Love in the Time of Corona

Image copyright: Financial Times Limited 2020

Propers: The Third Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

So how’s everyone doing? It’s been quite a week, hasn’t it? Seems as though half of us are preparing for the apocalypse while the other half dismiss viral concerns as alarmist or as fake news. And at this point it’s hard to say who’s right. This may well all blow over in a month or two, or it might change the world in ways we cannot yet realize. Morality often consists of taking the middle path: neither bending to fear nor abandoning prudence, but being sensible and careful and wise.

I’ll say this much, though: pandemic panic appears to be shining a rather unflattering light on many aspects of our society. Economically, we’re learning that material prosperity depends on common everyday people, showing up and going to work, more so than on billionaire investors and hedge fund managers moving money around in the capitals of global finance.

Medically, we’re learning that a system which works wonderfully for the rich but not for the poor ends up not working so wonderfully for the rich after all. Also, viruses don’t distinguish, and they love airplanes and cruise ships. A sick person on the other side of the world really is everyone’s problem. I am my brother’s keeper after all.

Socially, we’re learning that shutting down schools cuts an obscene number of children off from the only nutrition that they can rely on in any given week; and that most people, and most businesses, simply cannot take two to four weeks off without going under. We’re all performing without a net. Psychologically, it seems that we’re so keyed up with anxiety—about politics, the environment, international conflicts—that it will bleed out however it can, in fistfights over toilet paper and hyperventilating into surgical masks.

And to top it all off, most of us apparently have not been washing our hands. It turns out there’s a lot of structural rot we can paper over, right up until one good shove brings the whole thing down. Hopefully the coronavirus is not that shove. But it has exposed the costs of selfishness, of a system designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many. And if this doesn’t teach us the necessary lesson, something else surely will. “Do not harden your hearts,” sayeth the Lord. “A people whose hearts go astray … shall not enter My rest.”

Our Gospel reading this morning is a bit scandalous, to be honest. God often makes His point by upending our expectations, and there’s plenty of that today. Here in our story Jesus has come to a Samaritan city and asked a woman at a well for a drink. And this might all seem innocuous to us—which is why it’s important for Christians to know our Old Testament.

Judeans and Samaritans used to be the same people, Israel; descended from the same forebears, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. But a family feud became a civil war. And the people of Israel were split, North and South, not unlike our own bloody past. The Northern Kingdom of Ephraim, with its capital city Samaria, was conquered by the Assyrian Empire, a particularly brutal group of killers who specialized in the annihilation of entire peoples.

The Assyrians took from the North all the movers and shakers, the priests and professionals, and scattered them throughout the other lands they had conquered. And then they imported five other peoples who had lost five other wars. These five immigrant groups each brought their own ancestral god, known thereafter as the five ba’als, or lords. And they settled and intermarried with the remaining Israelites, those poor folk left behind, to produce a hybrid Samaritan culture that still remembered Yahweh, but who also had five new gods with whom to contend.

The Judeans to the South, then, viewed their Northern cousins with disdain. They were, not to put too fine a point on it, hillbillies, half-breeds, and heretics. In the time of Jesus, Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans, and haven’t for over 700 years. So what does Jesus do when He passes through Samaria? He picks up a girl.

Throughout the Bible, men go to wells for one reason: to find wives. It worked for Isaac; it worked for Jacob; it worked for Moses. And there’s a reason for this. You see, women in the Ancient Near East were responsible for drawing water. But young girls were too small to carry much, and married women were established enough to send out servants or daughters to do the heavy lifting for them. So a water-bearer at a well is likely to be a single, available, strong young woman. In other words—prime marriage material.

Jesus is sitting at the well, in the heat of the day, when a Samaritan woman comes up, bearing her water jar, and He boldly asks her for a drink. This seems to take her off guard, for she can see that He’s Jewish, and rather forward to speak to her. They engage in a bit of clever banter. She’s a sharp one, this lady. And they speak of history and religion and the hopes and dreams of their people. And when He asks her to go to get her husband, she replies—coyly, I imagine—that she has no husband. It’s almost flirty. She thinks, I think, that He might be interested.

But then He says: “You are right to say that you have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” And this pretty much blows her away. How does this strange Man seem to know so much about her? Meanwhile, we’re all wondering, “How does a young, healthy desert woman go through five husbands so quickly?” But that’s because we’re missing something here that she does not miss. Indeed, I am not at all convinced that Jesus is being literal.

For you see, the word for husband is “lord,” or ba’al—that same word used for the Samaritans’ five foreign tribal gods. And the Prophets of the Old Testament consistently compare the relationship between God and Israel to that between a husband and a wife. God’s Covenant with His people is a marriage covenant: good or ill, thick or thin, for richer or for poorer. When Jesus says, “You’ve had five husbands and none of them is your real husband,” He’s actually saying, “You’ve had five gods and none of them is your true God.” And she gets this, because she is a Samaritan and, as we’ve established, a pretty sharp cookie. This is a formidable woman at the well.

That’s why she says, “You’re a prophet!”—not because He magically guessed how many times she’d been married, but because He speaks religious and prophetic truth. And this opens the door to a much deeper conversation. First she sees Him as a man, then as a prophet, then as Messiah, and finally as Savior. Then she goes and tells her people—leaving the water jug behind—and leads them all to Christ, the wayward children of God come home at last in Him.

This isn’t about one woman’s faith. It’s about the redemption of her entire people—for God does not forget even one of His children, and He never breaks His promise. Jesus says that He is sent from the Father to complete the Father’s work, which is none other than the universal reconciliation of all peoples and all of Creation with God in Christ Jesus. No-one is beyond His mercy. No-one is beyond His love. And no-one will be forgotten or ignored or cast aside when He comes again as victorious Lord of All. For we have had many lords. But our true Lord has come now for us.

In light of all this, what then shall we say of how the Church ought to respond to fears of pandemic? Shall we be tested and found wanting, as so many other aspects of our society are currently being tested? Well, first off, we must speak truth. We must be bold, and loving, and fearless. We shall neither be foolish, testing God, nor terrified, mistrusting God. We are to serve others humbly and prudently. Take sensible precautions, if not for ourselves then for the most vulnerable among us.

Listen to facts over frenzy, to science over sensationalism. Be a beacon of calm in a sea of tumult. Like the prophets of old, we must in the face of adversity and calamity be a clear and forceful voice for the poor, the sick, the elderly, the forgotten and the ignored. And like Christ, we must offer compassion, forgiveness, and new ways of life—a third path apart from our usual choices of violence or passivity.

This is not the first crisis Christianity has faced. It certainly isn’t the first plague. God is with us, to forgive, and to heal, and the resurrect the dead. And we are here to be Christ for a world still very much in need of Him; loving and serving all peoples as Christ has first loved us.

It doesn’t matter if you’re from Samaria or Appalachia or Wuhan. To us, to Christianity, you are Jesus in the flesh. And we will serve you all as servants of the Lord.

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