A pastoral resource for Christians in exile

Barry J. Robinson

The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem . . ."

  Do you remember that scene in Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov? One of the characters, Ivan, I think, tells a parable that still speaks to the plight of freedom-loving people everywhere. Christ returns to Seville during the height of the Spanish Inquisition and performs a miracle whereupon he is immediately arrested by the Cardinal Inquisitor, who later visits his prison cell in a scene reminiscent of Jesus' interrogation by Pontius Pilate, in that the Inquisitor speaks while Jesus remains silent. The Inquisitor tells Jesus that the freedom he offered his disciples was a burden that few would accept. People need certitude and rules, not freedom, and the church, recognizing this anxiety, replaced Jesus' message of freedom with a message of law and obligation. Says the Inquisitor to Jesus,

"For fifteen hundred years we have been tormenting ourselves with this freedom; now it's finished with."

  When he finishes his speech, the cardinal invites Jesus to respond, who does so simply by stepping forward and kissing the cardinal on the mouth. The cardinal is taken aback and is prompted to release Jesus from prison, but with the admonition,

"Go, and come no more . . . come not at all, never, never!"

  We who consider ourselves keepers of the Christian faith, whether we be preachers, theologians, church authorities or church members who come together to do the business of the church, cannot too often remember Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor. We cannot forget the dilemma that is bitingly written on every page of church history: that it is entirely possible that we are about the business of religion and do not know Jesus.

  It is that one theme only, which he continually varies, that the author of the fourth gospel is concerned to address: to know Jesus is life. That, then, becomes the one question that he asks his readers over and over again. Do you know Jesus? Everything else is secondary to that question and it is the question at the heart of this week's gospel passage.

  Jesus is out in Samaria, that shadowy, marginalized place of apostasy and betrayal. Unbelievers. That is what self-respecting Jews called these long-lost cousins of theirs - the Samaritans. You know what I mean. It is what some Christians today call people who do not read the Bible as they do. Surprisingly, however, Jesus seems to have more success being understood and received here among these unbelievers than he does back home among his own people. But the road to faith is, shall we say, - interesting.

  To begin with, the Samaritan woman whom he meets at the well of Sychar is an outsider. What is more, she is a woman who has the effrontery to talk to a man in public. Thirdly, she is a polygamist. Three strikes and you're out, right? She is also remarkable. In response to Jesus' simple request for a drink of water, she talks back to Jesus in an obvious attempt to get rid of him. When she sees that he won't be easily dismissed, she uses humour and sarcasm in an attempt to ridicule him. When that doesn't work and his persistence and perception begin to baffle her, she peppers him with question after question.

  In other words, she hangs in there, undeterred by the difficulty of speaking with this foreigner who speaks in a dialect that is not her own, who uses words she does not understand and tells her things about herself that he shouldn't know. She is determined to find out who this mysterious man is, and finally says to him with wry humour,

  In the community for which John was writing, to confess Jesus as a prophet was to be on the way toward true faith, but not quite there (John 6.14). Convention required a test (as it most certainly required a test in John's community). So, this woman in John's story becomes a stand-in for all those in the church who want the controversy about Jesus settled once and for all. Those who are curious, but not convinced. Of course, the woman frames the question in a way that fits the controversy in Jesus' time.

"Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem."

  It is Jesus' response to this question that is important for people like you and me to hear, because it is a response that both cuts across and cuts against all our religious rivalries, not just against that which existed between Samaritans and Jews. For Jesus says,

". . ., the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, . . ."

  It is well nigh impossible to underestimate the revolutionary impact such a statement would have had on the minds of religious-thinking people in Jesus' time. No rabbi in his right mind would have dared suggest such a thing. For Jewish believers, Jerusalem was absolutely central to faith. There was no other place anywhere where one could truly worship God. To say that Jerusalem and its temple cult did not matter anymore, that one could worship God without it would have been unthinkable.

  We need to remember this when, later on in the season of Lent, we will also hear in John that Jesus was accused of destroying the temple. Although John says that the accusation was slanderous and although it is probably true that Jesus had no intention of blowing up the temple like a terrorist, it is true to say that he took a stand against everything that the temple had come to stand for. He called it, you will remember, a den of thieves. He said that not one stone of it would be left standing upon another. He said that God had abandoned it, turned his back on the practices that were going on there. And in this story he is announcing to a representative of the competition, of all things, that the Jewish temple was already irrelevant!

  You know how this story ends. An unbeliever meets a man at a well who befriends her. He is a Jew. She is a Samaritan. They shouldn't be talking to one another but they are; and, as a result of it, this woman comes to know Jesus. She lets Jesus take her to a place far deeper than she would ever have gone had she been left to the devices of her own religion or of his.

    "He cannot be the Messiah, can he?"

  Have you ever noticed that sometimes it's the least well educated, least intellectual folk who seem to know what Jesus is all about, who get to know him? Maybe it's true, as Jesus said, that God hides from the wise and reveals to the simple. But I think there is another reason this happens. It happens because some people have not allowed themselves to be completely boxed in by what other people say God is like.

  One of the reasons Dostoevsky wrote his tale of the Grand Inquisitor was to criticize the Russian Orthodox Church of his day, a church that aligned itself so closely with the tyrannical rule of the czars that it became a virtual arm of the aristocracy in suppressing the masses. There was no freedom to think or worship God as one pleased under the czars and the inquisitions that took place were very real. The church had become a box in which there was no room to think.

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