Fifth Sunday of Pascha: Sunday of the Samaritan Woman; The Holy Martyr Theodotus of Ancyra; Holy Martyrs Peter, Dionysius and those with them; The Seven Holy Virgins.
Acts 11:19-26, 29-30; John 4:5-42.
Read John 4:5-42
There’s more to the picture than meets the eye. And there was a lot to meet the eye in the picture Jesus’s disciples and the Samaritan woman were seeing: the field Jacob purchased from Shechem after being reunited with his brother Esau, whose birthright he had taken (Genesis 33); the Samaritans, the victims of Assyria’s cultural genocide of the northern Israelite tribes through intermarriage, whom the Jews no longer considered as having a birthright with them. It was difficult for the disciples and the woman to get past what they could see and all that went with it.
But Jesus saw more in the picture. He was looking with different eyes. Where the Samaritan woman saw water in a well, Jesus saw the deepest human thirst, able to be quenched by the Holy Spirit. Where the disciples surmised that their Lord must be hungry, Jesus experienced the deep sustenance that comes from helping others grow in faith.
Looking below the surface in this way is not an esoteric spiritualized thing disconnected from what’s right in from of our eyes, it simply requires looking at who and what we see with God’s perspective and not avoiding it because of what it might require of us. Jesus saw differently because he looked at people differently, and then he didn’t look away because he might have to deprive himself of some good. He calls us to look beyond the satisfaction of our appetites to the lived physical and spiritual reality of others and then to give ourselves to participate with God in some way to transform them.