An homily from St. John Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers

Dear brothers and sisters, we are at the Fifth Sunday of Pascha, overlapping the Feast of Mid-Pentecost we commemorated during this past week on Wednesday. Pentecost overlaps now in the glory of our Lord’s Church calendar with the most joyful Pascha. The account in the Gospel of the Samaritan Woman expresses this. Last Sunday the Paralytic remained by the pool until our Lord Jesus Christ came, illustrating Holy Baptism that comes from the Resurrection. Today, the Samaritan woman receives word of the Living Water and of God as Spirit, pointing toward the Chrismation of Pentecost and the full founding of the Church as Israel fulfilled. The lesser blessing of the waters we performed in Church on Wednesday for Mid-Pentecost show this link. For the waters of baptism, in the triple immersion reliving Jesus Christ’s three days in the tomb and Resurrection, relate to the waters upon which the Spirit moved at Creation and again to the sound of a violent wind and the vision of flame-like tongues at Pentecost followed by diverse languages and then baptisms. For the Spirit moved upon the waters of Creation as if a transforming wind, and  flame produces water too as do tongues and speaking. From our Lord’s most pure Body, water fell on the earth both from his agony in the Garden and from the Crucifixion, in both cases blood and water together. In His teaching, He associates the Living Water integrally with the inspiration of the Spirit. The Living Water and the flames of Pentecost both typify the uncreated light, the divine energies, of God’s grace, sparkling in Creation both like flame and light on the waters of Creation.

Our Lord tells the woman at the well, “God is Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” He declares here, especially as evident in the original Greek, the Holy Spirit as God, while telling of the nature of the Church as superseding old forms of worship centered on one particular place, as with the Samaritans in their ethnic heartland, or likewise the Jews at Jerusalem, where, although he indicates salvation is of the Jews, drawing on the types and shadows of the Old Testament, the time is coming when God will be worshiped in Spirit. This is because the Church is the Body of Christ. Both the Resurrection and Pentecost form the Church as the Body of Christ. 

I used to belong to two related old New England unitarian cults before I became Orthodox, Unitarian-Universalism and Christian Science. They both claimed descent from Puritanism, which often was hailed as the foundation of American Protestantism. In both cases they denied the personhood of the Holy Spirit. Instead they subscribed, as many Americans of Protestant background do, to a vague Deistic sense of God, without the true theology of the Holy Trinity found in Orthodoxy, while looking to America heretically as exceptional in relation to its individualistic and “progressive” faith.

Christ’s message at the well would fall on deaf ears in the case of much of such American culture. The latter’s sense of the one Spirit was impersonal and vague and outside the Body of Christ, His Church, while engaging in a confusing false ecumenism. Likewise, like the Samaritans, modern Jews and Christian Zionists wrongly tend to revere the state of Israel as a particular focus for worship, and Roman Catholics have done the same, mixing up the state of the Vatican with salvation, neither understanding the Orthodox Church as Israel for all nations.

Thus they all lack also the true practice of Christianity, proclaimed by Orthodoxy, exemplified for us by Jesus Christ to the woman at the well.

For our Lord cared for this Samaritan woman, even though she was a member of an ethnic community considered deplorable by the Jews. This marked how His ministry in His Church would be to all nations and peoples. Likewise He cares for us Americans here in Appalachia today, and also gives us the living water. Our little Church here in Northern Appalachia is a fractal for the whole of Christ’s Body, in which we participate God willing in the Eucharist.

And the Holy Spirit is not impersonal but a Person of the Trinity, Who proceeds from the Father. He is not subordinate to other Persons of the Trinity but all dwell together in love as one, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. The old name Holy Ghost may convey to us moderns that ancient and living and everlasting Personhood of the Holy Spirit.

Blessed Theophylact writes of our Lord’s words to the Samaritan woman,

“By ‘in spirit’ He points to the practical life. For, as the divine Apostle says, ‘As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they put to death the deeds of the body, and again, ‘The flesh desires against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh.’ By ‘in truth,’ He indicates the contemplative life, as Paul again says, ‘with the unleavened bread of sincerity,’ that is, purity of life, which is the practical part, ‘and truth,’ which is the contemplative part, for contemplation concerns itself with truth in doctrine. Also, since it was the peculiarity of the Samaritans to confine God to a place, saying that He must be worshipped there, while among the Jews all was done in types and shadows, the Lord says: ‘In spirit’—in opposition to the Samaritans, showing that true worship is not local but noetic and of the soul; and ‘in truth’—in opposition to the Jews, showing that it is not in type and shadow, but in reality, free of foreshadowing rites. Therefore He says: ‘The hour is coming, and now is’—that is, the time of My bodily presence—when the true worshippers will not worship as the Samaritans, in one mountain only, but everywhere in spirit, offering incorporeal worship, as Paul also says: ‘I serve God in my spirit.’ Nor will they worship as the Jews, in types and shadows that point to what is to come, but in truth, with a worship having nothing shadowy. For such worshippers the Father seeks: since He is Spirit, He seeks spiritual ones; and since He is Truth, He seeks true ones.”

Despite her immoral history of marriage and cohabitation, our Lord reached out to the Samaritan Woman with love, reflecting His New Commandment, to love our neighbor more than ourselves. And the highest love is to bring our neighbor to the living Water of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit in the Orthodox Church, as we were grateful to witness again this morning in welcoming our new brother Isaac into the Church through baptism and chrismation, a living icon of today’s Gospel lesson.

The woman at the well became a Christian, and took the name of Photini (or Svetlana in Slavonic) at baptism, meaning “the enlightened one,” and she is referred to as apostle and evangelist in early Church homilies. At Pentecost she was baptized with five sisters and two sons. After a vision of the Lord, she traveled to Rome, and appeared before the crazed Emperor Nero with her son Joseph and other Christians, saying, “We have come to teach you to believe in Christ.” The emperor asked whether all agreed to die for the Nazarene. Photini said, “Yes, for the love of Him we rejoice and in His name we’ll gladly die.” Tortured, imprisoned, and tempted with wealth, St. Svetlana and her companions held firm to the faith. In fact, in the process, St. Svetlana converted the Emperor’s daughter. For three years Svetlana and her company, after having survived various forms of torture and poison, were kept in a Roman prison, and St. Svetlana made it into a “house of God” where many Romans came to the prison to become Christians. The enraged Emperor finally had the whole group beheaded except for St. Svetlana. She was thrown into a deep dry well and then into prison again before giving up her life to the Lord. She became a mother to many in the Church, while on earth and as an intercessor, reflecting also the appropriateness of this Sunday also being Mothers Day this year. May the Holy Martyr Svetlana pray to God for us and the salvation of our souls and for our mission work to America. 

We may remember in this regard the works of Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of California, of blessed memory, who this past week our Council of Bishops announced is in the process of glorification as a saint in our Church. He would be the first American saint from the continental U.S., a suburban child and sinful intellectual who found the Orthodox Church and brought many others to her, with help from our patron St. John. Father Seraphim famously said, “It is later than you think. Hasten therefore to do the work of God.” Brothers and sisters, this is so true, and we are blessed today, in this time of the overlay of Pascha and Pentecost on the Church calendar, to realize how our Lord lifts us up out of the limits of human time, for our salvation, to that day which with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. Let us rest in the Living Waters that we may rise with Him, and cover a multitude of sins by bringing others of our family and friends to holy baptism. Today at Mid-Pentecost is a good time to renew our baptism vows and missionary zeal, with humility in the Risen Christ.

Christ is Risen! Truly He is Risen!

****

The Reading from the 

Holy Gospel according to John,

§12 [4:5-42]

At that time, Jesus cometh to a city of Samaria, which is called Sychar, near to the parcel of ground that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Now Jacob’s well was there. Jesus therefore, being wearied with His journey, sat thus by the well; and it was about the sixth hour. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said unto her, ‘Give Me to drink.’ (For His disciples had gone away unto the city to buy meat.) Then said the woman of Samaria unto Him, ‘How is it that thou, being a Jew, askest a drink of me, who am a woman of Samaria?’ For the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. Jesus answered and said unto her, ‘If thou knewest the gift of God and who it is that saith to thee, ‘Give Me to drink,’ thou wouldest have asked of Him, and He would have given thee living water.’ The woman said unto Him, ‘Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep. From whence then hast thou that living water? Art thou greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank thereof himself, and his children and his cattle?’ Jesus answered and said unto her, ‘Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again, but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.’ The woman said unto Him, ‘Sir, give me this water, that I thirst not, neither come hither to draw.’ Jesus said 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 thou saidst truly.’ The woman said unto Him, ‘Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and ye say that Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.’ Jesus said unto her, ‘Woman, believe Me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither on this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father. Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour cometh and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship Him. God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.’ The woman said unto Him, ‘I know that Messiah cometh, who is called Christ. When He has come, He will tell us all things.’ Jesus said unto her, ‘I that speak unto thee am He.’ And upon this came His disciples and marveled that He talked with the woman; yet no man said, ‘What seekest Thou?’ or, ‘Why talkest Thou with her?’ The woman then left her waterpot, and went her way into the city and said to the men, ‘Come, see a man who told me all things that ever I did. Is not this the Christ?’ Then they went out of the city and came unto Him. Meanwhile His disciples entreated Him, saying, ‘Master, eat.’ But He said unto them, ‘I have meat to eat that ye know not of.’ Therefore the disciples said one to another, ‘Hath any man brought Him aught to eat?’ Jesus said unto them, ‘My meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work. Say not ye, ‘There are yet four months and then cometh the harvest’? Behold, I say unto you, lift up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages and gathereth fruit unto life eternal, that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. And herein is that saying true, ‘One soweth and another reapeth.’ I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour; other men laboured, and ye have entered into their labours.’ And many of the Samaritans of that city believed in Him because of the saying of the woman who testified, ‘He told me all that ever I did.’ So when the Samaritans had come unto Him, they besought Him that He would tarry with them; and He abode there two days. And many more believed because of His own word, and said unto the woman, ‘Now we believe, not because of thy saying, for we have heard Him ourselves and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.’