Paying Attention To The Sky

The following is a reading selection from Fr. Robert Barron’s The Priority of Christ.

The English word sin is derived from the German term Sunde, which carries the connotation of sundering or dividing. The Greek word diabalos, from which various terms for the evil one derive — diablo, diable, devil, Teufel — means basically “scatterer.” In the book of Genesis, the original sin — incited by the serpent — amounts to a sundering of the human relationship to God (expulsion from the Garden) and a radical division and scapegoating among creatures. When Adam is challenged by God, he responds, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate,” and when the woman is confronted, she passes the buck to nature: “The serpent tricked me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:11-13). Over-and-againstness, separation, suspicion, mutual hatred, blaming — all are signs that the scattering power of sin is let loose.

In the course of the Old Testament, the twelve tribes of Israel — gathered together as one people through the power of God’s covenant — are periodically separated, divided, carried into exile because of their infidelity to that covenant. The hope for a united Israel, for a return of the exiled tribes, is expressed in the Prophets and in Psalms: “Jerusalem — built as a city that is bound firmly together. To it the tribes go up” (Psalms 122: 3-4), “the joy of all the earth, Mount Zion, in the far north, the city of the great King” (Psalms 48:2). A large part of the mystique of King David was that he had united the disparate people of Israel and had governed them from the central capital city, Jerusalem. And despite his numerous failings, David’s son Solomon enjoyed great renown, first because he had built the temple in Jerusalem, which had become a physical and spiritual focal point for the nation, and second because his reputation had drawn to the capital potentates from around the world, most famously the Queen of the South. In this he had embodied Israel’s mission to be a light to the nations, the true pole of the earth, the gathering point of the world.

When a Jewish prophet of the first century announced that the reign of God is at hand, N. T. Wright has argued, he would be taken to mean something very specific: that the scattering of the tribes of Israel (in both a literal and a spiritual sense) was over and that Yahweh was coming to reign in Jerusalem, this reconfiguration inaugurating the illumination and salvation of the entire world.

In other words, he would be interpreted as saying that the dream of Israel-realized only fitfully and inadequately throughout its history-was now coming definitively true. So when Jesus of Nazareth said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:15), he was not calling attention to general, timeless spiritual truths, nor was he urging people to make a decision for God; he was telling his hearers that Yahweh was actively gathering the people of Israel and, indirectly, all people into a new salvific order, and he was insisting that his hearers conform themselves to this new state of affairs. In this gathering, he was implying, the forgiveness of sins — the overcoming of sundering and division — would be realized.

In a word, the proclamation of the kingdom was tantamount to an announcement that the Gatherer of Israel had arrived and had commenced his work. What is most remarkable about Jesus, according to Wright, is that he not only indicated this fact but embodied it and acted it out, taking, in his words and gestures, the very role of the Gatherer. Origen said substantially the same thing when he described Jesus as autobasileia, the kingdom in person.

We continue our analysis of the Gathering by looking at one more splendid Johannine icon: the carefully crafted story of the meeting between Jesus and a Samaritan woman alongside a well. Like many of the other narratives in John’s Gospel — the woman caught in adultery; the man born blind, the raising of Lazarus-this story is both a literary and a theological masterpiece. And like the wedding feast account , it is, I will argue, a nuptial tale, a presentation of the process by which Jesus gathers to himself a bride.

As the fourth chapter of the Johannine Gospel opens, Jesus is making his way from Jerusalem (where he had cleansed the temple) back home to Galilee. Perforce, he passes through Samaria, that in-between country taking the term in both a geographical and a spiritual sense. Samaritans stood on the margins of official Judaism, partaking of its Scriptures and most of its practices but barred from full participation in temple worship and community life. Jesus’s work during his brief stay in this land will be to draw the marginal to the center.

At noon, he sits down to rest by the side of Jacob’s well, a place of powerful symbolic significance. There are numerous encounters at wells in the Old Testament that are associated with engagements and marriages. In the book of Genesis, the servant of Abraham finds a wife for Isaac at a well after uttering this prayer: “I am standing here by the spring of water; let the young woman who comes out to draw…let her be the woman whom the LORD has appointed for my master’s son” (Genesis 24 :43-44).

In the book of Exodus, we read of Moses’s sojourn by a spring of water: “But Moses fled from Pharaoh. He settled in the land of Midian and sat down by a well.” After chasing away shepherds who were interfering with the daughters of the priest of Midian, Moses was welcomed into the priest’s home and given his daughter Zipporah in marriage (Exodus 2:15-21). Most important for our purposes, there is the Genesis narrative of Jacob’s journey to the land of Laban, his mother’s brother. ‘While reclining near a well, Jacob inquires after Laban and is told that Laban’s daughter Rachel is approaching. When he meets her, Jacob kisses her and then weeps for joy; later, of course, after many adventures and misadventures, he marries this girl, whose effect on him was like that of Beatrice on Dante. So as Jesus sits down beside a well (especially because it is identified as Jacob’s), we know that an engagement and a wedding are in the offing.

John tells us that Jesus rested at the well because he was “tired out by his journey” (John 4:6). Augustine commented that the fatigue of the Lord was a function of his total identification, through the “journey” of the incarnation, with the condition of sin. Sometimes the Gospel speaks of the Logos in forma Dei (in his exalted form as Son of God), and other times it shows him informa servi (in his humble incarnate state). The “tired” Jesus is a prime example of this second form of description, and what it points to is not simply the physical weariness of Christ but his entry into the life-denying and energy-draining state of sin. “I have come that [you] might have life and have it to the full,” says Jesus (John 10:10); but he brings that life through solidarity with the lifelessness of those who have wandered from grace.

So his sitting by the well is quite similar, theologically, to his standing shoulder to shoulder in the waters of the Jordan with those seeking John’s baptism of repentance: both are saving acts of identification with the debilitating condition of the sinner. We also hear that this session took place when it “was about noon” (John 4:6). We are at the high point of the day and hence a natural time to stop to rest and eat, but at the symbolic level we are at the moment of greatest illumination, a time when the light of the world will be on particular display.

“A Samaritan woman came to draw water” (John 4:7). From the standpoint of a Jewish man, we are dealing here with a triple outsider. First, as a woman, she would be considered inferior; second, as a Samaritan, she would be looked down upon as a half-breed and a heretic; and finally, coming as she does at midday (hardly the optimal time for physical labor) and unaccompanied by other women, she would be suspect as a person of probably questionable morals. Barriers religious, ethical, racial, and cultural would naturally separate her from someone like Jesus and make of her an exile par excellence.

As is his wont, Jesus reaches out to establish contact with the outsider:

“Give me a drink” (John 4:7). Throughout the Gospels, Jesus identifies himself with food and drink-”J am the bread of life” (John 6:35); “Take, eat, this is my body…Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant” (Matthew 26:26-28)-but here he assumes the stance of one who needs sustenance. This thirst on Jesus’ part has nothing to do with divine “neediness,” as though God required something from the world that he makes in its entirety. It has everything to do with the establishment of the loop or pattern of grace that I discussed in the analysis of the prodigal son.  Jesus asks the woman to give him a gift, but this is only so that he can give her an even greater gift. The point is that he wants to draw her out of her isolation and exile, her tendency to be curvatus in se, and his strategy is to tempt her into generosity.

Conditioned by years of prejudice and the violence of marginalization, she naturally draws back: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (John 4:9). She has come to get water for herself, and a powerful enemy is asking her to give him the very thing that she seeks. This sounds, in short, like a typical game of antagonism in the realm of ousia, and so she turns in on herself in a defensive crouch. John 4:9 signals the lack of grace-the “far country” quality of the Jew-Samaritan relationship-in a wonderfully laconic aside: (“Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”) Anti-coinherence is the rule.

Under the full light of the noonday sun, Jesus then commences the disclosure of his identity: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10). What better description of the being of Jesus is there than this pithy formula “the gift of God”? Like the father of the two sons who entrusts his entire being to his children-”all that is mine is yours” — Jesus, the Icon of God, presents himself as the giver of gifts, and the purpose of his gift is the gathering of those who have themselves forgotten how to receive and give. He wants to draw the Samaritan woman into that peculiar rhythm of grace through which alone authentic being can be maintained. The loop of grace is the engagement ring that this new Jacob, this new Moses, is proffering to his bride.

In line with John’s usual way of advancing a spiritual argument, the woman takes Jesus’ words at the literal level: “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (John 4:11). Earthly realities can only hint symbolically at the spiritual truth of the law of the gift, for no matter how superabundant, any material source eventually gives out.

What Jesus is driving at is the divine life that is never exhausted even as it is given, since it is, in its essence, nothing other than giving: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (John 4:13-44). When the divine gift is received, it becomes in the recipient that which can be given away infinitely and indefinitely, and that which, even as it is given away, never gives out. This is why it “bubbles up” to inexhaustible life.

On Augustine’s reading, the well water which the woman seeks every day and which leaves her thirsting for more, represents the various objects of concupiscent desire. The deepest thirst in us is for the divine life, and when we seek to slake that thirst with something less than God — money, sex, power, the esteem of others — we necessarily become thirsty again, much as a drug user becomes increasingly addicted to the narcotics that fail to satisfy him.

Further, we turn those finite goods, which are meant to be used as instruments in the flow of grace, into “substances,” what is ours, what is coming to us. What is being revealed in the exchange between Jesus and the woman at the well is that the fiercest thirst in us is not for possession but for the capacity to give, and this to the ultimate degree; to have this (by not having it) is to experience the spring of eternal life within.

In light of this clarification, Jesus’ sitting by the well in his fatigue takes on a new resonance His tiredness is a participation in the weariness that follows from the sinner’s repeated journeys to the well, which is to say, the incessant attempt to satisfy the desire that cannot be satisfied through possession.

Finally beginning to see with spiritual eyes, the woman replies, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty again or have to keep coming here to draw water.” (John 4:15). Her words reveal that she is well acquainted with the rigors of the life of sin, with the fatigue that comes from concupiscent desire.

With that, the conversation takes a most unexpected turn: “Jesus said to her, ‘Go, call your husband, and come back” (John 4:16). Why would the woman’s husband be of such concern? As we have seen, this entire episode is a wedding story, an account of how the Samaritan woman finds her proper spouse. In the context of an admittedly sexist culture, a woman’s quest for a husband is her search for governance and direction in her life.

Hence, once Jesus sees that she has come to a sufficient spiritual insight to ask for the living water, he explicitly introduces the theme of the husband or “headship,” essentially asking this: “Show me who or what governs your life.” When she says, “I have no husband,” she is witnessing, on the one hand, to her moral drift (she is at the mercy of her conflicting desires) but also to her openness to a new orientation (as spiritually unattached, she is able eventually to take Jesus as her husband). Sometimes it is our very dysfunction that allows for the advent of grace.

Jesus then compliments her for her honesty, but like a good spiritual director, he spies the rest of the truth hidden by her cagey response: “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband” (John 4 7-18). In accord with the hermeneutic that I have been developing, Jesus discerns that the Samaritan woman’s life is currently unfocused (no husband) but that she was formerly under the thrall of five powers from which she has managed to free herself.

Who or what are these five? Augustine suggests that they represent the five senses or the five books of the Torah. In her quest for meaning, she had submitted herself, first, to the tyranny of the senses, orienting her life to the empirically verifiable world of color, sound, taste, and pleasure, embracing the hedonist option. When this failed, as it necessarily would, she turned to a somewhat more refined form of idolatry, seeking satisfaction in the rigors of a moralizing religion.

This progression is, of course, a familiar one: the hedonist becoming the puritan, while retaining the same basic spiritual maladjustment of seeking joy in some worldly object or set of values. The fussy moralist is often just the sensualist in a flimsy religious disguise. By reminding her that she comes each day to the well and never finds satisfaction and that she has, in frustration, discarded five husbands in turn, Jesus tells the Samaritan woman’s hard truth, compelling her to see her spiritual condition: anyone but the Word made flesh is inadequate food for the soul.

Impressed by his clairvoyance, the woman tells Jesus, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet,” but then, with almost comic alacrity, she changes the subject: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem” (John 4:20). The prophet has revealed her truth, but she is not yet ready to deal with the implications of that revelation, so she redirects the conversation onto the far less threatening plane of abstract religious controversy. The Samaritans based their cult on Mount Gerizim, while the Jews centered their religious practice on the temple in Jerusalem. Perhaps if she can direct the attention of this “too perceptive young rabbi” to this speculative question, she can avoid the issue of her life’s direction.

But the prospective bridegroom is not so easily put off the trail. With breathtaking directness and clarity, Jesus dissolves the question that had helped to divide Jews from Samaritans: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem …[but] in spirit and truth” (John 4:21-24). We recall that one of the principal tasks of the Messiah was to gather the tribes of Israel and then, through them, to gather the nations of the world. What the Messiah opposes, therefore, is division (Origen knew this when he said, “Ubi divisio, ibi peccatum”), especially that division which is perversely caused by religion itself. The Samaritan-Jewish battle over the correct place of the cult is a prime example of just this sort of corruption.

What the Father of Jesus desires is not geographically correct worship, but worship in “spirit and truth” (en pneumati kai aletheia). Both of these central Johannine symbols speak of the force of unity. The pneuma of God is the breath that God breathes into living things, awakening in them the corresponding breathing in of the psyche (from which our word suck is derived). Thus worship en pneumati is praise born of a living relationship with the Spirit of God, a breathing out in prayer of what was breathed in from the divine source. It is to be in the loop of grace, giving what had been received.

And the truth, which God is, is a universal power, transcending time, space, and artificial cultural boundaries. To worship in truth, therefore, is not to be sectarian or cultish but to pray in the power that unites the tribes of the world. We might draw a contrast between the twin mountains of Gerizim and Zion, standing over and against one another in opposition, and the well of Jacob that serves as a point of contact between Jesus and the woman. The mountains embody the great divorce, while the circular well bespeaks the wedding ring.

Beginning to sense that she is speaking to one who is even more than a prophet, the Samaritan woman says, “When he [the Messiah] comes, he will proclaim all things to us” (anaggelei hemin hapanta, John 4:25). This is one of the most extraordinary descriptions of the Messiah in the Bible. She is implying that in the Christ, the Icon of the living God, the fullness of truth, will be announced and made clear, not so much in the sense that he will give us every piece of data as that he will be the lens through which the whole of reality is properly viewed. The highest truth about God and ourselves will be made plain iconically in his way of being.

Genesis tells us that Yahweh walked with Adam in the cool of the evening as a friend. This easy relationship was interrupted when Adam sought on his own terms and through his own power to seize the knowledge that belongs naturally to God and that can be received by another only as a gift. In attempting to cling to this knowledge of good and evil (this lens through which the whole of reality can be properly viewed), he put an end to the friendship he had enjoyed with God. The Messiah, the person through whom God wishes to reestablish intimacy with the human race, is thus correctly described as the one “who will tell us everything.” But the key is that this divine interpretation must be given and received as grace.

Realizing that his interlocutor is ready for marriage, Jesus discloses his true identity: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you” (John 4:26). The Greek formula behind the first phrase is ego eimi (I am), evoking, obviously, the “I AM WHO I AM” of Exodus 3:14, the title by which Yahweh announced himself as the deliverer of his people. So the Samaritan woman, an archetype of the sinful and searching human race, is being rescued from the slavery of concupiscent desire through the taking of the Messiah as her bridegroom. And this Messiah is the one who is speaking personally to the woman (ho lalon soi).

Sin, the rupture inaugurated in the Garden of Eden, is a breakdown in the easy conversation between divinity and humanity. In the playful, almost teasing repartee between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, we witness the act by which God, through grace, puts himself and humanity back on speaking terms.

After the full manifestation of Jesus’ messianic identity, we see the dramatic effects of grace in the sinner: “then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city” (John 4:28). The jug that she had carried on her head day after day, seeking after the water that would never finally quench her thirst, is symbolic of the weight of concupiscence. Fixed to worldly objects, human desire can never adequately enter into the ecstasy associated with the loop of grace and hence remains tied down, burdened.

In Dante’s the Purgatorio, the prideful are compelled to carry around huge boulders in order to feel the weight of the ego pressing them down; when Dante is freed from sin, at the end of his purgatorial journey, he is weightless and can therefore fly through the spheres of paradise. The putting aside of the water jar is evocative of this lightness of being which comes from the correct orientation of desire. Gifts are not heavy; for once they are received, they are given away, only to be received and given again.

I suggested at the outset of this analysis that the isolation of the woman probably indicated her social ostracization. How fitting therefore that, having set down her burden, she immediately runs into the town. Whatever had shamed her is now eclipsed, and she is filled with enthusiasm to speak: “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” (John 4:29).

Hans Urs von Balthasar has argued that the beautiful calls to the one who perceives it and then sends him on a mission to spread the word. Having seen the young Beatrice, Dante is seized by the compulsion to write a poem more beautiful than any other; having spied his future wife in the surf off the Dublin strand.  James Joyce is compelled to become an artist, the reporter of epiphanies. So the woman at the well, having been drawn into a saving conversation with the Son of God, having been freed from concupiscent desire, and having realized that water is bubbling up in her to eternal life, becomes a missionary, indeed the first evangelist in the Gospel of John. The beauty of the coinherence has seized her, and now she must tell of it. We notice that the heart of her message is that the divine hermeneutics has appeared: “[He] told me everything I have ever done.” The implication is that this saving insight — this knowledge of good and evil, which was lost through grasping — is now available to everyone through grace.

The effectiveness of her evangelization becomes clear when we hear, a few verses later, that “many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony” (John 4:39). The prime consequence of the divine gathering is a desire on the part of those gathered to gather others in turn. Like a storm over water, the circle of grace grows as it moves, irresistibly drawing others into its power.