Sermon: Eucharist - 27 March 2011

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 27th March 2011
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: John 4: 5-26

‘”I know that Messiah, that is Christ, is coming. When he comes he will tell us everything”. Jesus said, “I am he, I who am speaking to you now”’. The corpus of Johannine writing, the Gospel, the letters of John, the Book of Revelation, all unveil. They approach, tease at and then display the writer’s belief that in Jesus the light breaks out – the Christ has come.

Christianity spread to Samaria some years after the ministry of Jesus, this helps to explain some of the details in today’s Gospel, though we should note that the Acts of the Apostles gives no hint that Jesus already had followers in Samaria before Phillip came, as this fourth Gospel would indicate. But an intrinsic claim to plausibility has merit. The scene set is one of the most detailed in John, the Evangelist displaying a knowledge of local colour, as well as Samaritan beliefs, that is impressive. The well at the foot of Gerisim, the question of legal purity, the spirited defence of the patriarchal well and the prophet-like Moses – if we analyse the repartee at the well, we find quite true to life the characterisation of the woman as coy, a certain light grace. As in characters like Nicodemus, or the paralytic, or the blind man in the Gospel, the Evangelist uses his characters as foils to permit Jesus to unfold his revelation, each having his or her own personal characteristics and suitable lines of dialogue.

There is a complex literary device in this story, common to the rest of the Johannine writing – a technique of misunderstanding, of plays on words. Whatever the sub-stratem of traditional material, John takes it, and with his masterful sense of drama and various techniques of stage setting forms the story into a superb theological scenario; misunderstanding followed by irony, the quick changing of an embarrassing subject, the front and back stage Greek chorus effect of the villagers – all these dramatic touches skilfully applied to make this one of the most vivid scenes in the Gospel and to give John’s magnificent doctrine of Living Water the perfect setting. Much more than in the Nicodemus scene which we examined last week, Jesus’ discourse here is worked into a dialogue and a background that gives it meaning.

‘”I know that Messiah, that is Christ, is coming”, the woman answered, “When he comes he will tell us everything”’. The Samaritans did not expect a Messiah in the sense of an anointed king of the Davidic house, they expected a Taheb, the one who returns, seemingly the prophet-like Moses. This belief was the fifth article in the Samaritan creed, even though John places the more familiar Jewish designation of Messiah on the woman’s lips, so John begins with Samaria and re-fashions it.

Is this story true? That’s a question that teases us, as with so much else in John. And the answer must be found in the complexity of the way John uses tradition, the world he works in, understands and inherits, and what we might call the Holy Spirit of Christ in the early Church revealing more and more of the truth about Jesus, the Jesus who in John says, ‘I am he, I who am speaking to you now’. For John is always using that Greek tense, which brings from the past into the present in precisely the same way that Holy Communion brings the Jesus of the past into our present. When we come to the altar rail we are not looking back, remembering a distant Jesus, we are kneeling to receive Jesus present now, mystically present in the Holy Sacrament of the Altar.

‘Christ our God to earth descending,

Our full homage to demand’

John’s Gospel, as all the Johannine writings is revelatory of the truth as the writer believed the truth to be in Jesus, a truth held up or displayed for all to see. Last Tuesday I was speaking to the Head Teachers of the Diocese in retreat at Ladywell in Godalming. The beautiful chapel has in its Italian mosaic apse a series of saints gathered around Our Lady, who holds up for our adoration the Christ child. One of the figures, I noticed, was St Clare of Assisi holding a monstrance. Clare was born in 1194, the foundress of the Minoresses or Poor Clares. When she was 18, so moved by the preaching of Francis of Assisi, she joined him at the Porziuncula where she renounced all her possessions and took the habit of a nun. She was formed in the religious life of the Benedictine convents of Bastia and Sant' Angelo di Panzo, until Francis was able to offer her and her companions a small house adjacent to the church of San Damiano in Assisi. There she became Abbess in 1215 of a community of women, who wished to live according to the rule and spirit of Francis.

She never left her convent at Assisi, but twice during her time there Assisi was in danger of being sacked by the armies of the Emperor Frederick II, which included a number of Saracens, or what we would call, Muslims. Clare, although ill, was carried to the wall holding a pyx or monstrance containing the Blessed Sacrament, at which, say her biographers, the Saracens fled. I was telling the Head Teachers that if you go into the entrance hall of the Deutche Historische Museum on the Unter den Linden in Berlin, there is on the floor a vast, wonderful, interactive map of Europe, and on it you can see the advancing hoards of Islam over the centuries: the early Christian Church, the Church of Augustine of Hippo, the Church where Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, all so much in our minds today, now are – all that North Africa, once Christian, gradually overwhelmed. Then, through the conquering of Byzantium, Islam extending through what is now Rumania and Hungary to the very gates of Vienna. Looking at this map you can see that it was touch and go whether Christianity would survive or be defeated by the warriors of the Prophet.

The painting or statue of St Clare holding aloft the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, and so repelling the Saracens from Assisi, was hugely popular in 17^th century art, which is why you often find her adorning the Baroque altars of Bavaria and Austria, and all because of the terrifying threat of subjugation by the armies of the Prophet. What is happening in Middle Eastern politics, in Libya and Egypt, along the coast of what was once Christian North Africa, and through the Islamic diaspora, what is happening from Bradford to New York, causes us unease. What should our response in the 21^st century be to Islam? Perhaps the woman at the well in the story in John may help us find the answer. She interrogates the young prophet and in turn is questioned by him. She’s a worldly-wise person, as we are, she knows her way about, as we do, but in the young man at the well she finds herself confounded. ‘” When he comes he will tell us everything”. Jesus said, “I am he, I who am speaking to you now”’. As the woman questions Jesus, we should question Islam.

On the walls of Assisi St Clare had nothing in her hands but the Consecrated Bread with which to defend her community, and how marvellous that that story should have been reworked by Italian mosaicists after the Second World War in the 1950’s in our very own Godalming, and that Church of England Head Teachers should have gathered for an Anglican Eucharist at the kind and hospitable invitation of the Roman Catholic nuns of Ladywell this very Tuesday. The apse of the chapel at Ladywell is a kind of proscenium which frames the drama of the Eucharist, just as this morning’s chapter of John is a kind of theatre in which the Evangelist assembles his actors with his masterful sense of drama and his various techniques of stage-setting, forming this superb theological scenario -misunderstanding followed by irony, the quick changing of an embarrassing subject, the front and back stage Greek chorus effect of the villagers; dramatic touches skilfully applied to give us one of the most vivid scenes in John’s Gospel. A pert woman who knows her way round her own religion, ”I know that Messiah, that is Christ, is coming. When he comes he will tell us everything” and the devastating reply of Jesus, “I am he” ego emi, I who am speaking to you now”.

How do we know it’s true, this Gospel of John? We know if our hearts will open to receive what the theologian dramatist offers us, the light the darkness cannot quench. Finally, how should we approach Islam today. Well, we are at the mercy of so much fear, propaganda and politics through a particular school of Jehadist Islamicism, militant Islam wishing to subjugate the world to the Caliphate. But there is a deeper Islam, the way of the Sufi, the mystic, the person of prayer. There is a whole culture, a Muslim culture, of course, that Christianity managed to destroy in Spain, but whose beautiful ghosts can still haunt us in Grenada, in the Alhambra, in algebra and geometry, and the fountains and water gardens that illustrate the Islamic paradise.

How wonderful if Jonathan Frost’s vision of a Multi Faith Centre can be brought to fruition on this hill, that side by side the teaching of the holy Koran and the teaching of the Gospel of John can be heard, so that the light which enlightens everyone, not just the light which enlightened a courageous nun in the 13^th century, but the light which also enlightened her enemies can be seen. One of the invitations of Christianity, and its particular invitation for Lent, is that we so study, question, think and meditate on our Holy Scriptures that we discover that what is true is to be found in the Jesus St John believed to be the Christ, the Christ not only of the pious Jew or the heretic Samaritan, then so despised and feared, but the Christ who is the light that no darkness can overcome.