True worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth
If talking to strange women in public places about their sex lives is still viewed as a breach of etiquette today, we can surely see why it was that the disciples were “astonished” at this encounter between Jesus and the woman of Samaria. This story reminds us more than any other that Jesus was the kind of person who showed no regard for racial, religious, social or gender divisions. He broke down barriers and shunned convention. But even once we’ve tried to take on board that easily-passed-over truth, it still seems astonishing to us that this encounter should be the unlikely occasion for Jesus’ most significant teaching on the nature of worship. It seems incongruous. What possible link can there be between this woman who is the symbol of everything Jesus’ society viewed as unholy and the holy activity of worship such as we undertake here in this church?
There are some clues in the context that take away some of this surprise, particularly the location of the meeting: Jacob’s well. We read in the book of Genesis that Jacob had a dream of a ladder stretching between heaven and earth with angels ascending and descending. Jacob is a kind of archetype of one who saw the holiness of God in the world, an interaction between heaven and earth. And so Jacob’s vision is of longstanding significance for understanding worship. As he awoke from his dream he exclaimed, “Surely, the Lord was in this place”. And that is the basis of the holiness of worship, “The Lord is here”.
So Jesus characteristically builds on traditional teaching, but takes it in a new direction. And if we really try and get to the heart of what Jesus is saying, there is much that is very unsettling both to how worship was understood at Jesus’ time and to how many of us conceive of worshipping God today. He sums it all up with the words:
The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.
So what does this mean? Well, here is my reading.
These two characteristics of worship which Jesus gives to us here – worship in spirit and truth – are about the orientation of worship in its proper relation to God and its proper relation to ourselves as creatures of worship. So firstly, worship in Spirit as a proper relation to God.
After their conversation at crossed purposes about the water of life and the revelation of this woman’s complex sexual history, the theme of worship is brought to the fore through the disagreement between Jews and Samaritans over where people should worship. Samaritan tradition interpreted Mount Gerizim as the location of Jacob’s vision and so as the primary site of worship. The Jews, however, saw Jacob’s vision as legitimising Jerusalem as the focus of their religious cult. This was one of many cultural-religious disagreements between Samaritans and Jews, a reason why Jesus shouldn’t have been talking to this woman in the first place.
But Jesus moves beyond this cultural disagreement. St John has already told us earlier in gospel that the Temple in Jerusalem was to be replaced by the temple of Jesus’ own body that was to be destroyed and rebuilt in three days. Worship in the Spirit is to be worship in and as the Body of Christ, the Church, which is not to be constrained either by geography or, as we also see here, by human cultural differences which divide rather than unite people in God. And we see in this dialogue with a Samaritan woman the beginning of the extension of salvation to the non-Jewish peoples, and this socially-excluded woman is to be the first evangelist of Christ to the culturally different.
But what might this relativising of culture mean to us? Worship performed by gathered groups of religious people is inescapably a cultural activity. That’s why it’s right that worship should take different forms in different places around the world, reflecting a particular social group’s language and symbols. That’s also why we have the different worship styles of different denominations reflecting different human temperaments and tastes. And it would be wrong to say that we need to get over those cultural differences in order to truly encounter God or to fully unite the Church, as if language and symbols could be done away with and are not the very means through which we encounter God.
But what Jesus is alerting us to in speaking about worship in Spirit is that cultural expression of worship is something that we have to enter deeply into in order that we might, in some sense, move beyond it and allow God to enter into us. Worship in Spirit raises up the people of God to an encounter with something beyond the merely cultural and human. So we have to be aware of where we might be tempted to stay at the surface of worship and refuse to allow God to raise us in the Spirit, as we receive and become incorporated into Christ’s body.
For the Jews and Samaritans that “staying at the surface of liturgy” was on the level of geography and ethnic difference. For us it may be on the level of aesthetics or of traditionalism or of a kind of intellectualising of faith. But the question for all of us is: “What is the aspect of worship that is in danger of becoming my idol?” “What is blocking my encounter with the Lord, rather than raising me up to that level of spiritual encounter with God?” Because it is once we address those things that our worship becomes less about ourselves and what we take pride in, and is put in its proper relation to the God who heals and transforms through worship in Spirit.
So that leads to the second dimension: worship in truth as a proper relation to ourselves. What is extraordinary in this meeting at the well, in addition to its illicitness, is that it is the occasion of an alarmingly high level of honesty. “What you have said is true” says Jesus, “you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.” And there it is, this bald fact from the messiness of an emotional life. Neither condemned nor condoned, simply named and made present.
Here we have the theme that has been the topic of this week’s Lent course: that prayer and worship are the time in which we truly encounter who we are, a time in which we are unable to run and hide like Adam and Eve in the garden. As we gather before the one who created us, in the body of his Son, the layers of self-deceit and pretension need to be slowly stripped away. Worship in truth is worship in which we are not afraid to be the vulnerable mortal creatures that we are, because we are in the presence of the one who loves and redeems.
Imagine in this liturgy the Lord Jesus saying out loud to you, as he does to this Samaritan woman, the most shameful truths of your heart. But imagine also that your reaction is not to run and hide, to break down or despair. Rather it’s a feeling of liberation, which seems to have been this woman’s reaction as she realises that what she most fears will bar her from the holiness of God is named, accepted and forgiven. And it is in fact this facing up to truth that enables her to go with confidence and joy to others and say “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” – not a sentence one can easily imagine being said with joy.
Worshipping in truth is about finding our own story within the story of faith and that can’t be a veneered, presentable version of our story, because God sees through that. And, moreover, that dishonestly with ourselves will prevent our worship from being a true encounter with God that will really transform us into Christ’s witnesses in the world, his labourers in his harvest. As Fr Stephen put it in the Lent booklet, “Our salvation becomes possible only when we come out of hiding in order to become real people before a real God. All the rest is illusion.”
So what this term, “worship in spirit and truth” presents us with is in fact a challenging and radical view of what worship really is, which perhaps makes the context of Jesus’ scandalous encounter with the Samaritan woman somehow more appropriate. Both the temples on Mount Gerizim and on Mount Zion in Jerusalem promoted a view of worship as trying to get outside of the world, to get away from what is labelled as impure and messy in order to achieve an otherworldly holiness. They relied on worship as a culturally-constructed experience of perfection that made people think that they were doing something that was holy enough to be accepted by God, because God couldn’t accept anything else. But that was untruthful about what human beings are like and it misunderstands how God engages with us. Because the truth is right there in St Paul’s letter to the Romans: “While we were still weak… Christ died for the ungodly”.
Worship in spirit and truth is the worship of the ungodly being made godly. Jesus’ new truth about worship and holiness is that you don’t need to eradicate what is imperfect to please God, you need to embrace it in order that God might touch and transform you through it. And the way we do that by seeking to give our worship the right relation to God in that it goes beyond the purely cultural, and the right relation to ourselves in that we are truthful about our ungodliness.
Praise God that while we were still far off he met us in his Son and brought us home. Praise God that he did that to an unlikely woman in Samaria. And praise God that he does that to us in our worship this morning.