The Giver of Living Water and the Samaritan Woman

    Our Lord in His great Providence made possible a conversation with a woman from Samaria from which we learn very great lessons. Although He came to the children of Israel, He took advantage of their rejection to demonstrate that Faith and Obedience were indications of being true descendants of Abraham, not merely being born from him physically. Creating the opportunity, our Lord was able to be left alone to have a conversation with this Samaritan woman about the Gift of God of Living Water that is able to quench our Spiritual thirst. As the psalmist said, "My soul is athirst for God; yea, even for the Living God!" Only God is able to quench our soul's thirst because our soul is not made of the earth like our bodies are. We try to capture Life by pursuing all types of worldly pursuits, but are never able to, and are constantly hoping that one day we will find Life in an unexpected source.

    The Samaritan woman asks our Lord, "Art thou greater than our father Jacob, which gave us this well, and drank thereof himself, and his children, and his cattle?" She was expressing the physical wonders of the well which was able to provide water for Jacob and his children and cattle, but our Lord desired to provide her with a spiritual lesson from God's great and marvelous creation. Just as how this well was able to quench the thirst of all of Jacob’s family, down to even his cattle, the Source and Maker of all creation is able to quench the Spiritual thirst of the man of God, down to his children, his thoughts, and his cattle, the powers of his soul that are not endowed with reason such as anger and desire. The water bringing physical refreshment, is symbolic of the spiritual waters of purification in Holy Baptism and in the hot tears of repentance that bring one over from a life of wickedness to one of blessedness.

    "Jesus saith unto her: 'Go, call thy husband and come hither.' The woman answered and said: 'I have no husband.' Jesus said unto her: 'Thou hast well said: 'I have no husband', for thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband; in that saidest thou truly." How quick we are to judge this woman for being on her 6th partner, thinking to ourselves, “no matter how bad I may be, at least I haven’t been married and divorced 5 times and still living in sinful relationship”. Spiritually, all Christians are only to be wedded to one person and that is Christ. Are we able to confidently say that we have not had 5 husbands already? Can we surely say that the current partner we have is Christ and not someone else? We are addicted to this sensual world, and give over our 5 senses to it and find ourselves in the same state as the Samaritan woman. Having been let down with finding any lasting happiness in the 5 senses, we have divorced them, and have gone to live with our sixth partner, the successor of the 5 senses, Falsehood and Filth. We have become fornicators with Heresy, erring grievously in doctrine. But now that Christ has come and offered us Living Water, we have the choice of asking Him to stay with us as did the Samaritans, or we can be like the Nazarenes that sought to cast the Lord down from the hill to destruction for His words, or like the Gadarenes who begged Him to leave them and go away.

    The Lord is asking this most important question of us: who is it that we are wedded to? We can answer that we are wedded to the world, sin, or the Devil, and be destroyed along with them. We will be drinking a water that will only make us thirstier the more we drink from it. Or we can acknowledge Christ the Lord as our lawful Husband, and espouse ourselves to Him with faith and love, and drink of His living water, from which we will not thirst and on which we will float into the heavenly Kingdom and Eternal Life.

Ephrem the Syrian on Salvation

I've been reading through St. Ephrem the Syrian's homily "On our Lord" found in His collection of "Selected Prose Works", published by CUA and thought I would share a few of the beautiful thoughts of this God Bearing Father.  His words are very inspiring and bring a refreshing feeling to the soul after reading them.  I am amazed at His ability to explain the whole of Salvation and the Christian way of Life from short accounts in the Gospels such as the account of the Sinful Woman and the Pharisee recorded in the 7th Chapter of St. Luke's Gospel.  Here are a few quotes from St. Ephrem in His homily "On our Lord".

In speaking of God's great condescension and ultimate Justice for the righteous, he says the following: "The Only-Begotten journeyed from the Godhead and resided in a virgin, so that through physical birth the Only-Begotten would become a brother to many.  And he journeyed from Sheol and resided in the Kingdom, to tread a path from Sheol, which cheats everyone, to the kingdom, which rewards everyone.  For our Lord gave His resurrection as a guarantee to mortals that He would lead them out of Sheol, which takes the departed without discrimination, to the kingdom, which welcomes guests with discrimination, so that we might journey from where everyone's bodies are treated the same, to where everyone's efforts are treated with discrimination."  Like St. Gregory of Nyssa, He teaches that our Loving Lord came down to rescue us and our brothers lying in death from the inescapable prison of sin and death that rightfully contained all of mankind.  He also teaches the same imagery that St. Gregory of Nyssa used to describe the purpose of the Incarnation, namely that he took a body from the Most Holy Virgin in order to be able to be devoured by death and Sheol in order to break into its vaults and carry off its treasures.  "When death came confidently, as usual, to feed on mortal fruit, life, the killer of death, was lying in wait, so that when death swallowed life with no apprehension, it would vomit it out, and many others with it."  He speaks of Christ disguising Himself to be killed on the Cross, but supernatural Life killed death, thus with the very weapon that death had used to kill Him, He gained the victory over death.  This is why we as Orthodox Christians love the Cross, because it has become for us a great weapon and bridge to Heaven.  It is as if the Cross itself is used to tread this new path out of Sheol to the Kingdom of Heaven.  And in God's great Providence, He has allowed all of us to taste of death so that we could mature and become dispassionate especially in the area of Pride, which is what began our downfall in wanting to become our own gods at the tempting in the Garden.  So we as offspring of Adam and Eve are devoured by death without discrimination, from the Holy Patriarchs to the wicked Judas, but once brought out of Sheol, we will be rewarded for our Faith and good deeds or punished further for our obstinate vices in the face of God's great mercy and patience.

Continuing to contemplate on the ineffable condescension of the Incarnation St. Ephrem also says, "The Firstborn, who was begotten according to His nature, underwent yet another birth outside His nature, so that we too would understand that after our natural birth, we must undergo another birth outside our nature.  As a spiritual being, He was unable to become physical until the time of physical birth.  And so too physical beings, unless they undergo another birth, cannot become spiritual."  He teaches the great love that God has for us in showing us what it is we must do to enter into adoption as Spiritual children of God.  It is not enough for us to try to live in this world as if it is our only life, forsaking our future immortal life.  We must be born again or anew in the Spirit so as to enter into the God-Man Jesus Christ and share in Divine Life for all eternity.  We do this by dying to the old way of life and allowing God's Will to become our will, and not worrying over things of this life as if they were in any way permanent.  So our Loving Lord chose to be born as a baby to the Holy Virgin Mary to show us the need of being born again, if we are to share in both physical and Spiritual Life.

Then the Holy Father explains the Mystery behind the event of the sinful woman and Simon the Pharisee saying, "Our Lord was not hungry for the Pharisee's refreshments; He hungered for the tears of the sinful woman. Once He had been filled and refreshed by the tears He hungered for, He then chastised the one who had invited Him for food that perishes, in order to show that He had been invited not to nourish the body but to assist the mind. Nor was it as the Pharisee supposed, that our Lord mixed with eaters and drinkers for enjoyment, but rather to mix His teaching in the food of mortals as the Medicine of Life. For just as the evil one had given his bitter counsel to the house of Adam under the guise of food, the Good One gave His living counsel to the house of Adam under the guise of food."  We see such brilliance given by the Holy Spirit to our Beloved Father, St. Ephrem.  He uncovers the real motive for all that Christ does in His humbling act of the Incarnation.  We, living in the world, often become blinded to eternal realities and can only look at the decaying things of the world right in front of our eyes.  The Pharisee, who was supposed to be the most educated and pious Jew at that time, could only think about temporary, ever-changing, decaying things such as physical food.  He who had seen our Lord do all kinds of miracles such as healing the blind, deaf, and mute, couldn't believe that our Lord would allow a sinful woman to wash His feet with her tears of repentance if He knew what kind of woman she was.  He failed to be hospitable to the One that he had previously seen re-create eyes in one born without eyes, and even began to question whether or not our Lord was even a Prophet at all!  When we are filled with such attachment to worldly things, we quickly forget the miracles that we have personally seen and look rather foolish in questioning God's Providence.  We see that God wants from us tears more than anything.  He does not lower Himself to our level to eat of decaying bread, but rather to give us the medicine of Immortality in the Holy Mystery of the Eucharist and the other Holy Mysteries of the Holy Orthodox Church.  We partake of these Life-giving Mysteries with fear and trembling, Faith, and Love, only with many tears of repentance and longing for God's Will to be done in place of all the wickedness that we were once a proponent of.  We see the proper use of cunningness here as well as in His tricking death by death, by using the wicked one's own methods to destroy Satan, as the Holy Prophet David foretold in His Psalms by saying that they "shall fall into their own net."  We must become "wise as the serpents and guileless as the doves" as our Lord taught us, meaning that we too must use the world in a way to bring about great Spiritual progress as our Lord demonstrated in this account.  We can use things as food to mix in the Holy Medicine that is our Lord Jesus Christ.