Sunday of the Samaritan Woman
Repentance and remission of sins should be proclaimed in His name among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. (Luk 24:47)
Beloved brothers,
In order to understand the meaning of today's Gospel, we have to go back in the history of the Old Testament, when Israel, the North Kingdom, falls under the assirians. The North Kingdom was comprised of few provinces and among them was one called Samaria. Tee people of Israel were taken away in slavery from their land and, in their place, in Samaria were brought people from other nations, as we read in the book of Second book of Kings "And the king of Assyria brought men from Babylon, and from Cuthah, and from Ava, and from Hamath, and from Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of the sons of Israel. And they possessed Samaria and lived in its cities."(2Ki 17:24)
This people obviously brought with them their religious beliefs, their temples and their idols. Since they were not of the same religion as the Israelites, even after the Kingdom was recovered, Samaria was considered as a land of mix-breeds, of impure people, outcasts. This is why the women presented us today exclaims when Jesus asks her for water: "How do you, being a Jew, ask a drink of me, who am a woman of Samaria? For the Jews do not associate with Samaritans. "(Joh 4:9) In their vain pride, the Jews would not associate with impure people, considered somewhat an inferior race.
Well, in a way Samaria of the North Kingdom reminds me of North America, a country of people from all over the world. People often call it the new Babilon. We have Englishmen, Irishmen, Scotts, Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Indians, Chinese, Greeks, Russians, Romanians and many others. In this gigantic cultural soup we mix a little bit of everything and we distill a new race the Americans. The Americans as a race of its own does not exist anymore. But the world has a name for us, they call us Americans, as the Jew were calling the people from Samaria, Samaritans.
Because of such diversity is also very difficult to name the religion of the Americans. Christians were the first to settle, and they replaced step by step the Indians, then the Chinese came to build the railroads and brought with them the Buddhism, then the Arabs came and brought in Mohamed, the Jews were always here and so on. There are more than 1500 religious faith groups in America only.
Well you will ask me how this relates to our Gospel? Well, as Orthodox Christians coming from an Orthodox cradle country, we have the tendency to behave like the Jews from our Gospel. We treat all others as unbelievers. For the Greek the rest of the world is xeno. For the Russians only the Russians are pravoslavnic and so on. We even have suspicions among each other about the purity of faith.
So we all come from our countries here in America and fight for the Greek Church, The Russian Church, the Romanian Church, the Antiochian Church forgetting that we actually are one people, the people of God. We fight over the language of our Liturgy, but we forget that there is a language above the language, the language of God, a language that you don't hear with your ears but you feel with your heart, a language that speaks the words of truth, beyond any normal comprehension.
We forget that we are blessed with a faith purer than the water of a mountain spring, and instead of enjoying it and drink from it like from a fountain of eternal life, we start spilling pollutants in the water of our neighbor.
But I will ask you, how do you see if somebody's faith is good? The Scripture says: "every good tree brings forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit." (Mat 7:17) We are so proud we are Orthodox that we forget that as Orthodox we have not only rights, but duties also, and I don't mean organizing a coffee hour after Liturgy on Sunday. I mean duties to our Lord, duty to bring him the right worship, Orthodoxia! This is the meaning of Orthodox, right worship. But most of the times the "true" orthodox comes to Church only on Sundays, and most of the time late. Nobody comes to Paraklesis on Wednesday, Vespers on Saturday, this is not for the "true" Orthodox.
We only come when dinner is cooked. Organize a party and people will come. However we forget that Jesus said to His disciples: "My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work."(Joh 4:34)
What happens most of the time is that sometimes an American, a xeno, a non-pravoslavnic, discovers the Orthodox faith, and he or she comes to Church, attend the services and does everything from the heart, because he/she feel like coming back home. He has discovered the fountain of the living water that springs from the wound of the side of the Crucified One.
And we look at these people with perplexity, we see their zeal, we see them coming to the Morning services on Sunday, and the Paraklisis on Wednesday and we think: this is guy crazy, he needs to slow down, he'll burn out. We don't see anymore that what they do is actually what we should all do, because as a Father was saying: in the crooked mind even the right things are seen as crooked. We don't see anymore what we re missing, because we are used without them, but God, in His benevolence and love of mankind is bringing in front of us these examples from the Samaritans, from the xeno to show us that we are not as Orthodox as we might think, and make us humbly look inside and say, maybe I should start doing some of these things.
However some of the times we see the reverse, under the peer-pressure of the "true" orthodox, even the new ones lose their enthusiasm and join in the others.
As Orthodox we should never do this, we should keep our enthusiasm and our energy as in the first day we were baptized. If we loose the drive to conquer the Kingdom of heaven we are lost. There is no stagnation in the way to heaven "No one, having put his hand to the plow and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."(Luk 9:62).
Let us therefore not look back to our bad habits, but look straight ahead to God. Our souls thirst for Him, and they cannot be fulfilled with anything else but with Him. We need to have Him always with us and within us, so we can never thirst again. Amin.