Brussels, Pro-Cathedral of the Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe

Brussels, pro-Cathedral of the Diocese of Gibraltar in Europe.

March 19, 2017

Sermon on John 4, 5-26

+ Joris Vercammen, old-catholic Archbishop of Utrecht.

My dear Sisters and brothers,

People in competition. That’s what we are. Everybody focuses on their own ambitions. In a cultural climate that stimulates individualism, we learn to live for ourselves. This climate undermines our need for communion. We have learned to see the others as a threat. There are far too many of them! As there are too many immigrants and asylum seekers, too many people fleeing because they want a better life….the same life as we are longing for…

Trying to exclude ‘all kind of others’ from our lives changes us in people who struggle with loneliness.

Lonely: that’s also the woman we come across in today's Gospel. Did you notice her name is not even mentioned? It means that she can be called by any name, perhaps – who knows? - by your own name. It is easy to understand that the tension in the story will increase by doing this.

At the hottest moment of the day, the women comes to the well. It is the moment everybody would avoid to be outside, but not this women. Indeed, she is lonely. She is a lonely women in a lonely country. Samaria is unclean. During the centuries after the exile, the population became mixed. According to some Jewish leaders, they had departed too much from the norm. With less ‘different people’ the country would be less marginalised as it had become now. Notice: the historic Samaria is now the West Bank. It is the piece of land that is occupied by the army of the state Israel and it is the place where the illegal settlements arise. Until now it is the piece of land that is not granted to those who are different.

How did Jesus end up in that country? Very simple: it was part of his journey. It sounds a little bit too simple perhaps, but sometimes it happens that your way goes through a foreign country even if you didn’t expect it. Sometimes you don’t expect to come across another person who is so very different from you, that he or she likes to be a stranger to you. Jesus departed from Jerusalem. There he had a serious argument with the leaders of the people, who collaborated with the imperial authorities, and who claimed the temple. Jesus drove the merchants out of the temple while protesting they had changed ‘the house of the father’ into a marketplace. Jesus is not against the temple but he is against the manipulation of religion into ideology that serves private ambitions and individualistic profit. The house of the Father is called to be a safe space for devotion and prayer. And isn't prayer this: offering hospitality to the Father, the One, who is totally different? Praying is impossible without relativizing your own ambitions and needs. Jesus took the shortest way to ‘his’ Galilee, also such a place that is populated by ‘sinners’. This way went through Samaria. In Jesus days, most of the Jews would rather avoid to travel through Samaria, in an attempt to avoid the confrontation with those people on the margins. They want to avoid the confrontation with the otherness of those strangers. They want to save their cleanness. If the others are a threat to your welfare or your power, to your way of thinking or to your culture…than you can better exclude them out of your minds and sight. It is better to pretend they don’t exist.

Samaria is a symbol for the threat that the otherness of the others is to us. We can experience that when we are fleeing for this otherness, conflicts in our societies will increase together with loneliness as its consequence. In Samaria, Jesus encounters a women. Above all kind of differences of race and faith, there is also this gender issue. Is it possible that a Jewish man can be involved in an encounter with an unclean Samarian women? - In Samaria you can’t avoid tensions! - What will be left of my own opinions and ambitions when I take this women seriously and offer her hospitality in my own life? In other words: when this women is also right, what will remain of ‘my own truth’? What is wisdom? Samaria refers to our uncertainty and our thirst. Thirst for water, yes, but above all our thirst for wisdom.

The scene is located in a town that is called Sychar. ‘Sychar’ means ‘next place’ or ‘next door’. It means ‘neighbouring country’. Yes, indeed, the other is never far from your own home. In Sychar, there is the well of Jacob. Jacob is that complicated patriarch who dreamed that there was a ladder between heaven and earth on which angels are the active bridge-builders between those two realities. As if heaven and earth are called not to be strangers to one another, but neighbours. Distance has been bridged in that dream of Jacob. Could it be that in the well of Jacob we find a secret key that can open for us the door to a life in communion? Beyond all fear for the others?

That lonely women is on her way to the well…and she meets Jesus. The situation as it is described by the writer of the gospel is a very realistic one: Jesus is tired and asks for a drink. As it is not yet obvious that the woman is the one who is looking for some perspective in her life…- remember that I said that we are this woman – but it would mean that Jesus is asking us something to drink? Jesus goes beyond borders that hold people captured in their loneliness , and in doing this he is relativizing some strong convictions.

Indeed: are we aware of ‘the Gift of God’? In other words: are we still aware of the fact God committed himself into a covenant with mankind and that the Torah, the Law, with her wisdom is given to us as a gift for life? That Law is refreshing and vitalising, it is a living water at the hottest moment of the day.

“Do you know the gift of God?” Jesus’ question confronts us with our poverty. We have all we need and yet we are struggling with depressions. We are succeeding and yet we feel ourselves threatened. We are friends with ourselves but yet we don’t know how to bridge the gap that separates form others. That are symptoms of a cramp of latent fear within ourselves and within our societies.

Also, in the story it is the women that asks Jesus for water. First of all she is impressed and even overwhelmed by the strong words of the Lord about water that quenches all thirst. First she understands it as an excellent invention, but only when she becomes aware of the meaning of the words of Jesus in her own life, she understands the real meaning of it. Those five husbands are the representatives of the same amount of idols who are keeping the women in their power. It poses the question to us: with how many idols are we actually married?

Jesus is the seventh man in the life of the women: shall this relationship turn out to be a redeeming one for the women? The women is unable to belief it, the gap is too deep, the otherness too big, the differences unbridgeable. People are competitors. The ambition of the one is the temple, the other wants to have a sacred mountain and all hold on ‘their own truth’ as a wall of defence. Are we condemned to the fight with one another in order to uphold our own fantasies of imagery truth?

Next to the well of Jacob, it is impossible to hold on to this approach. When Jacob experienced there wouldn’t be a competition even between heaven and earth, why should people continue to be in competition with one another? When God sends angels to us in order to extend us Gods’ greeting and commitment, yes, when God sends even his son Jesus to us in order to offer us the experience of Gods’ love and grace…how would it be possible to lock ourselves in an ivory tower if we are God himself? Yes, precisely then we have become an idol!

Jesus calls ourselves out of our ivory tower and connects us to one another, because neither the temple nor some sacred mountain, neither Mecca nor Jerusalem, neither Rom nor Kathmandu, neither Canterbury nor Utrecht…have the last answer to our last question. The Truth is that we are all humans, no matter how different in heart and mind, but all belonging to Gods’ humankind. Truth is that God entrusted us to one another. That’s the wisdom of the Torah and that’s the refreshing water that quests the most severe thirst. As God is no threat to any human being, but one great gift enriching our lives and our world, all of us are meant as a gift to the others in order to enrich their lives.

Worshipping in spirit and truth is offering hospitality to God, who is the ‘wholly Other’, and at the same time – it can’t be otherwise – for every other you come across in your life. Worshipping in spirit and truth we can experience how all of us are at home in the divine communion that offers the answer to our deepest desires and our most severe thirst.

The other as a gift: I know, it is extremely more difficult than it sounds, but it is the key of the door to the fulfilment of our lives as Jesus has shown us.

It is the calling of the church to hand over that key to us. The church is the body of Christ, what means that it is the concrete love and grace of God for the actual moment and the actual world, here and now. It is within the church that we can find that ladder that bridges the gap between heaven and earth on which Gods’ love comes down among humankind. In every Eucharistic celebration we are accepted in that divine communion where we are entrusted to one another. Because we are called to be as good as God, for one another and for the world.