Third Sunday in Lent
March 15, 2020
BENEATH OUTWARD APPEARANCE
March 15, 2020
BENEATH OUTWARD APPEARANCE
John 4: 7-30, 39-42
TEXT: “The Samaritan women said to him, ‘How it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’” “Come and see a man who, told me everything I have ever done!”
(John 4: 9, 29)
The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was becoming more popular and he was paying a price for that popularity. We are told in the verses immediately preceding the text we read from John’s gospel, that the Pharisees were becoming aware that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist in the province of Judea. Knowing that the religious authorities would take an unkind view of these actions and that they saw Jesus as a threat to their authority over the people, Jesus and his disciples departed once again for his home province of Galilee. They had to pass through Samaria. Jesus was tired from his journey, and in the heat of the noon-day sun he sits down by the well at the edge of the town of Sychar. He was alone, for the disciples had gone into the town to buy food. Because of the heat and his fatigue, he was obviously thirsty. When a Samaritan woman came to the well with her water jar, Jesus asked her for a drink.
It is in her reply that we learn that wat is going on is much more than just a simple request: “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” In this she showed astonishment at Jesus request.
Given the background of Jewish and Samaritan relations, it is not surprising that she should be astonished. The Samaritans and the orthodox Jews had had a long and well-known history of hostility and contempt toward each other. The Samaritans had their own centers of worship and did not feel the need to travel to the temple in Jerusalem. Because the Samaritan people were the result of intermarriage between Canaanites and Jews, the orthodox Jews looked upon the Samaritans as unclean. Anything they touched would be unclean and that impurity would thus be transferred to any person who made us of their eating and drinking utensils. What Jesus was doing in that simple request for a drink of water was demonstrating that he was treating her as a real person, not as an unclean object. She marveled at the kindness represented in his request. By asking the woman to give him a drink, Jesus showed himself ready to disregard that hostile presupposition regarding Samaritans for the sake of a more inclusive fellowship, in fact, a universal fellowship of God’s people. As we learn from the account, the acceptance of her personhood made it possible for her to respond to Jesus and to bring to Jesus the people of the city.
H. A. Williams has described the effect of such acceptance. “Perhaps it can be said that God accepts me just as I am because God sees that in fact, I am not just this. Perhaps God can be described as seeing below the surface of my superficial self . . . to an underneath where lie the materials from which a being in God’s image and likeness is waiting for construction. And perhaps this may illuminate St. Paul’s idea of Christ in us, or better, Christ being formed in us. In short, when God forgives me, God receives the self of which I am unaware. God’s reception of the self of which I am unaware is only a necessary stage in the therapeutic process. It opens me out to what I am and can become.”
How often we judge other people or even whole communities simply by what we have heard about them or by outward appearances. We judge other people, put them in categories, and in our minds that is where they remain. Here is a case in point.
Women screamed and fainted at the sight of him. Taunting mobs followed him through the streets of London, hurling stones and shouting expletives. Stranded in Brussels when the freak show he had appeared in closed, he was beaten and robbed of his life’s savings. Even his parents abandoned him in childhood.
These reactions are not hard to understand. Picture a disfigured creature with two great bosses on his forehead, like an elephant’s head; a mouth like a pink stump; a huge right hand like a fin or paddle; a stopped back from which hung sack-like masses of cauliflower-brown flesh – and you have Joseph Merrick, described by Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon-writer who first saw him in 1884, as “the most disgusting spectacle of humanity I have ever seen … a degraded, perverted version of a human being.”
Why then, has this hideous creature captured the imagination and admiration of two continents for more than a century? A successful play had been fashioned from Merrick’s bizarre life, as well as, a movie.
The secret of the Elephant Man’s appeal seems to be this: Merrick, as the surgeon Treves came to realize, was Beauty and Beast incarnate. Beneath a horrific exterior beat a gentle heart. Encased with the grotesque skull glowed a subtle, endlessly inquisitive mind. Like his celebrated fictional counterpart, the monstrous Caliban of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Joseph Merrick proved to be unscathed by the brutish life he was subjected to, free from any trace of cynicism or resentment, ennobled by troubles. As the surgeon writer who befriended Merrick put it: “As a specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of Merrick, if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth-browed and clean of limb, and with eyes that flashed undaunted courage.”
And what of the woman at the well? Here was a woman with a rotten self-image. She undoubtedly had a bad public image, too, what with her multiple marriages and living out of wedlock, besides her inherited liability of being a Samaritan. But in in her case, the public image issued from the private one.
It seems clear that she was a troubled person who had difficulty accepting life or knowing who she was. Jesus exposed this in her: “Come, see the man who told me everything that I have ever done,” she cried to her townspeople, after she discovered what Jesus called “the living water.” What was going on this encounter by Jacob’s well was that Jesus saw beneath the outward appearance of the woman to her inner self.
“Be yourself” is a common piece of advice. However, it is an edict that is infrequently carried out. Few people are entirely satisfied with being themselves. The urge to be somebody other than oneself seems universal and deep-seated. Many people spend the better part of their lives trying to find themselves; the inference is that the self they are making do with in the meantime is not their own but somebody’s else’s.
A commercial photographer classifies his customers as Pharisees or publicans. The publican, after the suggestion in Luke 18, accepts himself or herself for what he or she is; but the Pharisee, rejecting the first six or eight proofs, wants more sittings. “While the pictures are being taken,” the photographer says, “many customers assume the most outlandish poses and pictures. I tell them repeatedly, ‘Just be yourself.’ They scrutinize the proofs and finally select the most flattering even if it isn’t the most lifelike. Then they ask to have the hairline lowered a bit, the wrinkles removed, and youthfulness added to the cheeks.”
After years of professional activity, the photographer added: “I long ago discovered that many people will neither accept themselves for what they are nor behave in a manner that is most natural. Why is it that so many of us are always wearing masks of pretense?”
Everybody engages in minor impostures to at least to a small degree at one time or another, if not all the time. When we temporarily or permanently assume a facial expression or posture that conveys some we are not feeling inside, we are imposturing. It goes without saying the actors and actresses engage in imposture on the stage, and, not infrequently, off the stage as well. And in the world of politics, of course, a rather inferior variety of imposture is rampant. All society seems inflicted, to some degree, with this tendency to deny ourselves in favor of some other identity which we feel is more advantageous to display.
This attitude can deeply affect our relationship with our Creator as in the case of the Samaritan woman, in that we are stifling the true person God created and rejecting God’s image within us. We must stop kidding ourselves and let the soul that exists at our very center to come forth like living water and say, “Here I am, this is me.”
It is only when we can take an honest look into the depths of our own personalities that we can begin living as the beautiful sons and daughters God intends us to be. I have always felt in this account when the woman shared what happened to her that fateful day with her neighbors that she was well on the way to a life filled with hope and fulfillment. What happened to her in that encounter with Jesus is not a one-time affair, but open to each of us.
TEXT: “The Samaritan women said to him, ‘How it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’” “Come and see a man who, told me everything I have ever done!”
(John 4: 9, 29)
The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth was becoming more popular and he was paying a price for that popularity. We are told in the verses immediately preceding the text we read from John’s gospel, that the Pharisees were becoming aware that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the Baptist in the province of Judea. Knowing that the religious authorities would take an unkind view of these actions and that they saw Jesus as a threat to their authority over the people, Jesus and his disciples departed once again for his home province of Galilee. They had to pass through Samaria. Jesus was tired from his journey, and in the heat of the noon-day sun he sits down by the well at the edge of the town of Sychar. He was alone, for the disciples had gone into the town to buy food. Because of the heat and his fatigue, he was obviously thirsty. When a Samaritan woman came to the well with her water jar, Jesus asked her for a drink.
It is in her reply that we learn that wat is going on is much more than just a simple request: “How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” In this she showed astonishment at Jesus request.
Given the background of Jewish and Samaritan relations, it is not surprising that she should be astonished. The Samaritans and the orthodox Jews had had a long and well-known history of hostility and contempt toward each other. The Samaritans had their own centers of worship and did not feel the need to travel to the temple in Jerusalem. Because the Samaritan people were the result of intermarriage between Canaanites and Jews, the orthodox Jews looked upon the Samaritans as unclean. Anything they touched would be unclean and that impurity would thus be transferred to any person who made us of their eating and drinking utensils. What Jesus was doing in that simple request for a drink of water was demonstrating that he was treating her as a real person, not as an unclean object. She marveled at the kindness represented in his request. By asking the woman to give him a drink, Jesus showed himself ready to disregard that hostile presupposition regarding Samaritans for the sake of a more inclusive fellowship, in fact, a universal fellowship of God’s people. As we learn from the account, the acceptance of her personhood made it possible for her to respond to Jesus and to bring to Jesus the people of the city.
H. A. Williams has described the effect of such acceptance. “Perhaps it can be said that God accepts me just as I am because God sees that in fact, I am not just this. Perhaps God can be described as seeing below the surface of my superficial self . . . to an underneath where lie the materials from which a being in God’s image and likeness is waiting for construction. And perhaps this may illuminate St. Paul’s idea of Christ in us, or better, Christ being formed in us. In short, when God forgives me, God receives the self of which I am unaware. God’s reception of the self of which I am unaware is only a necessary stage in the therapeutic process. It opens me out to what I am and can become.”
How often we judge other people or even whole communities simply by what we have heard about them or by outward appearances. We judge other people, put them in categories, and in our minds that is where they remain. Here is a case in point.
Women screamed and fainted at the sight of him. Taunting mobs followed him through the streets of London, hurling stones and shouting expletives. Stranded in Brussels when the freak show he had appeared in closed, he was beaten and robbed of his life’s savings. Even his parents abandoned him in childhood.
These reactions are not hard to understand. Picture a disfigured creature with two great bosses on his forehead, like an elephant’s head; a mouth like a pink stump; a huge right hand like a fin or paddle; a stopped back from which hung sack-like masses of cauliflower-brown flesh – and you have Joseph Merrick, described by Sir Frederick Treves, the surgeon-writer who first saw him in 1884, as “the most disgusting spectacle of humanity I have ever seen … a degraded, perverted version of a human being.”
Why then, has this hideous creature captured the imagination and admiration of two continents for more than a century? A successful play had been fashioned from Merrick’s bizarre life, as well as, a movie.
The secret of the Elephant Man’s appeal seems to be this: Merrick, as the surgeon Treves came to realize, was Beauty and Beast incarnate. Beneath a horrific exterior beat a gentle heart. Encased with the grotesque skull glowed a subtle, endlessly inquisitive mind. Like his celebrated fictional counterpart, the monstrous Caliban of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” Joseph Merrick proved to be unscathed by the brutish life he was subjected to, free from any trace of cynicism or resentment, ennobled by troubles. As the surgeon writer who befriended Merrick put it: “As a specimen of humanity, Merrick was ignoble and repulsive; but the spirit of Merrick, if it could be seen in the form of the living, would assume the figure of an upstanding and heroic man, smooth-browed and clean of limb, and with eyes that flashed undaunted courage.”
And what of the woman at the well? Here was a woman with a rotten self-image. She undoubtedly had a bad public image, too, what with her multiple marriages and living out of wedlock, besides her inherited liability of being a Samaritan. But in in her case, the public image issued from the private one.
It seems clear that she was a troubled person who had difficulty accepting life or knowing who she was. Jesus exposed this in her: “Come, see the man who told me everything that I have ever done,” she cried to her townspeople, after she discovered what Jesus called “the living water.” What was going on this encounter by Jacob’s well was that Jesus saw beneath the outward appearance of the woman to her inner self.
“Be yourself” is a common piece of advice. However, it is an edict that is infrequently carried out. Few people are entirely satisfied with being themselves. The urge to be somebody other than oneself seems universal and deep-seated. Many people spend the better part of their lives trying to find themselves; the inference is that the self they are making do with in the meantime is not their own but somebody’s else’s.
A commercial photographer classifies his customers as Pharisees or publicans. The publican, after the suggestion in Luke 18, accepts himself or herself for what he or she is; but the Pharisee, rejecting the first six or eight proofs, wants more sittings. “While the pictures are being taken,” the photographer says, “many customers assume the most outlandish poses and pictures. I tell them repeatedly, ‘Just be yourself.’ They scrutinize the proofs and finally select the most flattering even if it isn’t the most lifelike. Then they ask to have the hairline lowered a bit, the wrinkles removed, and youthfulness added to the cheeks.”
After years of professional activity, the photographer added: “I long ago discovered that many people will neither accept themselves for what they are nor behave in a manner that is most natural. Why is it that so many of us are always wearing masks of pretense?”
Everybody engages in minor impostures to at least to a small degree at one time or another, if not all the time. When we temporarily or permanently assume a facial expression or posture that conveys some we are not feeling inside, we are imposturing. It goes without saying the actors and actresses engage in imposture on the stage, and, not infrequently, off the stage as well. And in the world of politics, of course, a rather inferior variety of imposture is rampant. All society seems inflicted, to some degree, with this tendency to deny ourselves in favor of some other identity which we feel is more advantageous to display.
This attitude can deeply affect our relationship with our Creator as in the case of the Samaritan woman, in that we are stifling the true person God created and rejecting God’s image within us. We must stop kidding ourselves and let the soul that exists at our very center to come forth like living water and say, “Here I am, this is me.”
It is only when we can take an honest look into the depths of our own personalities that we can begin living as the beautiful sons and daughters God intends us to be. I have always felt in this account when the woman shared what happened to her that fateful day with her neighbors that she was well on the way to a life filled with hope and fulfillment. What happened to her in that encounter with Jesus is not a one-time affair, but open to each of us.
