Having left Egypt to escape slavery, the Israelites wander the Sinai Peninsula, destined to spend forty years in the desert for failing to believe in God’s promise to them. Their complaints are manifold. In the Book of Exodus, the people grumble against Moses, blaming their leader for their thirst: Why did you ever make us leave Egypt? Was it just to have us die here? The people fail over and over again to trust in God, constantly questioning God’s care for them, although God has never stopped caring for them. Their quarrels and tests are examples of the barriers the people erect between themselves and God. As Psalm 95 notes, their hearts are hardened in the desert. The psalmist calls his contemporaries to better. Psalm 95 is an invitation for the people to gather in worship, to give thanks for all God has done: Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, let us kneel before the Lord who made us. But we can only kneel before the Lord if our barriers are removed, if we are open to God’s work in our lives.
The Samaritan woman whom Jesus meets at the well in John’s Gospel has put up her own barriers between herself and God. She has been married multiple times and is currently living with a man who is not her husband. In his request to her, Give me a drink, Jesus reaches beyond these barriers, and more. The woman is a Samaritan, and Samaritans were cut off from Judaism; she is a woman not of his own family and yet he speaks to her. Jesus is willing to violate the social customs of Jews and Samaritans alike in order to reveal himself as God in her presence: I am he, Jesus responds when she mentions the Messiah who is coming. Just as extraordinary: the woman believes it! She is not caught up in the possible blasphemy of the statement or Jesus’ potential overreaching here: rejected by her own society, she is accepted, welcomed, loved by the Messiah himself, and her transformation will be radical. Dropping all barriers, she invites all who will listen: Come and see a man who told me everything I have done. She is ready to worship in Spirit and truth, to worship from the heart, from the source of grace itself, and her community joins her in this worship: we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world. The fields of followers are indeed ripe for the harvest!
We believe that Christ’s death and resurrection are effective in our lives, bringing us forgiveness, opening the heart of God to us, dismantling all barriers we might have erected between ourselves and God. Such faith is a gift from God; it is not our own doing. Paul reminds the Romans that Christ’s death and resurrection were salvific for all people, and that we are justified by faith; we know that hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Whatever barriers we might erect, the love of God made manifest, Jesus Christ, has come to remove them. Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving, indeed, and recognize the God who made us, who saved us, who loves us more than we can ever know.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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