Third Sunday in Lent: Repent for the Kingdom III: Accepting Grace

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42

Traditional Christian interpretation of how the “Old Testament” replaces the “New” is clear in the readings for this Sunday. The first reading is the familiar story from Exodus, where the Hebrew people complain that Moses has led them out of slavery in Egypt into the desert only to die of thirst. In order to satisfy their demand that Moses prove God’s promise is reliable, Moses uses his staff to strike a rock and produce a rush of water. The Psalm confirms the moral: “Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, when your ancestors tested me . . . For 40 years, I loathed that generation . . . Therefore in my anger I swore, they shall not enter my rest.” The portion selected from Paul’s letter to the Romans confirms the tradition: “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Like a good story teller, the Elves return us to the opening metaphor, as John’s Jesus trumps Moses by supplying the enemy Samaritan woman not with physical water, but spiritual water – recalling last week's conversation with Nicodemus about the necessity of baptism for salvation.

Most traditional Christians don’t even need to read the text. We already know these stories and their traditional meaning. But the “tradition” has been in danger of diverting into false paths from the beginning. One of those false paths, which is all too easily found in John’s Gospel, opposes Christian “enlightenment” to the “darkness” of Jewish tradition. Another is the path that leads to collaboration with political empire. Both result from answers to what I pose as the “four questions of the apocalypse,” which have informed these commentaries since they began. The four horsemen of the apocalypse – War, Famine, Disease, and Death – galloping down the ages out of the Revelation of John of Patmos (not the author of the Gospel) – have brought humanity to the brink of extinction in the 21st Century. We continue to terrorize ourselves with their seeming inevitability. Whether or not that metaphor is the one that prevails depends upon how humanity (not just Christians) decides to answer:

1) What is the nature of God (or the Universe)? Violent or non-violent?
2) What is the nature of Jesus’ message (or any spiritual message)? Inclusive or exclusive?
3) What is faith? Literal belief, or commitment to the great work of justice-compassion?
4) What is deliverance? Salvation from hell, or liberation from injustice?

These are eschatological questions because the choices we make about each of these dichotomies determine not only the quality of our individual and corporate lives, but the sustainability of human life on the Planet. Indeed, to chose non-violence, inclusiveness, justice-compassion, and liberation directly challenges violence, exclusiveness, literal belief, and salvation, which define the seemingly inevitable development of John Dominic Crossan’s theology of empire (John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (Harper SanFrancisco, 2004) pp. 72-73; 288 ff).

The traditional interpretation of the stories chosen for consideration on the Third Sunday in Lent in Year A assumes that the answers to these four questions must be 1) Violent; 2) Exclusive; 3) Literal Belief; and 4) Salvation from Hell. Therefore, these readings need to be carefully unpacked and reclaimed, if possible, in the light of post-modern scientific and political knowledge, and post-Christian scholarship.

Probably the most important question to start with in considering these particular readings is whether “faith” means “literal belief.” Very few (if any) of the stories in the Bible are literally “history remembered.” Certainly the magical qualities of these particular stories should be suspect: Moses uses his magic wand to hit the rock and produce water. Jesus supernaturally reads the Samaritan woman’s entire sexual history when she lies, “I have no husband.” Taking these stories as literal, physical truth robs them of their meaning and power. Moses is reduced to a Wizard controlled by a vengeful, violent God, who holds a grudge for 40 years. Jesus is reduced to a New Age self-help guru, mobbed by clamoring fans.

The second most important dilemma to consider with these particular readings is whether God is violent or non-violent. Taken literally – as it has been for most of Christian theology – Paul’s language implies violence. “. . . while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely [therefore], now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.” What most Christians listening on Sunday morning have no access to is the footnote in the Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV), which explains that “The wrath of God” is not God’s anger – a human emotion – but “the rightful response to what humans have done” – i.e., rejecting God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion and embracing retributive justice – getting even – which is not justice at all. See Harper Collins Study Bible (NRSV) p. 2117, note 1.18. The Old Testament is chock full of cautionary tales about what happens when the people turn away from trust in God’s realm of distributive justice (where the rain falls equally on the good and the bad) and begin to rely on human systems.

Third, is the message inclusive or exclusive? At first blush, John’s story would seem to be inclusive. After all, Jesus – against all social taboo – speaks alone to a woman outside the town. Not only that, this woman is a Samaritan – the sworn enemy of the Jews. John’s Jesus also says to her, “. . . salvation is from the Jews.” But he goes on to make it very clear that “true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth,” presumably as opposed to Jewish tradition and religious law. “[F]or the Father seeks such as these to worship him.” John’s Jesus seems to be saying that while “salvation” may have come from the Jews, it has not stayed with them, and furthermore, God himself no longer seeks them out as true worshipers. This language is extremely dicey in today’s world. By contrast, the portion of Paul’s letter to the Romans says that “Christ died for the ungodly,” which means everyone. If the writer of John’s Gospel had access to Paul’s arguments, he did not agree.

The last choice – salvation from hell or liberation from injustice – only becomes clear when the words – especially Paul’s words – are translated correctly into contemporary language, and when the customary understandings of such First Century concepts as “sacrifice” and “reconciliation” are explained in 21st Century terms.

In the first century, “sacrifice” was a ritual act that served two functions, both having to do with the restoration of right relationship (reconciliation). One function was to restore the balance between human patrons and clients in the Roman world. Put in simple 21st Century social terms, if somebody invites me to dinner, I am then obligated to pay them back by inviting them to dinner. If hosting dinners (or picking up the tab) begins to fall on me too often, then I begin to resent it, and if the “friend” or colleague doesn’t get the hint that it’s his turn, I’ll stop inviting him. Newspaper advice columns are full of these kinds of conundrums. In the First Century Roman world (which included the entire Mediterranean area), the social system of patronage prevailed on a vertical, class, basis. Dinners were given by patrons for clients below them, and were accepted by clients of patrons above them. The banquet restored the balance between patrons and clients. This spilled over into the spiritual realm when the meat for the banquet was first ritually prepared as a sacrifice in the local temple. The animal was sacrificed (made sacred) by being first ritually slaughtered, then burnt on the altar to restore the balance of relationship with God (or gods – or in some cases with Cesar himself, as the ultimate patron); then a portion of the sacred meal was brought back to be shared among the people, or political, social, and business clients. As John Dominic Crossan points out, no one ever imagined that the animal that was slaughtered for the sacrificial – reconciling – meal, deserved to die, or was killed as a substitute for the person holding the banquet.

Paul’s language about “justified by the blood of Christ” does not mean that believers’ lives are paid for with the murdered blood of Jesus. It means that everyone has been included in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion, and are made just – become just – are restored or reconciled in their relationship with God because of Jesus’s death. In Paul’s culture, Jesus was the metaphor for the sacrifice that restores right relationship. If Jesus’s death is the metaphoric sacrifice, how is that sacrifice distributed to the people? Symbolically, through the ritual of the common meal; practically, through the acceptance by each person of the challenge and opportunity to participate in the ongoing, here-and-now, realm of distributive justice-compassion. That participation is the radical abandonment of self-interest, and Jesus’s life is the model. The result is salvation as liberation from injustice.

Given all this, does the story of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well have anything to say to post-modern Christian exiles from the traditional belief? Only in the sense that what Jesus offers is Grace – free gift – automatic relationship with God in God’s realm of distributive justice-compassion. Grace is not “pardon” for sinning with six husbands; Grace is not letting anybody off the hook for petty trespass. Grace is the free gift of citizenship in God’s Realm extended to all, not just those who worship on the mountain or in Jerusalem. Grace is the free gift of eternal life, realized through trust in the nature of God’s realm – where there is no death, only transformation. “I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor,” John’s Jesus says. “Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

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