suspect that she’d never had such self-esteem before as in this altogether unreasonable assignment.
As well, there’s nothing especially rational about the Gospel which is entrusted to us. Every occasion in which we embrace it is an “irrational season” in our lives. The love at its center which can cast out fear, even the fear of risking the acceptance of such a trust, is perhaps the most unreasonable of all that we’ve ever undertaken. For it means that we remember ourselves, and that we love ourselves, and that this comes before any other truly creative love we could give to others, the love that “blooms bright and wild.”
At our baptism, we and those who sponsored us, stopped by a “well of living water” and received a bend in our own personal history. We made and continue to remake the Covenant that commissions us to go and to tell, not because of who we are, but because of who we can become.
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Note: May I suggest that the Baptismal Covenant be used in place of the Nicene Creed should the celebration include this preachment (BCP pp 304f).