Transformed

Picture a landscape over-swept with spiritual refugees (not hard to do these days). Where once coherent culture had stood is now fatally fractured, crazed with cracks running in every direction. The heart of their lifeworld, which is relationship with God, has been ripped out of its breast. "Where now is your God?" is a phrase that echoes, in one way or another, throughout the verses of their holy Psalter. Is this not the temper and mood we encounter in our Gospel lesson this morning?

Where is God? Where and what is right worship? Ascending to these heights, let us consider the whole subject (such that we can). What is God's first Creation? As we reflected yesterday on the Feast of St. John, God's first Creation was Himself, the Creative Word of God. God is the prime element of all periodic tables. He is the cornerstone and the foundation. He is all that we see and feel and know. For without Him was not anything made that was made (Jn 1:3). Through His mysterious, primordial creation of Light which is Life (Jn 1:4), all things live and move and have their being.

As we consider God's Divine Logos being sent into the world, let us also ask, "What is the God-man's first teaching?" It is this:

.... a Divine command. An edict his heard which cannot be appealed, directed to each and every one of us:

How personal!

St. Paul, whose own transformation of soul and mind stands out as the great exemplum in the New Testament, said this:

He elaborates, emphasizing that this transformation is not into something new but rather a return to a previous state. The Greek word he selects is ανακαινώσις / anakainosis means renewal (literally, "back to a previous spiritual insight or knowledge").

You see, transformation into something new is called innovation. But the verb St. Paul uses means renovation (and much more than that) — restoring all things to an earlier, uncorrupted state of being, with the suggestion that the restored version is more profound than its original.

This ana-kai-gnosis is a deep word. In it we see ana meaning "going back" and gnosis meaning "knowledge" (especially hidden of spiritual knowledge) linked together with kai, whose plain meaning is and. But kai here is a copulative declaring a deep relationship between the "going back" and the "spiritual insight." It forms a cycle — the going back leads to deeper insight; the deeper insight leads us to reflect on our lives in new ways. It is a very rich word.

Speaking of Jesus command, authors of the first century (e.g., Plutarch and Josephus) use the root word, μετάνοια / metánoia specifically to signify a change in heart prompted by regret. The idea is that one had been going in the wrong direction, living the wrong kind of life. But now something has happened to reveal this hard fact, causing bitter regret to sweep over us. We say, "Smell the coffee!" "Wake up!" We look in the mirror and say, "My life is a catastrophe! I have become a stranger to myself to my God!" A deep emotion sounds within the heart and soul:

And then we hear the command: Metanoeȋte. .... Turn back!

How appropriate that the Forerunner, St. John the Baptist, declares it first (Mt 9:9-10), for he is the man of Eden. He calls us back to own pristine state which he himself signifies.

.... a yearning that has haunted the human soul in every generation.

God's primal act in the world is to create the pure and the good. Who has not risen early on a spring morning to breathe in and behold the freshness of the morning of the earth? This is God's always-pure, never-blemished, always-coming-into-being creative act which we call life. When the Sisters here at the Hermitage wake up, they immediately go outside to be in the midst of God in this freshness at about dawn.

Always, He calls us back to this perfection, and to this pristine goodness, which is balm to the soul. We read the Scriptures and see that He does this over and over again: by way of the Flood; by way of the Incarnation; by way of founding His Church, breathing on His Disciples as He had breathed life into Adam.

In astonishing simplicity, God's creative act is always one: goodness, innocence, purity, peace, and happiness. He creates it, and then, when we have lost it, He enjoins us to return.

Is not this His command to Abram and Sarai? To leave Babylon .... to take no part in its pollutions:

Have no part in this culture, no part in the cultus of your father's house! Get out! ..... Like the people Israel of the Exodus, like John the Baptist, like the God-man following His baptism, Abram and Sarai are led into the purifying atmosphere of the wilderness. They travel south and west, being led by the Lord, and they come to "the place of Shechem."

This is no altar to which one drags bulls and goats, but rather an altar of the heart, marking the place where God met with man, an Edenic moment to be sure.

Why is Abram called away from Babylon? And why is God beginning His creation yet again this time with a new people whom He will call His own?

From the perspective of religious cult, the answer is obvious: Abram and Sarai are being called away from abomination seen in the the daily offering of blood sacrifice to idols. The very word Babylon rings out in the Hebrew, and later Jewish, imagination with precisely these associations. Abram and Sarai are called away from all this, into a new kind of life .... or rather back the original kind of life, which is unity with God pictured by Eden.

How do we do this? By offering goats and bulls? No. But by going back being transformed into something new .... or rather back to our selves, to our original selves. God calls us back.

Recently we read the martyrdom narrative of St. Stephen, which forms one of the earliest statements of our faith. Significantly, Stephen is condemned for speaking against the customs given by Moses, whose central cultic act is blood sacrifice. Above all, the Jewish council declared,

Which customs do they mean? As Jesus had already demonstrated riotously, the great issue here is animal sacrifice in the Temple of God, which, of course, is the essence of Zion worship. As Stephen rehearses in His long exposition to the council, speaking prophetically in God's voice,

Without the Zion Temple, the Mesopotamian cultus of blood sacrifice ends .... as the destruction of this temple a few years later will demonstrate decisively. Do people sacrifice in synagogues? Of course not.

For Stephen the great exemplar of right religion is Abraham:

And the central teaching of right religion, Stephen says, is not blood sacrifice, but personal transformation, even transformation unto the Divine:

Stephen is One with God. The Heavens have opened. Quite literally, He has emptied himself and is full of the Holy Spirit. He shines with God. And those who saw him attested the light that shone from his face:

Talk about personal transformation!

Let us pause here to ask a most important question: what was the central cultus of the First Temple — Solomon's Temple, which was desecrated by King Josiah, allying himself with Neo-Babylonian overlords and then razed to the ground by Neo-Babylonian troops? The answer to this question would have been lost to history forever if not for the twentieth-century discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The scholarship of Margaret Barker, in particular, reveals that the ancient Hebrew religion was one of personal transformation in which each person is to attain a fullness of the light that is expressed and manifested by angelic energies. Recently, we reflected on angels expressing a fluid situation between Heaven and earth. Ultimately, the aim was the erasure of all boundaries between Heaven and earth. As we considered, the Hebrew word for YHWH's name and angel is one and the same: malakh. And let us emphasize, as we take leave of our first martyr, Stephen saw the Heavens opened.

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As we enter the world of this morning's Gospel lesson, the first thing we learn is that Jesus has arrived to Sychar, which is to say, Shechem — the site of the altar with which Abram marked the place where Heaven met with earth, another fluid situation. This place is thick with Patriarchs. The Samaritan woman stands by the well, which "our father Jacob .... gave us .... and drank from it himself, as well as his sons." As Jesus has been sent to gather the lost tribes, we might ask, where in all Scriptures is the presence of all twelve tribes in a single unity more poignantly felt with their Shepherd standing in the midst of them. Truly, we have come to a significant place.

When we consider that here also is the most extensive interchange with Jesus recorded in any Gospel, we begin to gauge the central place of this narrative in our own faith story. The Orthodox Church calls this the "mid-feast," the place of central importance. In no other place are we afforded such proximity to His Sacred Person, His temperament, His mind and spirit.

And all is devoted to one subject: the personal transformation of a woman of Samaria, the first conversion to Christ. Underlining this, the woman is to become the first evangelist announcing the Christ to the world (Jn 4:29).

As we meet her, we picture a woman who is old and world-weary, trudging the same path over and over, always fetching water, yet always in thirst. As we learn more about her, we picture her earthen jar to be cracked, leaking water, like the arid and broken clay of her life and person. She says she can never be filled.

Hers has not been a life of wholeness. She has gone through five husbands in her quest to be filled and satisfied. That she lives in fornication so late in life is the detail that explains the rest. She seeks but never finds. As the popular song would say, she has been looking for love in all the wrong places. And now, understanding the disappointment of "body life," her mind is on spiritual things. She seeks meaning from the felt presence of the Patriarchs. She seeks meaning from the Temple on Mt. Gerazim, pointing back to ancient Hebrew religion. She seeks the Christ, "Who will tell us all things."

She seeks and she seeks and she seeks .... and today salvation has come. In a remarkable and unprecedented moment of self-revelation, Jesus reveals His Divine Identity:

The effect is electric. She is transformed. Significantly, she leaves her old, cracked jar (Jn 4:28). She sets it down never to pick it up again, we surmise. For everything is new .... or better said, restored to its former state, to her "little girl" state. Her regrettable path of life is all behind her now. She is made whole. The trudging old woman is now seen to be a young girl running into the city, excitedly telling the men and women of the city that she has found the Christ! Remarkably, she makes a clean (and very public) breast of everything .... what we today would call "life confession":

All things which I did over the entire span of my life. She empties herself. Nothing remains. She has not held anything back. Her interior is swept clean. She is ready now to be filled with "Christ water" and "Christ life" that she may never thirst again, she says. In a word, she is illumined, which will be her baptismal name Photine.

She does not hide this light under a bushel but places it on a lampstand that light might seen throughout her household (Mt 5:15), overseeing the baptism of her sisters, Ss. Anatole, Photo, Photis, Paraskeve, and Kyriake, and her two sons St. Photinos and St. Joses. She and they will all become tireless evangelists for Christ, not awaiting His death on a Cross, you see. Not awaiting His resurrection. He redeems the world with His life! With the cosmic force of His life touching the Creation all is redeemed (see St. Athanasius, De Incarnatione). For the religion which God has revealed today is not one of blood sacrifice, but rather, personal transformation.

So much of Christian life is seen here that we could do worse than to commend this longest narrative in St. John's Gospel as a manual for Christian life:

Like St. Photine, we are the generation to have met with God and to have heard His marvelous plan for humanity. For we are the ones to learn of the astonishing truths revealed through the Dead Sea Scrolls. Do you understand what has happened? We are generation to have received the faith!

It turns out that all along, and from the earliest encounters with God, which are seen in Abraham and Sarah, God's desire is that we empty ourselves, that we turn away from our former lives, that we be filled with Heavenly light. Animal sacrifice (inserted into the Hebrew Scriptures during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.) will not save us. Do you understand the cross does not signify the cultic offering of an animal? The Life-giving Cross is victorious symbol and sign of the Lord's power and life. He is the Victor over the world and death .... which has been true all along. The Cross is a most holy marker and symbol signifying to unbelievers what Photine understood almost immmediately. She did not need the show of His power in the resurrection!

The Passion of the Christ begins as He empties Himself of His incommensurable glory in order to enter the horrible straits of our narrow humanity. So we, too, must empty ourselves of all that is unworthy in our humanity that we might be filled with His Heavenly glory. The Early Fathers taught this as the Communicatio Idiomata — as His Divine glory is expressed in terms of our humanity, so our humanity can be expressed in terms of His Heavenly glory. Is not this His message declared throughout the Gospel of St. John over and over again?

In St. John's longest narrative, he sets before us an elder sister in the Family of God. "She is not what we expected," a Disciple might have murmured: she is a woman, a Samaritan, a shameful figure of promiscuity late in life. How courageous her spirit as she confesses all in the public square! How resolute and trusting she is in God as she sets down her earthen jar and walks away! How brilliant the light which she radiates! For there is nothing left inside her that would diminish or taint that light. And how gracious her charity and generosity to share that precious light all over the world .... such that she can.

Pray for us, O saint of Christian life, for you are the fulfillment of the promises of Christ!

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.