3

Apocalypse of Love.

Jesus was tired. So was the Samaritan Lady working to fill her pitcher with some noonday water at Jacob’s well. Never a big respecter of social taboos, Jesus stomps on a handful of them and looks this woman in her eyes and asks her for a drink. She sighed; men were always asking her to serve them.

There was a way of things, and this man, a Samaritan hating Jew so far as she could tell, was apparently not up to speed. She pushed back on the request. People like me don’t do things for people like you.

This is when things started to get weird. Jesus explained that his request was actually something of a wrapper on a gift. He didn’t actually want anything from her, but desired for her to have something instead. “Living Water” is how he put it. Something to quench a different, deeper sort of thirst. Allowing that they were both speaking in metaphor, she admitted she wanted whatever this was.

“Then go get your husband,” Jesus said. Not very subtle, Jesus. She doubtless preferred metaphors.

The woman’s eyes widened. This guy played by a different list of rules. Or was nuts. She explained she had no husband to go get, and Jesus agreed. “He’s not your husband. The other four were…but not this guy you’re shacked up with now. You’re right.”

The woman’s stomach flip-flopped. She probably came to the well alone everyday to avoid being known, confronted. And here she was suddenly experiencing both by way of an outta towner.

She tried to change the topic and talk about religion, a favorite side road for religious people when real life jumps out in front of the car.

The woman pried open an old debate about where God wants people to pray and sing to him from. Jesus graciously allowed her to run with the slack, then explained God isn’t really beholden to, or perhaps even interested in, human veneration systems.

“There’s going to come a time,” Jesus said, “starting now, where real worship of humanity’s Source won’t be about this place or that place, this group but not that group; It will be about the Spirit, and about Truth.”

Like Peter in the boat listening to Jesus preach toward the shore, she could sense something profoundly different in this man’s words. She worked up the courage to ask in a round-about way the suspicion that was boiling up inside her.

“We await Messiah. He will explain all these things to us,” she said. A question mark was drawn on her inflection.

“I am the Messiah.”

When Peter was confronted with El Roi, The God Who Sees, he immediately wanted to get some distance and had to be told to not be afraid. In a way, his reaction betrayed how manmade his god was. He thought God “finds things out” the closer God gets, like an old man squinting at you as you walk close, recognizing you by degrees as you draw close to his rocking chair.

After composing himself at Jesus’ invitation to stop being scared, Peter left his fishing net and became a fisher of people.

The woman was also confronted with El Roi, left her water pitcher by the well and ran back into town to become a bucketer of people. She isn’t recorded as being afraid. She seems to like being found out by One unthreatened by her backstory.

—-image—-

She went home to celebrate the revelation that judgment and love are, despite what shame and fear-mongering insist, the same thing. You and I learned God loves but has to judge us with a standard so elevated God can’t help but lovingly punish us forever. This woman was known and it hadn’t cost her. It had freed her.

She was trading veils and pretense for Spirit and Truth, running through her judgmental little town inviting others to experience the same.

“Come see a man who knows everything I ever did and was good to me anyway. Is this Messiah? I think it is!”

The word holy means “set off to the side,” or “special by comparison.” But what if the church wasn’t just holy in its purported rightness, or even in its sin properly managed, but by its not penalizing people for being honest? What if there was no divulgation that could scare the church because the church celebrates seeing people as its God does, seeing people as they were to be seen in the Garden, before there was such rampant fearful self-preservation and pants? Truly that would make Christianity different than other religions, which all demand sanctioned behaviors built atop suppressed guilt and shame and the fear of being found out.

Would The Way and The Truth and The Life be offended if we made the church a safe place where people ran home and said, “I told them exactly what was going on and it cost me no inclusion! Come and see!”

In the book of Genesis, after the creation narrative of nothing becoming everything, we’re faced with the story of two nudists whose life consists of gardening and naps. The rules? All dos, save for one don’t. This situation they manage to ruin completely with one irresistible granny smith.

The result of their disobedience provides a foundation for traditional Christian doctrine; There is a propensity for human beings, from their very origins, to do that which is prohibited. To defy on impulse what Wisdom lays out as necessary for life. Original sin, as it’s been dubbed. Kids steal cookies. Teens have practice sex. Adults build and expand on the first two. All have sinned and fallen short. Otherwise sane people routinely do what is bad for them in the singular and in the plural. It’s always been this way. Genesis tells in broad strokes about our individual contributions to a species systemically tainted with rebellion and regret.

When they realize they have acted rebelliously the text depicts them as suddenly noticing their nakedness. If it’s referring to mere nudity the scene is unintelligible. “Hey, we’re not wearing a thing we’ve never heard of!” I’m persuaded a different sort of exposure is in view.

When they sew together fig leaves they aren’t inventing laundry. They’re doing what you and I always do when we have something about us that we believe that could estrange us, they’re devising a way to control the others’ impressions. Putting a little something, a fig leaf, some cash, witty banter, an in-ground pool, Bible recitation, varsity, the 5.0 exhaust package, cleavage or biceps between us so you have less of an opportunity of feeling badly about me.

This is to say the first effects of the first sin aren’t moral, they’re psychological. These two rebels don’t wake up to arson or pornography or drums in church. They become concerned, and perhaps obsessed, with veiling selections of their person in order to keep even a plastic vestige of the peace they once had. They obscure parts of themselves to each other, the text going on to show them hiding behind trees when they heard God coming.

Get away from us Lord. We’re sinners. If only you knew.

“Do not judge from mere appearances; for the lift laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over the depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace and joy. The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.”

“The most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellent man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.”

“Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.”

The word “hell” in the english language puts us in mind pretty quickly of a place of punishment. A location apart. The word actually stems from a Proto-Germanic term, “halja” which means “one who covers up or hides something.” It has the further original sense of something buried or hidden underground. From Greek the early followers of Christ borrowed the word Hades, both a netherworld realm and the title of this realm’s god. Hades comes from “eido”, or “cannot see” or “out of view.” Hades’ other name, Pluto, is similarly known as the god of the hidden underworld, specifically the god of earth’s buried minerals, and is what we named the coldest, most distant, hardest-to-view rock in our solar system.

Hell is, at its roots, a thing or state at odds with being seen. A thing unreached by light.

The story of the primordial humans in the Garden isn’t just about doing that which was forbidden. It’s about all of us, from the very beginning, sewing together our own hell, or own system of hiding and suppressing, to see if we can pass as lovable, since we’re sure we’re not. That is, from the very beginning, really great people become obsessed with themselves.

Since a very young age, we’ve been convinced the whole truth about ourselves was a liability to what we cherish most; unmitigated connection to others and to Other. And so we hide, cautiously peeking out from our layers of social, economic, educational, hierarchal, sexual, religious flora, keeping hid the parts of ourselves too detrimental to our inclusion. We hide what’s hideous so we can appear not to be. Just as Carl Jung taught, we cram the liabilities of our personality flaws into the back store rooms of our mind where even we can’t get at them, and go on living the fig leaf pageant. We hide from each other. We hide from ourselves. And, however irrationally, we hide from the God who sees all and loads the boat full of fish anyway.

With a straight face, many of us call ourselves the people of truth.

In the New Testament Greek, the word translated truth is the word “alētheia.” With “A” at the beginning to negate, the second part is “Lanthano” which means to cover or hide. The truth is simply that which has been un-hidden. It’s not really a proposition or a winning argument. It’s just the way things really are underneath. Apocalypse, where faith traditions unanimously seem to know everything is heading, is another word that literally means un-cover. To reveal. Peter feared the apocalypse. The Samaritan lady embraced it.

A people of truth must understand that being afraid always makes us hide. We have to accept that every action, every inaction, every thought, every true intention, every suppressed doubt and rage and desire to satiate our many hungers and lusts, is already known. Accepting this is how we begin to understand what Love can really do. Fearful creatures hide. Hiding creatures are enslaved deceivers. Fearful, hiding creatures strain to love anyone but themselves. God knows this.

All of your garbage bothered mom and dad. Teacher. Spouse. The pastor and the elders and that lady in the prayer circle. Perhaps your life is the story of how you’ve hid your world from each of these people and more.

How about saying yes to the invitation to fast from the fig leaves, from the safety of duplicity, and from the fear of the only One who has seen us entirely and is no less into us?

How about having the courage to not be afraid of the One whose opening line has always been, don’t be afraid?