By Maximos Pafilis, Bishop of Melitene
I almost feel this stifling heat of midday, in the scorching heat of the sixth hour, there where the ancient well becomes the ideal setting for the most extreme shades of absolute thirst to meet. A woman drags her steps. Five shipwrecks of life, five shattered worlds tied tightly on her back, and she simply seeks a little coolness or rather, confessedly, she hides. She avoids the merciless sun, but mainly the prying human eyes. Social morality, this well-ironed white mask which diligently covers a face of pus, stands always at a distance of safety, observing with sick suspicion the defiled, because the iron rule of the age raised walls impassable, «for the Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans» (John 4:9). Sometimes the greatest miracles happen there where thou expectest it not. And suddenly, opposite her is found a strange man. He transcends the religious self-complacency of the righteous, he touches the trauma of the margin, he passes by the heavy stigma of her personal choices. That man seeks gropingly the hidden vein of a deeper spiritual truth within her ruins, a truth that not even the woman herself knew that she possessed. The world, while her soul longed unbearably for love, had offered her only the dry soil of disparagement. Christ, on the contrary, reveals to her things that to no «righteous» man did He ever reveal. We set up scaffolds with such characteristic ease, without second thought, only and only to persuade ourselves that we, the supposedly blameless, remain pure.
The abilities of the human mind before conversion terrify me. Truly, vertigo seizes me when I consider how the historical water of Jacob, the biological refuge of entire centuries, appears suddenly in her eyes simply like a muddy, almost pitiable pretext, as the stranger wayfarer offers her an entirely different, an inconceivable, a transcendent gift. A living water. The grace, that is, of the All-Holy Spirit, which, according to Nikiphoros Theotokis, can transform the exhausted man into an inexhaustible source of teaching that shall water everyone, leading them to eternal life.[1] The five ghosts are evaporated at once. The agony of the stone waterpot is dissolved before the revelation of the Messiah, leaving behind in a pure, in an almost childlike, in a paralyse-ing ecstasy her entire existence. A condition that pulls down from the foundations the pharisaic logic of purity, which strips completely the hypocrisy of all those who think that they hold the keys of the kingdom simply because they preserve their clothes spotless, at the very same hour that their soul reeks of a corpse and incurable condemnation. Fall, thou seest, hath secret scales. Thou fallest, thou art smashed, thou art desolated. But perhaps finally from the bottom of the well, from that extreme darkness, the heaven may be seen more clearly in relation to those who walk blinded by their own arrogance in the light of day.
I feel literally to be stifled sometimes by the sterile religious propriety. The condemnatory mob is nothing but a pack of iron teeth that chew the silence, ready at any moment to grow wild and to devour whichever weak man, every spiritually derailed human being who happened to stumble. And this rage of the «pure» to stone, I conjecture that it is nothing else but their own, their absolutely unconfessed terror. They hate the fallen man, exactly because they see in his desolated face their fragile nature and their own suppressed desires. But the truth finds always its way through cracks. She however, the Samaritan woman, while she carries against her flesh all the gloom, stands proud opposite the Knower of hearts. She asks Him face to face with paradoxical courage about ancient traditions, about mountains and places of worship, as if her mind struggles instinctively to escape from the mud of the past, seeking a theology large enough, spacious enough to fit her pain. The longing for the infinite is born exactly there where human dignity is shattered, leaving the soul naked and entirely unfortified opposite the unutterable.
At the moment of their soul-shaking dialogue, the material need simply fades out. The empty shell of her formerly rotten life is filled suffocatingly, it overflows, it carries away in its waters the entire social shame, confirming Saint John Chrysostom: «See zeal and wisdom, she came to draw water, and because she hit upon the true source, she despised now the sensible one, teaching us… within the hearing of spiritual things to overlook all things of life… and she spontaneously, without anyone commanding her, leaveth the waterpot and doeth the work of an evangelist having sprouted wings from her joy» (trans.).[2]
Entire cities are roused by her lips. Men who condemned her publicly, who perhaps exploited her in secret, now follow her enchanted by the light of a face which until yesterday morning they considered the greatest defilement of their city. Her gaze, like a fiery sword, broke the bonds of the law, dissolved the rabbinical certainties, transformed the personal trauma into a shout of redemption.
Geographical and ethnological boundaries of the faith are abolished on the same day, demanding henceforth radical, internal, almost exhausting honesty, «in spirit and in truth» (John 4:24). The sterile ritualism collapses before the eyes of the ecumene. God stands silent opposite us. He seeketh not certificates of virtue, but open hearts. He seeks our wounds. The deep, the unhealed and bleeding gashes which prove that we wrestled truly with our darkness, that we thirsted so much that we were forced to drink from the worst bog of history, waiting simply, even for a moment, for some unknown wayfarer. To sit beside us. And to ask us simply for a little water.
[1] Nikephoros Theotokis, Kyriakodromion [Sunday Sermonary], vol. 1 (Athens: Andreas Koromilas Printing House, 1840), 64. Original text: «Πάλιν ἡ γυνὴ γήϊνα φρονεῖ! νομίζει φθαρτὸν καὶ γήϊνον, οὐχὶ δὲ ἄφθαρτον καὶ οὐράνιον τοῦ σωτῆρος τὸ ὕδωρ… Ἐπειδὴ λοιπὸν οὐδὲ ταῦτα τὰ λόγια ἴσχυσαν ἀναβιβάσαι τὸν νοῦν αὐτῆς εἰς τὰ ὑψηλότερα νοήματα, δι ἄλλου τρόπου ὁ φιλανθρωπότατος ἐφέλκει αὐτὴν πρὸς τὴν πίστιν… κάλεσον, λέγει, τὸν ἄνδρα σου…».
[2] John Chrysostom, Ta Heuriskomena Panta [The Complete Findings], in Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, ed. Jacques-Paul Migne, vol. 59 (Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1862), 196. Original text: «Οὕτω γὰρ ὑπὸ τῶν εἰρημένων ἀνήφθη, ὡς καὶ τὴν ὑδρίαν ἀφεῖναι, καὶ τὴν χρείαν δι’ ἣν παρεγένετο, καὶ δραμοῦσαν εἰς τὴν πόλιν, πάντα τὸν δῆμον ἑλκύσαι πρὸς τὸν Ἰησοῦν. […] Ήλθεν ὑδρεύσασθαι· καὶ ἐπειδὴ τῆς ἀληθινῆς πηγῆς ἐπέτυχε, κατεφρόνησε λοιπὸν τῆς αἰσθητῆς, διδάσκουσα ἡμᾶς […] ἐν τῇ τῶν πνευματικῶν ἀκροάσει πάντων ὑπερορᾶν τῶν βιωτικῶν […] αὕτη δὲ αὐτομάτως, οὐδενὸς παραγγείλαντος, ἀφίησι τὴν ὑδρίαν καὶ εὐαγγελιστῶν ἔργον ποιεῖ ὑπὸ τῆς χαρᾶς ἀναπτερωθεῖσα».
Bibliography
Chrysostom, John. Ta Heuriskomena Panta [The Complete Findings]. In Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca. Edited by Jacques-Paul Migne. Vol. 59. Paris: J.-P. Migne, 1862. URL: https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Patrologie_cursus_completus_seu_biblioth/Fdg3AQAAMAAJ?hl=el&gbpv=1
Theotokis, Nikephoros. Kyriakodromion [Sunday Sermonary]. Vol. 1. Athens: Andreas Koromilas Printing House, 1840. URL: https://www.google.ca/books/edition/Nik%C4%93phoru_Theotoku_Kyriakodromion_t%C5%8Dn/7IFBAAAAcAAJ?hl=el&gbpv=1
