Homily for Sunday 18 May 2014--Jesus' Word is Easy and Hard

Homily for 18 May 2014:  5^th Sunday of Pascha (the Samaritan Woman)

(Acts 11:19-30)

(John 4:5-42)

 

Today’s Gospel reading gives us two excellent examples of how people misunderstand what Jesus says.

The Samaritan Woman whom Jesus encounters at Jacob’s Well thinks that the “living water” that Jesus talks about comes from the well.

The disciples think that someone else has brought food to Jesus when He tells them that He has food that they do not know about.

In both cases, Jesus has to explain the real meaning of His words.

We might be tempted to ask, “Are these people just stupid?”  Or is there another reason why they misunderstand?

But we need to be very careful about calling them stupid—because we also find it

• Easy to misunderstand Jesus’s message, and
• Hard to comprehend what He really means.
  Let’s look at a couple of examples:
  When Jesus says, “You must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me,” we think he’s imposing a burden on us.  We forget that the Holy Cross is the key to the gate of Heaven, and unless we are willing to carry our cross, as Jesus carried His, we will have a hard time entering His Kingdom.
  When Jesus says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we think to ourselves that it’s not natural to love everybody.  But in fact we usually don’t really love ourselves, so we can’t love our neighbors.
  When Jesus says, “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter Heaven,” we despair, because we all want to be rich—maybe even more than we want to be saved.  But it is attachment to wealth (a form of idolatry, loving money as a god), not wealth itself, that blocks our entry into Heaven.
  Jesus’s teachings are often easy to misunderstand and hard to understand because God’s ways are not our ways—even though they should be, because we are created in the image and likeness of God.  Sin prevents us from being in sync with God’s ways.
  This sometimes even extends to our idea of what the Church is.  Don’t we sometimes think of St Joseph’s as “the Arabic church” and of Latin Catholic parishes as “the American church?”  But isn’t the Church for everyone?  It’s God’s church for God’s people, not “our church for our people.”
  The Samaritan Woman talks to Jesus about her people’s beliefs in contrast with Jewish beliefs, but He tells her that soon “true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth . . . neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”
  And today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles says that the early Christians left Jerusalem because they were being persecuted and they preached about Jesus as the Messiah as far away as Phoenicia (that is, Syria and Lebanon), Cyprus, and Antioch (now in Turkey)—but only to Jews.
  Then, some also preached to Greeks and Greek-speaking Jews in Antioch, and many of them believed in the Lord.  The Church leaders in Jerusalem heard of this and sent Barnabas especially to work in Antioch.  They adapted to changing circumstances and broke out of their usual way of thinking about the Church.  Barnabas, as it turned out, had great success, and in Antioch the disciples were first called “Christians.”
  The lesson for us is clear—especially since we are the Church of Antioch, and we wouldn’t be Christians now if the original Jewish Christians hadn’t decided to include Greeks in the Church.
  Jesus Christ came for all people and His Church is for all people.  We never forget where we came from, but we have to live where we are now, and reach out to strangers, as Jesus did to the Samaritan Woman and as Barnabas did to the Greeks in Antioch.
  This is easy to understand—it’s not hard to get—the Church is not limited to a mountain or a city or a language or a country.  True believers worship in spirit and in truth, inviting everyone to hear God’s word and to share God’s love.
  The truth never changes, but the Spirit leads us where we need to go—which is not always where we expect to go or want to go.  We have to open up our minds and our hearts and our church so that we can let everyone learn about Jesus and discover, like the Samaritan Woman, that He is “truly the Savior of the world,” and give thanks and praise and glory to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, One God, now and ever and unto ages of ages.  Amen.