There are two things at stake that Jesus sees in today’s gospel lesson: 1) an egoistic attachment to personal and social boundaries and 2) human deficit as a means to reach the deepest reality of our being.
Jesus sees in both the Samaritan woman and his disciples their attachment to socio-personal boundaries. What I mean by this attachment to socio-personal boundaries is quite simple. Let’s look at what Jesus does in the story. He does something that he’s not supposed to do according to social rules in his time. He should not talk to or engage with Samaritans whatsoever, and even more so with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritan woman in the gospel story knows this very well. Jesus’s disciples all know this social norm very well. Yet, Jesus who knows this very well, without any hesitation, breaks that norm. In his eyes, both the Samaritan woman and his disciples are so attached to this somewhat ridiculous sociocultural norm. What happens when one is particularly attached to something that has no ethical basis but prejudice and stereotype, it produces a cycle of division. Let’s look at the Samaritan woman. When Jesus talks to her to get water, her immediate reaction is, “Why are you talking to me? You and I are not supposed to engage at all. I’m not Jewish enough.” We can see that she sees less of herself compared to Jewish people. Or we can imagine she’s a feisty person who is smart enough to see all this homogeneous pure-blooded Jewishness is delusional. Her response to Jesus can be something like this: “Well, well, well...I thought you Jewish pureblooded peeps aren’t supposed to talk to us. But now you’re just like us, getting thirsty for water and asking me for a cup of water? Aren’t you supposed to be better, higher, and superior than us?” We can go many different ways to imagine and understand what kind of attitude the Samaritan woman might have had to Jesus. But the reality is that there is this social boundary or norm that divides people from each other. What it does to people at a personal level is that they become so locked in their images created by this unscientific and discriminatory norm. For the Samaritan woman, it is “I’m a Samaritan who is forbidden to engage with Jewish people.” For the disciples who are astonished that their teacher is talking to the Samaritan woman, they have this mindset, “I’m Jewish who is better, cleaner, and purer than those mixed hybrid Samaritan gentiles.” Either way, it is self-destructive. What Jesus does in this reality, however, is to set both the Samaritan woman and his disciples free from that attachment or to shatter their preconceived images of themselves. In a way, this is the work of healing, making them whole, wholly human. There is no logical ground that one is better than the other. Also, no one chooses to be born Jewish or not. It’s simply given. So Jesus talks to her. He reaches out to her. Even when his disciples come back from the city, he doesn’t stop his engagement with her but invites them to change. He crosses the boundary to help both the Samaritan woman and the disciples start the process of knowing what they really are. How does Jesus actually lead them to see what they are? He starts from where they are. He starts with their longing and urgency for survival. He uses water and food. The Samaritan woman comes to Jacob’s well for water while Jesus’s disciples go out to the city for food. Water and food are the most vital and basic elements for us to sustain our lives. As we encounter the coronavirus outbreak, we too experience this reality of human survival. (On a completely off-topic note, I recently went to Costco to buy my son’s daily snack and juice for his daycare. As I was passing by the beverage aisle, there were no water bottles left. Thankfully, a box of juices for my son was there. Canned food, especially Spam and soup seemed to be popular. If you have watched TV shows or movies about apocalypse, they portray how important it is to secure water and canned food. What happens in this kind of crisis is that people who have less suffer more. There was an article in the New York Times about how the rich people are preparing for coronavirus differently that they have a means to obtain concierge doctors, chartered planes, yachts, and germ-free panic rooms. It is always easy to blame those who might unnecessarily and selfishly hoard piles of hygiene products, water, and food, yet this kind of criticism does not take account of our society’s serious inequity and imbalance of the capitalist system. We usually end up criticizing our own when the rich are securely and secretly hidden and well protected without ever getting their own greed and selfishness caught.) The Samaritan woman, Jesus’s disciples, and all of us facing the coronavirus outbreak deal with the basic human needs: water and food. Jesus goes further than this. He talks about the living water to the Samaritan woman, which will make her thirst no more and the food that his disciples do not know about. He turns our focus on our physical sensation of thirst and hunger to our fundamental spiritual thirst and hunger. Our physical sensation of thirst and hunger becomes a way to recognize deep spiritual longing in us though we might not experience i at times.. To experience this spiritual longing or void is, spiritually speaking, a gift from God solely because that experience awakens in us what is most important in our lives. Our deepest longing for God also awakens what we really are before God. St Augustine’s famous saying echoes this reality of our yearning for God, “Thou hast made us for thyself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.” This unrest is what Jesus means by spiritual thirst and hunger which can only be satisfied by God alone. When we realize this spiritual longing in us, our artificial cultural norm that divides us from each other loses its power over us. The division between the Samaritan woman and the disciples no longer exists. Because Jesus experiences and sees spiritual longing in himself, he knows what he truly is: God’s beloved. He sees the void that can only be fulfilled with God alone. Jesus sets the Samaritan woman and his disciples free from their attachment to the false images of themselves by awakening their spiritual thirst and hunger so that they can see their true nature as God’s beloved whose hearts can only be satisfied by God. Let’s look at what false images and delusions we are attached to in our lives. An example of this attachment to delusions is the Nazi ideoology in which the German Aryan race is superior than any other races. What about perfectionism we all suffer from? We may be attached and fixated to this unrealistically perfect version of ourselves. Any form of discrimination always manifests personal and social attachments. Only God can liberate us from all these delusions, and awakening our sense of spiritual longing is the very beginning to that liberation from attachments. This spiritual longing becomes our common ground on which we stand together without division. It is then transformed into our common ground of being where we are one in God and with God. From this Universal Ground of Being, which we call God, we drink the living water and receive the food to feed others in need. During this Lent, keep alive your spiritual thirst and hunger for God. Your spiritual longing will remind you of what you are and what others are. Your spiritual yearning for the oneness with God will evoke the desire for the oneness with others. As you eat the body of Christ and drink his blood, may your spiritual longing be filled and deepened. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
|