Homily for the Third Sunday in Lent 19 March 2017
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
The Rev’d John R. Clarke, Rector
“Come and see a man who told me everything
I have ever done!” John 4:29a
It was that
commitment to truth — coupled with a healthy appetite for sleuthing — that drove
him to solve a mystery: a family secret his father, a Holocaust survivor,
seemed to want revealed, but only long after his death.
As Bruce Feiler tells
the story in Secrets of Happy Families,
Itzhak Goldberg inherited his father’s watch: an 18-karat gold Patek Philippe
in a red box.
Tucked inside the
box, in the folds of the manufacturer’s guarantee, Itzhak discovered a tiny,
yellowing photograph of two women he didn’t recognize, roughly a generation
apart.
With the door on
what looked like a skeleton in the family closet left ajar, Itzhak couldn’t rest
until he had tracked down the identities of the women in the fading photograph.
What did he learn
from the online records of Yad Vashem (the Holocaust memorial in Israel) and
follow-up research?
The older woman
in the picture: a woman named Chaya. Turns out she was married to Itzhak’s
father before the war. The other woman? Their daughter — also named Chaya. Both
gassed by the Nazis at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.
Revealed, then, a marriage. A secret family. A family secret.
Reflecting on the
Goldberg family secret, Bruce Feiler suggests that Itzhak’s father understood that
ultimately, “certain truths” — too painful to discuss — “deserve to be shared.”
“Certain truths deserve
to be shared.” That’s how Jesus sizes up a total stranger he meets — a
Samaritan woman — as he breezes into alien territory at high noon.
Picture this:
Jesus risks tripping alarms when, trying to take a short-cut from Jerusalem to
Galilee, he crosses the frontier between Judea and Samaria, two
mutually-exclusive No-Fly Zones.
What’s that all
about? A North-South feud-without-end. And in that part of the world, memory is
long. History as immediate as yesterday.
Proof? Hundreds
of years earlier, when the population of the South was carried off into exile
in Babylon, the people in the North — what would become Samaria — weren’t
uprooted. When the Jews returned from exile, the Northerners did all they could
to stifle reconstruction in the South. It was survival of the fittest. And the South was competition.
Add to that the reliably
deadly blend of theology and culture: The Jews believe God’s earthly residence
is the Temple on Mount Zion — in Jerusalem. The Samaritans say God is headquartered
in their territory — at a temple on Mount
Gerizim.
Problem is,
roughly 150 years before Jesus takes the shortcut, the Jews decide it’s payback
time. They invade Samaria, level the temple on Mount Gerizim, and torch the
Samaritan capital.
The Samaritans
take their time retaliating. But finally — roughly 25 years before Jesus
crosses paths with the woman at the well — Samaritan terrorists infiltrate
Jerusalem at Passover and trigger a bloody riot.
By the time the Samaritan
woman encounters Jesus — a Jew — at a Samaritan watering hole … asking for a
drink of Samaritan water … under the harsh Samaritan sun
… we have a scene ready-made for point/counterpoint. Because with Jesus, it’s
never just about H2O.
Complication: The rules of engagement say that neither Jesus nor the Samaritan
woman should be talking to each other, much less sharing family secrets. It's a
bit like the evils of Jim Crow segregation in the South: The Jewish rabbi and
the Samaritan woman drinking from the same water fountain? Strictly taboo.
And yet, Jesus
strikes up a conversation with the stranger/enemy. Not just a chat, but a probing
back-and-forth ─ driven by the woman ─ about what
constitutes a well-watered life ─ the good life — the life God wants for each
of us.
Now, on the surface,
it looks like Jesus wades into the morally-murky waters of the woman’s marital
history: five marriages and what might be a current live-in arrangement without
benefit of nuptials.
The neighbors have taken note as well. They shun her, leaving
her to draw water in sun-searing isolation when most people choose the cool
shade.
But the woman's dodgy history
doesn’t appear to be a problem for Jesus. He knows a lot. And he tells what he
knows. Not surprising, that gets the woman’s attention. Soon she realizes that
Jesus sees her as she really is. In
turn — through quizzing, sparring, engaging — she begins to see Jesus differently
─ as he
really is.
That pushes the
woman to steer the conversation away from what she has been hiding to
what else Jesus can reveal.
Basically, she
says, “You’ve got answers. I’ve got questions. First, where does God
prefer to be worshipped after all? Who’s right? Your people, with your Jerusalem
thing? Or my people, with our Mount Gerizim thing?”
Jesus’ answer?
“You know, ma’am, God doesn’t really care! But God does care about honesty. God cares that we approach God together ─ Jew, Samaritan,
other ─ telling the truth about ourselves … all
hearts open … all desires known … no secrets hid. That’s life. That’s living.”
And then,
emboldened by the breathtaking expanses of Jesus’ answer, the woman pops the question
that is on the minds of everyone in that part of the world ─ Jew and
Samaritan and anyone groaning under the heel of Roman oppression. “Topic: the Messiah.
According to the prophets ─ and, it looks like you’re one of them ─ the time is ripe.
Who will be the Messiah-Liberator? Will you identify the specific person God has sent
to tell us everything about what it takes to be God’s people ─ free ─ once and for all
─ for all time?”
Read: The woman drives
the conversation forward, pushing Jesus to reveal a secret about himself. “The
Messiah? I … am … he.”
Cue some very dramatic
music: dum-da-dum-dum-dah!
And then, in perhaps
the worst case of timing in a history of ill-timed maneuvers, the disciples burst
in, stepping on Jesus’ Messiah line and driving the woman off so fast she
leaves behind her water jar!
But driving her
off to buttonhole — euphorically — neighbors predisposed to shun her: “Come
and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!”
Result? The
woman, her tut-tutting neighbors grudgingly admit, is reaching out to embrace a new life of openness and integrity that can withstand even the glare of God’s scrutiny.
Proving the value
of “no secrets!” for people who strive to become the unfailingly straight-shooting,
honest-to-God people of God.
And that striving —
not coincidentally — is a particular project of Lent. We’re each engaged these
40 days in one self-examining exercise after another, confessing, for example, “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done, and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.” All tongue-twisting aside, these exercises can come across as self-flagellation. More positively, they generate truths about ourselves that “deserve to be shared” with God. Exercises we have in common with our new-life-discovering sister from Samaria.
Pushing us to
return to Itzhak Goldberg’s quest for the truth about his father and the two
women in the hidden-and-yellowing photo.
In a matter of
weeks after Itzhak solved the mystery, his daughter gave birth to a baby girl.
They named her “Chaya.” Yes, Chaya. “Life.”
The family secret
would be secret no more.
Amen.
