3rd Sunday Lent A - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2023

Today’s Gospel passage is so rich, as is so often the case with John’s Gospel. Unlike Matthew, Mark or Luke, whose Gospels give us remembered details of Jesus’ deeds and teachings over the brief period of his public life, John’s Gospel rather aimed to tease out what John had come to understand more deeply about Jesus over the sixty years or so that had passed since Jesus had risen. John wrote, as he said elsewhere, so that his readers could deepen their faith that Jesus whose actual deeds, etc. they had read about in those earlier Gospels was in fact “the Messiah, the Son of God” and so that, as they deepened their faith and trust in him, “they might have life through his Name”. The long discourses that fill the Gospel of John reflect what John and other Christian believers who had gathered around John had come to see ever more clearly under the guiding inspiration of the Spirit of Jesus.

Today’s passage lists a number of insights into Jesus expressing, often in creative conversational format and with quite deep intuition, the fruits of John’s own personal meditation and on-going practical experience. The passage confidently showed its readers a Jesus who had broken free from so many restrictive assumptions of his Jewish culture — free and ready to talk to women, and a Samaritan woman at that. John spoke of his experience of that freedom as like a refreshing spring of water welling up from somewhere in himself and contributing to a feeling of being ever more alive. He rejoiced in a Jesus free from the centuries-old prejudices and hostility existing between Jews and Samaritans, no longer arguing about the fruitless distinctions between Jewish and Samaritan worship. He opened people instead to a God accessible to all, confined to no particular locality or tradition and truly available spiritually to everyone who seeks.

The passage highlighted the woman’s experience of feeling mysteriously known and tenderly understood by Jesus — a Jesus who clearly did not condemn her colourful but also shameful past, who freed her to accept that past, and who helped her to relax sufficiently to afford her the confidence to tell her fellow townspeople what had happened and to wonder if Jesus himself might indeed be the messianic figure awaited [and argued about] by both Jews and Samaritans. Might this respectful tenderness of Jesus have been one aspect of the Risen Christ treasured most strongly by the Gospel— a clearly relational Jesus who took the woman seriously?

The passage concluded by reflecting on the response of those townspeople. The Gospel pictured them coming together to greet Jesus. In all four Gospels, have we ever been shown a whole town of people coming out to Jesus and welcoming him like that? They even begged him to stay with them. Personally, I find that intriguing. Interestingly, the passage used a couple of words used earlier in the Gospel when it recounted Jesus’ call of the first disciples a short time after Jesus’ baptism. There, it had described how Andrew and an unnamed companion first met Jesus. When they saw him, they followed him. Jesus asked them what they were looking for? They answered, “Where are you staying?” and he replied, “Come and see.” The Gospel commented: “They came and stayed” — both special words in John’s Gospel vocabulary. Today’s passage pointedly used the same words of the Samaritan townspeople.

Finally the Gospel commented on the outcome of the townspeople’s invitation to come and stay: “We have heard him ourselves and we know that he really is the saviour of the world.” The woman’s statement had aroused their interest. Their coming and staying had opened their minds even further: “Now we no longer believe because of what you told us; we have heard him ourselves — and we know that he really is the saviour of the world”.

Does their observation throw some light on one reason for today’s diminishing congregations? In today’s world, do practising Catholics need deliberately to make the personal effort to know Jesus personally?