The Dangers of Literalism (Lent 3A)

The Dangers of Literalism
Homily delivered the Third Sunday of Lent (Lent 3A RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
12 March 2023; 8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist, Medford (Oregon)
Readings:  Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42; Psalm 95

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

I learned in almost 50 years of happy married life when my beloved brought an issue to me, I needed to listen to not just her words.   Like many, as a younger man I tended to be quite literal in how I understood what she and others said to me, and this got me into trouble time and again.   Tell me I had done something wrong, I’d ask exactly what and when, and start trying to explain why I did it, how I didn’t intend harm, and why it wasn’t important.  If her words bore a lot of emotion, my default position was to hunker down, shy away, and avoid that particular minefield at all costs.  Don’t lift that rock—you don’t know what’s going to crawl out! 

 

But I learned through hard experience that I needed to listen both to what she was saying and to the feelings with which she spoke, to the depths beneath the surface meaning of the words.  I am so thankful that I learned well before she got sick, well before she died.  We had a couple of decades of real communication and love shared as deeply as we were willing to risk looking under those rocks, well before the silence of death ended those deep conversations I learned to thrive on. 

 

Instead of replying back to the anyone’s surface language, I now find it better to try to plumb the depths of their expression to me right out.  I don’t always get this right, but I try to correct course as soon as I realize what’s up. 

 

The Gospel of John has several scenes that reveal Jesus’ true identity where people misunderstand him because they understand only the surface meaning of what he says.  In chapter 3, Nicodemus asks “How can a person enter back into the womb and be born again?” as he is standing before Jesus, the one who brings birth from on high. In chapter 5, the invalid at the pagan healing Temple at the Pool of Bethzatha complains, “I have no hope of being healed since have no one to put me in the water when the water is stirred up…,” while Jesus, the one who will heal him and make him whole, stands before him. 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers to quench the thirst of a Samaritan woman. She replies pointedly, “And just how are you going to do that?  This well is deep and you, sir, you have no bucket or rope.” 

With Nicodemus, Jesus is talking about spiritual birth and the new life it brings.  With the invalid by the pool, Jesus is talking about the healing that he brings, not therapeutic magic from a spring’s sporadic bubbling. With the woman at the well, Jesus is talking about spiritual and life sustenance, not a simple thirst quencher.

Jesus meets her at about noon, the hottest part of the day and least desirable for hauling water.  This suggests that the woman is a social outcast even within her community, the Samaritans, who were themselves treated as social outcasts by Jesus’s community. 

In Tyler Perry’s magnificent film, Diary of a Mad Black Woman, the protagonist encounters a cousin she knew in her youth but has not seen for many years.  The cousin is in rough shape, strung out on heroin.  The woman asks her grandmother “What happened to her?” The reply? “Life happened to her! That’s what!” 

Life has happened to the Samaritan Woman.  Whatever it was that drove her into her hard life decisions that have led where she was in life, they clearly were something not wholly of her choosing.  Now she is scarred by all this rejection and the hardness of her life, and is somewhat rough:  Jesus asks for some water and she immediately replies, “You, a Jew, are asking me, a woman and a Samaritan for a drink?  Don’t you know that I am one of the unclean ones you shouldn’t speak to?”  

Life has happened to this woman.  As it has happened to us all.   

No way she’s going to give this chummy stranger a drink.  It’s just too creepy. 

Jesus answers, “If you knew who I truly am, you would be asking me for a drink.” 
And she again misunderstands him.  “You have no bucket, sir, and the well is deep. How are you going to draw water for me?”  She has heard Jesus’ words, but not their meaning.   Like Nicodemus and the invalid, she misses it by being too literal. 

Literalism!  Some people today boast that they are good Christians because they, as opposed to others, “read the Bible ‘literally’.”  I find this odd, given the fact that for the first 14 centuries of the Church, our best theologians and teachers consistently taught that the “literal meaning” of the Bible was its least important sense. 

Literalism!  Taking things ‘by the letter.’  Remember St. Paul said, “the letters kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:7). 

You remember all those passages where Jesus condemns the scribes?  Here's the thing: the Greek word for scribe used in all of them is grammateus, that is "one who goes by the letter, a literalist."   .

There are many ways we let literalism get in the way of our faith and in the way of our love. 

How often do we use the words, “but you said,” trying to hold someone to a meaning of their words we had heard but they had not intended?

How often do we let our literalism bring us to unreal expectations and disappointment in our faith?  “It says here that God will answer our prayers and give us what we ask in faith.  I prayed in good faith, and my loved one still died.”  “I prayed for healing and just got sicker.”  I prayed for protection for my family and my child killed himself.” 

And, on the other hand, how often do we let the literalism of our previous experience tell us that God cannot help us?  “The well is deep and you have no bucket.”  After all, miracles on occasion are known to occur, and prayers to be answered as we had hoped, though when and why is a mystery. 

When Jesus surprises the woman and tells her things he otherwise could not have known, she begins to see that perhaps there is mystery here, another meaning deep beneath the words Jesus has used.   “This man must be a prophet.” Maybe even the prophet who was to come and fix everything.
 
Jesus says, “Drink from this well, and you will thirst again.  But the water I offer will become a spring in you welling up to unending life.  You will never be thirsty again.”  

You don’t need a bucket for this living water.  He offers it whenever we stand at a deep well beyond our reach with no bucket.  He offers healing when no one is able to put us in the healing waters of the pool (physicians, counselors, care givers).  He offers new birth just when we seem most dead. 

Even though Jesus says we'll never be thirsty again, we do, in fact, even as we live in Christ, experience “dry times.”   After the initial incandescent moment where we stand before the frightening and alluring mystery, which we gradually or suddenly recognize as the face of Jesus, we do come, from time to time, to times of dryness, of renewed thirst. 

 

Such dry spots usually occur when we start worrying about not having a bucket for a deep well.  In C.S. Lewis says that God sends us “dry times” for a reason: so we learn to walk as free and equal partners with God.  So we can grow in our right practice of the will uncoerced.  So we actually deepen our relationship with God when the wellspring within us once again bubbles forth.

 

This story touches me personally, and has reminded me again and again of why I love Jesus and trust him deeply.  Jesus reaches out to that woman, unclean and repulsive as his religion taught him she was, and impure and immoral as her own community standards declared.  He travels a hard and dangerous road not often taken by his compatriots just to seek her out.  He does this because he loves her, as he loves each and every one of us, even me.  He talks to her with his feelings, not just words, and then when she tries to avoid his meaning, he begins to lift up that rock for her by asking her about herself.  And when she lies to him, as we all lie to him at first, he gently tells her the truth so she can maybe start listening to the deep message of love he has offered to her in what had appeared to be riddles.   

 

The African American spiritual says it all.  I used to sing it as a lullaby to my children: 

 

Jesus met the woman at the well
Jesus met the woman at the well
Jesus met the woman at the well
And he told her everything she ever done.

 

He said, woman, woman, where is your husband?
Woman, woman, where is your husband?
Woman, woman, where is your husband?
I know everything you ever done.

 

She said, Jesus, Jesus, I ain’t got no husband!
Jesus, Jesus, I ain’t got no husband!
Jesus, Jesus, I ain’t got no husband!
And you don’t know everything I ever done!

 

He said, woman, woman, you've got five husbands.
Woman, woman, you've got five husbands.
Woman, woman, you've got five husbands.
And the one with you now, he ain’t your own.

 

She said, this man, this man must be a prophet!
This man, this man must be a prophet!
This man, this man must be a prophet!
He done told me everything I ever done!

 

Jesus met the woman at the well.
Jesus met the woman at the well.
Jesus met the woman at the well.
And he told her everything she ever done.

 

This week, I invite us each to try a spiritual practice intended to help us develop our imagination, be less literal, and overcome dryness.  Upon waking each morning, instead of hopping out of the sheets immediately, stay there.  Thank God for the new day, and then lying still take five minutes.  Imagine what the coming day will be like if God is present and fully in charge.  Let your imagination run wild through your day, and then bring it back to focus on a concrete task you must do this day to help God’s gracious Reign arrive. 

 

The fact is, Jesus meant it when he said we’d never go thirsty again.  The dry times, needed as they are, come to an end.  The spring indeed wells forth again with living water.  We see that our literalness was shallow and blind, and that we didn’t ever really need that bucket or that rope. 

 

Thanks be to God.