Don't you think?

March 7, 2010

The Samaritan Woman at the Well

Could this not be the Christ? A question.

I love this story, and Fulton J. Sheen's chapter on it in The Life of Christ is pretty much unbeatable, but since it is the lovely gospel story this week, here's my attempt to add something. His illustration of her progression from "jew" to "sir" to "a prophet" to the Christ is wonderful to realize and such a beautiful miniature portrait of a journey to faith.

But the next step is just as common and just as interesting. When she goes to tell the people in her town - who have every reason not to really believe her - what she says is a question. Even though she knows the answer perfectly well. It's easier. "Don't you think it's odd that we care more for a parent's convenience than the life of a child - just because we can't see the child yet?"

A leading question, but I can just see her running in: full of questions and curiosity and excitement but afraid to show certainty. Afraid to proclaim yet. Giving testimony, witnessing, but not proselytizing.

The result seems almost better. They come to her later and tell her that now they believe because they have seen for themselves rather than what she has told them. They are not dependent on her for their faith. But then, if they had believed it from her, believed it without needing to see, they would have been doubly blessed. Did she rob them of that by fearing to use her certainty? To speak of it as knowledge? Or was it better to let them come to Jesus on their own, open their mind to God in pieces?

These days such certainty is more likely to scare your hearers off - our world is so complicated and our feelings so complex that plain and simple truths are just a guise for easy lies. Everything sounds truer as a question, because a question can still be played with. It doesn't have the burden of Truth. We don't like absolutes in our world. But come to us with a question, and we're likely to take it up. And then, perhaps, as is our way with the knowledge of so many horrors that happen to take place across the globe, to put it down again when the discussion grows weary.

I don't know if it's cheating or if it's better. It feels less courageous, but perhaps it's a better way to communicate. Trust in the Holy Spirit to guide you is all that I can say. And with all the people who throw down absolutes willy-nilly in this world, be wary of simple truths. The most clear cut are the hardest won.

Perhaps that was it - she felt it, she knew it, she was touched by the hand of the Son of Man and God Almighty - but she shared that with her people. They figured it out together. They took what she felt and they made it into something that could be proclaimed from the (sacred) mountaintops as real together. We all talk so much about politics and philosophy and religion now - often screaming and biting but - this is our gift, if we take it. The chance to put together the difficult puzzles of our world in community. To rely on not only our own minds to find all the beauty in the truths of the universe and the promises of our God but to share them together.

Don't you think?