Beginning Again

Jesus is heading south toward Jerusalem. He has just been in Galilee, where He has revealed His identity at a marriage in Cana (His "hour," He tells His Mother). He changes water into wine and in so doing He has set an end point, looking forward to His last miracle, in which He changes wine into His blood.

We do not regard the Resurrection as a miracle, no more than water being wet is a miracle. It is the inevitable outcome of deathless God shattering the house of death.

Now, Chapter 3 of St. John's Gospel, which precedes His arrival to Jacob's well, is an aside. It is non-geographical. Its purpose is to attest Jesus' divinity. First we have Nicodemus, a member of the Sanhedrin (the Zion Temple's supreme court), who comes to Jesus under cover of night. He says,

Then we have John the Baptist, who is somewhere in the wilderness beside the Jordan, who says,

In Chapter 1 Jesus had called His Disciples — all northerners, antagonistic to Judah-ism with the exception of Judas, whose name is a variant spelling of the Judah. Jesus calls Him a devil (Jn 6:70). Jesus announces that they all shall see a return of the old religion:

These things had been forbidden by the new religion in Judah. Talk of Heaven and of angels was suppressed by the Temple authorities. Indeed, the Name of God had been proscribed, permitting it to be rendered only as elohim or adonai, in English my lord, the same term used to address Marduk, Persia's God. But Jesus now boldly proclaims that He is God, the Son of God, and that God is to be addressed as Father. Extraordinary!

In Chapter 4, Jesus arrives in Shechem, perhaps the holiest site on earth at least where relationship with God is concerned. For it was to Shechem that God first ordered Abram out of Babylon. And it was in Shechem that God first appeared to post-diluvian man.

God had revealed Himself three times — to Adam and Eve (who had betrayed His love and trust), to Noah and his family (who had polluted His pristine, new Creation with father drunkenness and mother incest), and to Abram in Shechem (on home He set His hopes):

Nowhere in the text does it say that Abram offered blood sacrifice to God, for God had called Abram away from the land of blood sacrifice par excellence: Babylon. Needless to say, the Oak of Moreh is an antetype of the Oaks of Mamre, where Abraham will sup with the Holy Trinity, with God is His Fullness, in the Fullness of intimate Relationship with God, which is the goal of human history:

You see, the Oaks of Moreh are gesturing quite conspicuously to the Oaks of Mamre, where man will commune with God, share intimacy with God, will begin again as in Eden.

The context around Shechem in the first century is a god with whom it is impossible to have relationship. He is aloof. He is dangerous. He demands blood.

It is here, to the site of this altar built of Abram, that God has returned in the Person of Jesus. He has returned to renew His call of intimacy with His people. He comes to the well that Jacob dug to reveal His living water, that those who drink of it will never thirst again. And He looks for the altar. Where is the altar that Abram has raised in a pledge of love? It has been torn down by the kings of Judah, as rivals to their new religion. All the old altars, all the high places, all the sacred groves torn down.

He offers water that will quench our thirst. And what do we thirst for, what do we long for, what is that emptiness inside us today, if it is not the intimate Company of God?

For here, during the first-century, intimacy with God has descended into the bizarre and the lurid: living animals being cut open at the altar. In response, God asks,

"I desire the fellowship of your soul," God says:

Here is that word glorify, which Jesus uses to signify a particularly deep form of interrelationship. It appears more times in the Gospel of John than in any other book in the Bible.

And again:

The Greek verb is δοξαζω / doxazo . It is a very deep expression of love in which both parties arrive to an incommensurable level of fulfillment. And it is this love which is the egregious omission in the world into which Jesus is born — the failure to honor and reverence and worship and, yes, glorify God.

Is it too much to say that this is the reason for the Incarnation? The world across which Jesus walks is a wasteland. God is absent. All the memorials to relationship with God have been torn down. They have been replaced by Laws, a civil religion regulating conduct of life and an aloof god who demands blood. Utterly absent is intimacy of God.

For what does salvation mean, we ask the Savior of the world, if not the love of God and intimacy? In practice, what does salvation mean, after all? Does it mean that pixie dust has been sprinkled on you, so you can enter some objective heaven? Does it mean a magic wand has been waved before you. "There! You are saved!" What is salvation but intimacy with God? "A new command I give you," the Savior said. "Love God and love each other. By this you will be saved."

Recall, that when Jesus enters Shechem, the place where God should have been eternally glorified, God has been entirely forgotten. Jesus says simply,

"God is spirit," He says. God, therefore, requires that we worship Him in spirit and truth, that is, with the spiritual organ that has been placed inside us, the soul. It must be a living, active, vital relationship.

Yet, God has been supplanted by a figure who looks all the world like Marduk: aloof, unapproachable, dangerous, wrathful, and requiring blood sacrifice.

Does this sound like the God Who loved His human creatures in Eden? Who with solitude walked through the groves of Eden that He might have communion with His beloved human creatures? Does this sound like the God Who sent His Son to live as one of us and to suffer death on a cross? Jesus taught us to call God "Our Father." And He depicted Him as wise, patient, understanding, self-sacrificing, and standing by a roadside, watching for our return with solicitous love. Yes, God is Our Father, from the beginning and now and unto the ages of ages.

How could an aloof idol proposed by Persians in their Zion Temple have ever taken the place of God? The answer is simple: through conquest, through compulsion. It is a police state that governs these people.

Jesus sets about His work by expressing an intimacy hitherto unknown, in Shechem: He knows our deepest secrets and shames. He looks inside us, and He sees them. And He forgives us. He bestows upon us new life.

He places His loving hand directly on the longtime sin that has enslaved Photini. She has become like her clay jar, cracked and leaking water. She fills the jar over and over again, but she cannot satisfy her longing .... because she has mistaken lust for love. And the husband she has now is not her husband, that is, she longs for love but has been denied even the outward appearance of respect. Yet she is willing to take what he offers on any terms.

But the water that Jesus gives will become a life source "a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life." Instantly and instinctively, Photini says, "Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw" (Jn 4:15). In this, she has been freed. She sets down her clay jar, which she never again has any use for.

It is on this level, the level of longing and love and secret shames, that she recognizes Jesus to be the Christ:

You see, it is relationship and profound intimacy, which reveals God. Not by compulsion, not upon pain of death, but in trust, in the deepest trust, and understanding.

As we know, she will become St. Photini, the first evangelist. Here at the site of the well dug by Jacob, at the foot of Mt. Gerizim — said to be ancient Mt. Moriah, where Jacob's grandfather and his own father Isaac did not participate in the abomination of blood sacrifice. Here, in Shechem, God is once more encountered as God and this time to be remembered for ever after.

Jesus then receives each of the people in Shechem into His love, and each realizes that he or she has never been touched like this before. He says, "Come to Me you who are heavy-burdened. Tell me about ..... At first we are shocked. Our secret is out. And then we are deeply reassured because the stone has been rolled off of our backs.

He is the Savior of the world. He saves the world one-by-one.

It is it not marvelous that God should work perhaps the greatest miracle imaginable for our sakes? We say He speaks into our lives with uncanny "coincidence" (C.S. Lewis called them "God-incidences"). But that means that He has permitted the "accidents" of the world to be synchronized to each of our personal lives. But how does He accomplish this for everyone at the same time?

I have been a party to this. More than once, I have offered a homily in a large church and then greeted people at the door. Several of them at different places in the receiving line would tell me they would talk to me later .... and each would follow up confiding how the Scripture and my homily had spoken into their lives, had touched the very thing with which they were struggling with uncanny precision and exactitude.

You see, we are "the apple of His eye" (Ps 7:2) .... and so is everybody else. How in the world does He do it?

If you never go to confession, and you have never set out your life and all of its shames before God (and His appointed priest) .... you know, a general life confession. Mine took three months to prepare. I filled up all the pages of a blank book. It required three hours to confess. If you have not done this, then you are not in it. You are not in God's plan for salvation. You have not made God your intimate. You have not "let Him in." Salvation is not pixie dust.

It is no good to be your own priest. This is one of the few Mysteries He has put entirely into the hands of his bishops and priests (Jn 20:23). You need intimacy with God. And you will not get it by making yourself your own priest. It is when you walk into the confessional, with a priest waiting for you, and with trepidation you open the book and begin. I assure you, you will be reduced to tears. You will be humiliated. You will be purged. And you will be healed. You cannot truly know the love of God until you do this: to summon the courage to admit your shames and to leave behind a life leading to eternal death. Do you think you can carry this burden into Heaven?

This is what Photini experienced .... and all of the people Jesus received in Shechem. Intimacy, a place to where you are understood, a place where you are forgiven, and a place where you are restored to fullness of life. This can only be the province of God.

This is our faith. It is none other than this. Everything else is about coming to intimacy with God. And it is on account of this love that the people of this ancient city in the Kingdom of Israel believe.

Finally Jesus moves on from here. They beg Him to stay. But He moves on from this historical place where many centuries earlier He had encountered Abraham and where Abraham built an altar for everlasting remembrance.

He moves on having relumed the fire upon the altar of Abraham. He has blessed that altar with the fire of His love. He moves on having commissioned many evangelists. Photini's five sisters and two sons are among those enlightened by His holy fire. They will travel to northern Africa proclaiming the Gospel. It is a fact that thirty-three years after the Crucifixion of Jesus (what a fearful symmetry!), they attained to the glorification of martrydom. The Kontakion said on St. Photini's feast day, (March 20) is

Almighty Savior. These are same words uttered by the people of Shechem. He is the Savior of the world. And His salvation is the knowledge of God — our knowledge of Him and His knowledge of us, the deep knowledge, the all-encompassing knowledge, involving all of your heart and all of your soul and all of your mind. He calls it love. It is the only divine property to be found on the earth — the only one that can transform a life, the only one that can ennoble us, the only one that enables us to see God, and the only thing that makes life worth living, now and unto the ages of ages. It is "a fountain springing up unto everlasting life." And He offers it all to us, one conservation at a time, one heart at a time, one intimacy at a time. This is our God. And this is how He saves the world.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.