A homily for the Third Sunday of Lent (Scrutinies), March 3, 2024
Ex 17:3-7, Rom 5:1-2, 5-8, Jn 4:5-42
The fable of the city mouse and the country mouse has a few different versions with differing details — cats, porcupines, skunks, more cats — but the moral they share is always the same: Don’t be a snob.
Well, not precisely; it’s a bit more like we all live our own lives the way we want to, the way we know best. Each of us deals with our own challenges and celebrates our own joys, and what fits one of us may be the wrong size for someone else. And we all should respect that.
But we don’t. When someone thinks they’re better than someone else because of their respective ways of living, then, yeah, that’s snobbery.
In college, I was a snob. Felonious, even. Guilty as charged.
I earned my bachelor’s at a small school in south-central Pennsylvania, in the county seat of a quiet region with many farms and open spaces. The city had a cute, walkable downtown, with a U.S. highway bisecting it and interstates surrounding it.
The permanent residents were hardworking church-going people who read their Bibles regularly and minded their own business until their neighbors needed help or the latest gossip. Many of them worked at the college as support staff members. Not too many millionaires in the bunch.
And for many of us — too many of us — it was easy to look down on them. Thus, we economically advantaged, academically gifted, elite-city-dwelling snobby brats did exactly that.
We even referred to the janitors who kept our bathrooms spotless with a slur: We called them the Toads.
Damn, we were immature. I especially was an immature uncharitable ignorant train wreck. I cringe as I think back.
But I also cringe as I look around today at the two-way snobbery — or whatever we may call it — that drives wedges between our sisters and brothers and herds us into tribes of sheep and goats butting heads with each other. This up-down snobbery, born from religious or cultural disagreements, geopolitical differences and the Grand Canyon-size wealth gap, has rapidly and continually escalated into hatred and occasionally violence.
Fear plays a part, too: We’re afraid that, if we get to know each other, or at least if we try to understand the other person’s point of view and how they came to embrace it, we might agree with them in part or totally. We’re afraid that our current positions might be mistaken, and we’re afraid of how much work it’ll take to realign our thoughts and beliefs.
We react to that kind of work with the same revulsion the young Bob Denver demonstrated as Maynard G. Krebs in the B&W TV show, “Dobie Gillis.”
“Work???”
And yet, just as it was 2,000 years ago, and has been every day right up until today, we need some way to open our eyes to the reality that we’re all members of the same human family.
Jesus is that way.
Jesus is The Way.
When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well in her village at the hottest time of the day — when she could go into a mostly deserted square unnoticed — he chides her about her marital/intimate history. The two of them exchange words about the enmity between their peoples, and touch upon the divergent roles that men and women played in the Holy Land of the first century.
At no point, however, do they escalate their disagreements.
Because of living water.
Christ’s living waters cooled their disagreements. They cool our disagreements, ancient and deep-rooted or current and fleeting.
Those living waters, at least on that blistering midday, put out the fire that kept Israelites and Samaritans at each other’s throats.
Jesus showed the woman at the well, her fellow villagers by extension, and all of us that the gift of salvation is for everyone, regardless of tribe.
Jesus showed her, her fellow villagers, and all of us that the spring of living water is for all humankind: past, present and future.
Jesus showed her, her neighbors, and all of us that what every man, woman and child thirsts for, has ever thirsted for, is God’s love.
Our Messiah invites us to drink deeply.
A deep, deep draught of God’s love, like a sip from a cold, bubbling spring somewhere out in the countryside, can remind us of all the ways we are the same. Of everything in life that parches us.
God’s love is for all. God’s love flows into everyone, as living water.
Therefore, God demands that we share that love, and never look down our noses at anyone.
