The Third Sunday of Lent – March 14, 2004

(Readings from Cycle A - Rite of Election)

            When I was in seminary, as we future priests were studying how to preach, we were often admonished never, never, never in a homily say the word “must” or “ought” or even “should.”  These words carry too much a sense of the negative, so we were told.  Well, like some other things taught in our seminaries (places, so often, of so much intellectual and spiritual disarray), I promptly ignored this silly advice.  For here in today’s Gospel we see our Lord Himself breaking this little rule:  “God is Spirit,” Jesus said to the woman of Samaria, “and those who worship him must worship him in Spirit and in truth.”

            Strange, in our days, this strong, demanding emphasis of Christ that religious worship actually have something to do with truth.  (And more than that:  the connection between truth -- and our adherence to it -- and our own salvation.)   Strange, is it, this emphasis on truth?  Pick up almost any current and contemporary manual on prayer and worship, and you will see for yourself.  With all the emphasis on technique of breathing, posture, mental vacuity, one is introduced into a kind of prayer that really is one, giant self-inflicted feeling of self.  Using workshop lingo -- which is hard to even translate into good, standard English -- we see fundamental concepts such as the grace of God, that divine favor toward us and power within us to communicate God’s own life to us (way, way beyond the detection of feelings) -- we see this reduced to some sort of imagery of one’s floating like a feather on a gentle breeze.  And so forth, ad nauseam.

            What we have seen happen in the modern age is the replacement of truth in religion and worship with experience.  Experience becomes the judge and standard of truth and not the other way around.  A while back I read an article in a Jesuit magazine about the Generation X, and how, the author mentioned, most of the Catholic Church’s teaching is irrelevant to young people’s ordinary lives.  Immediately, one has to ask, which teaching is irrelevant?  The one that says that God is love and loves us so much that through Christ God Himself entered our world to destroy the power of sin and death over us?  Or, this one:  that in choosing to truly remain with us until the end of time, that at every celebration of the Holy Eucharist, there will be Christ, really present under the Signs of bread and wine?  Is it irrelevant to our ordinary lives the command to love our Creator, who brought us and our whole world into being, to love God with all our heart and in loving Him truly find ourselves?  Is it irrelevant, the Church’s insistence that we love our neighbor as ourselves, that we not squander and abuse such gifts as sexuality, that wife and husband live up to their own freely given commitment to each other, that there is joy and peace for those who seek to do good and that evil will judged and punished?  How so irrelevant?

            What the author of this sad and foolish little bit of writing really means is that the Church’s teachings are not in line with his experience or his desire for certain experiences.  But here, here in today’s Gospel, we are at the very core of things:  God and the worship that is due Him.  And no matter what our experience, no matter what our feelings tell us, God is a certain way -- that is, perfect in being, goodness, holiness, power, and knowledge -- and there is no changing that.  We must (there’s that word again) conform ourselves to that truth, especially in worship, so that we might know the one true God and love Him and enjoy God’s life now and for all eternity.

            And so, what of experience?  Are there no consolations in the life of faith, of religion, in the Church?   Jesus, in a real way, answers that very question in today’s Gospel.  “Everyone,” He told the Samaritan woman, “who drinks this water will be thirsty again.”  That is, everyone who merely drinks of the water of ordinary life, seeking life only in the here and now, that person will just get thirsty again.  “But whoever drinks,” Jesus continues, “the water I give him will never be thirsty; no, the water I give shall become a fountain within him, leaping up to provide eternal life.”  After this short dialogue, Jesus goes on to show this woman her need of God, of forgiveness, her need of truth, of stepping out into the light of truth.  It is then that they talk about the worship of God in Spirit and in truth.  And Christ has shown her that he indeed is, as the prophet and Messiah of the truth of God, able to give her a water that will reach not to the bottom of her feelings, but deep down into the very heart of her person, to water there the place where God would begin a life-long and eternal conversation with her:  His voice the Word of truth and life to her and her response and her listening are what we call prayer, worship, adoration of the God who has life in and of Himself, pure existence, pure goodness, pure mercy, Maker of all things, visible and invisible -- and there, in today’s Gospel story, there He is concerned to speak life to this one woman as if she were the only human being on earth.

            How relevant is Christian teaching?  Well, much of Catholic teaching has been terribly obscured by the very trying to make it relevant, like ordinary water that we drink and then only get thirsty again.   Modern religion would have had Jesus simply help the woman fill up her water bucket at the well and then talk about the experience of doing that daily chore.  But the real Jesus, the Christ of the Christian faith, uses the ordinary to quickly move to the heart of the matter, this woman’s heart, your heart, my heart, where there is a thirst that cannot be quenched by even the best of human experiences, but only by the speaking of the word of truth from God, from the heart of the Eternal One to the human heart made to hear the truth and then to worship the divine majesty of this God in Spirit and in truth.