Homily: Lent III: 2014

Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well.  It was about the sixth hour.

St. Augustine in a homily on the Gospel this Sunday says this: “Jesus, being wearied with his journey sat thus by the well: and it was about the sixth hour. Already the mysteries begin.” What was he talking about? "Already the mysteries begin".

In the first place, in the 4^th and 5^th centuries this Gospel like the Gospels for the next two Sundays was associated with the final preparation of the catechumens for baptism at Easter. Last week we celebrated the memorial of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, a near contemporary of St. Augustine,  who called his instruction to  the catechumens a 'mystatogogy,' that is, an ‘entrance into the mysteries’. When Latin speaking folks encountered the Greek word mysterion they sometimes translated it as ‘sacramentum’ and sometimes just turned the Greek word into a Latin word: ‘mysterium’. So Augustine’s congregation would probably have thought at first that he was talking about the catechumens and their reception of the mysteries or the sacrament of Baptism . So he was.

Jesus’  words to the Samaritan Woman, not to mention the whole context of the well, clearly point to the Sacrament of Baptism: Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.

So the catechumens as they approached the baptismal font would sing Psalm 42: sicut cervus: LIKE as the hart desireth the water-brooks, * so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: * when shall I come to appear before the presence of God?

 

But the 'mysteries' could also be used to describe all the rites of Holy Week, which by St. Augustine's time had taken much the same shape as they have now. The mysteries in this sense being the mystagogy, 'initiation into the mysteries  of the Passion and Death of Jesus, the Mass of the Lord's Supper, the Veneration of the Cross, the Solemn Vigil of Easter.

Finally the word ‘mystery’ could also refer to the mystical interpretation of Scripture and the liturgical proclamation of the mystery of Christ. This is especially true of St. John’s Gospel, which is a ‘mystagogy’, a leading into the mystery of Christ. 

This seems to be what St. Augustine particularly had in mind: “already the mysteries  begin”. “It surely is not without meaning that he is weary who is the power of God.” A detail which probably would not capture our modern attention at all, except as the circumstance which brought him to the well in the first place.  But Augustine just cannot get past this: “he is wearied by whom the wearied are refreshed . . . He is weary by whose absence we are made weary, by whose presence we are made strong”.

There is “a strong and weak Jesus”. If you want to see the strong Jesus, read the prologue of the 4^th Gospel: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and  the Word was God. If you want to see Jesus weak then read: the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.  . . He made us by his strength and sought us by his weakness.

It is in fact the weakness of Jesus which exposes our weakness, just as his request "give me a drink" exposes the weakness of the Samaritan woman, which draws out of the woman the truth: "You are right in saying, `I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband." So it is the Cross of Jesus which exposes the reality of our weakness.

It is after all the sixth hour the same hour when he cried from the Cross: I thirst. So ‘already the mysteries begin’. Already we begin to see not just what the catechumens must see but what we all must see: we are saved by His weakness not by His power. It was such  a disappointment to his first disciples. We had hoped is the sad regret of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Our modern regret is slightly different: why did he have to die so violently, why did it have to be on the Cross?

On the first Sunday in Lent we saw the alternative to the Cross: stones to bread, invulnerability, and power and control, if you will fall down and worship me. That is the only alternative to the Cross. Which means for Jesus, who will only do His Father’s will, there is no alternative to the Cross.

Nor for us is there an alternative to the Cross. It is not that somehow Christians should pretend to be weak, when we are not really weak. There is no pretense in Jesus. His weariness, his thirst, his suffering, his death were real and to say that they were not is a big time heresy. It is that we must realize how weak we really are. That is the point of Lent: to force us to understand that we cannot turn stones to bread, that we are not invulnerable, that we are not in charge. Maybe we can fool ourselves most of the time into thinking that we have it all covered but the one thing that we cannot get out of, be in control of, micro-manage is our own death.

That’s the 'how come' of the Cross: the ultimate identification of God with the human predicament: saving the weak by His weakness. Our weariness must be healed by His weariness. We must come to the Cross singing  LIKE as the hart desireth the water-brooks, * so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God: * when shall I come to appear before the presence of God? Our thirst must meet His thirst. "Already the mysteries begin".

Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well.  It was about the sixth hour.