Sunday Homily, March 23, 2014, 3rd Lent, Cycle A
Readings:
Exodus 17, 3-7, Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?
Psalm 95, If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Romans 5, 1-8, We have peace with God.
John 4, 5-42, A woman of Samaria came to draw water.
Exodus observations :
What: After two weeks in the first book of the Bible, today we move to the second. The book basically tells the heroic struggle of Moses to get the Hebrew people out of Egypt, where they had gone because of the drought in their land some decades or centuries before.
Author: The book is about Moses, but he is not the author, as was thought for centuries. Instead, it is a compilation.
When: Take a guess. Yes, during and after the Babylonian Captivity, 555 before Christ. Why now? To help the Jewish tribe stay together. Biblical commentators will say this is the most important book in the Bible. Why? Cultural history gives identity, especially one that goes from tragedy to triumph. Plus, the writers, the priests-Levites, emphasized that God considered this tribe to be The Tribe.
Today’ selection: an amusing story about how the Jewish people are bummed out with Moses for taking them out of the so called cushy slave life of Egypt into a desert with no water and no food.
Water
This morning I would like to mention 3 comments about John’s gospel that contemporary Bible scholars make. Then, proceeding from the general observations, I would like to look at today’s gospel and especially the play on water. Is it a symbol maybe?
Observation 1: 3 writers can be identified as contributing to the gospel of John. The 3 authors worked over a period of 25 to 30 years, up to around 90.
Secondly, the figures in the stories are literary creations, perhaps built around certain people.
Third, the words that Jesus uses are not just recordings, but words composed by the writers to convey a message or a symbol, like water.
Which leads to our selection from John this morning, the Samaritan woman at the well. She is talking about ordinary well water. Jesus is talking about symbolic water, living water that gives life to the spirit.
I would propose this living water takes all sorts of forms. For example.
Remember the first time we had our penitential rite? When Mike proposed the idea I confess I was a bit skeptical. I was thinking, ‘Nobody is going to want to do this. More focus on sin.’ This is why I don’t like Lent, the endless focus on sin. What does the ordinary Mass always begin with? Focus on me a sinner.
Was I pleasantly surprised. In fact, that penitential rite was pure water to my spirit. I was humbled and most touched.
So, events can be living water, people can be living water. Put them together and my spirit is moved.
Now we have another idea from Mike, our team idea man, and I have my usual skepticism, the rice and bean brunch after our celebration two Sundays from now. I am saying to myself, ‘We are going to lay an egg, no one will like it, it will come off silly or pointless.’ All this while trying to stay open to new ideas.
Meanwhile, I am thinking of our little friend in Cuernavaca, Karina, and her mother Maria Theresa, before she died. What do they eat every evening, rice and beans. When I stayed with them in ’86 while I was learning Spanish, what did they eat? Although to satisfy this gringo, they would pick up a roasted chicken or bread.
In fact, Rosemary & I would always buy roasted chicken for them when we visited them over the years. Karina told me it was the only time all year they ate chicken. There are millions all over the world who subsist on rice and beans, if they can at least.
So who am I to say this rice and beans brunch will not bring us all living water and our spirits will be touched?
Sign Rosemary and me up. And you?
Sources: Raymond Brown and John Shelby Spong