Sermon preached on Lent III at St. John's Hills Road in Cambridge.
This is the extended version of the sermon I preached at St. John's church in Cambridge this morning, with the longer intro that was cut off for the sake of brevity but which I wanted to include in the blog. As a young child, my favorite memories were the weekends I would spend with my grandmother. She used to take me on walks in our native Rome, we would visit the ancient ruins, museums, churches. Among my favorite churches we first visited together is the basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
The church stands on ancient foundations, it was built over a temple dedicated to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. Quite ironic for a Dominican foundation, the religious order founded by Saint Dominic in order to evangelize the world through studying and preaching. The church is only a short distance from the Pantheon, and right outside its unassuming façade, marked by plaques remindful of the Tiber river floodings, stands Bernini’s fine elephant sculpture, supporting an Egyptian obelisk, strategically placed so that its rear end would be in good view of the then Dominican prior’s rooms.
It is one of Rome’s few surviving Gothic churches, in a city in which much of the sacred architecture is dominated by the domes, theater and drama of the Baroque built to overwhelm the senses, Santa Maria sopra Minerva has a different atmosphere, its tall, pointed arches and deep blue vaulted ceiling draw the eye upward to a different way of contemplating the divine. The church itself is rich in extraordinary art treasures. Standing in quiet triumph by the altar is a statue of the risen Christ by Michelangelo, holding the cross, once the instrument of the passion and now an instrument of salvation.
Not too far, in the north transept is a banner painted by Fra Angelico’s favorite pupil, Benozzo Gozzoli, better known for decorating the Magi Chapel for the Medici in Florence, besides it is his tomb, the saintly patron of the arts. Beyond the transept, in the sacristy is the cell of Dominican mystic and patron saint of Italy, Saint Catherine of Siena, decorated with beautiful Renaissance frescoes by Rome's own master, Antoniazzo Romano, the saint herself laying under the high altar. In the south transept, is Rome’s finest example of Florentine Renaissance art, the Carafa Chapel, decorated by Filippino Lippi, (son to Filippo and pupil to Botticelli, inheriting and mixing both in his own glorious art), with stories from the life of Mary and Thomas Aquinas, theology made incarnate. In the north aisle is a fine monument by Bernini, in the south, a fine tomb by Andrea Bregno with a fresco of Christ and two Angels by pictor papalis Melozzo da Forlì.
The church is not only filled with art, but also with history. Several popes are also buried there, two from the powerful Medici family, Leo X, Luther’s great friend, and Clement VII, the man who created us by denying Henry VIII that annulment… on a lighter note, he also commissioned the fine Final Judgment fresco to Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. Pope Pius V, remembered for the calling the Christian alliance that won the naval battle of Lepanto is also buried there, he is the reason why popes wear white, it started the tradition by wearing the white Dominican habit in office.
But enough with the artistic and historic background of this church. You may be wondering why I am bringing it into the sermon. I want you to visualize this amazing space and I want you to follow me, walking amidst Rome’s streets, looking at the Pantheon’s enormous dome and finally walking into this church, with grandeur, masterpieces, monuments at every corner. What stayed with me the most is my encounter with something almost hidden.
As you come in through the right-hand door in the West-end, squeezed between the counter-façade and one of the many imposing chapels commissioned by Rome’s great families, is a tiny space, almost invisible and so quiet. A space that hardly looks like a chapel, a space that feels like the sort of place where you’re not even supposed to wonder in. There, illumined by an almost ethereal indirect light, in a room without any decoration, is the simple baptismal font, a quiet, intimate space, easily overlooked really.
Behind the font hangs a simple painting. It is what we call in art history, the iconography of the Noli Me Tangere, this was executed by Marcello Venusti, a Mannerist master. Mannerism was the dramatic and slightly bonkers tail-end of Renaissance art. As a younger man, I remember standing there and looking at this intimate scene. In that iconography, Mary Magdalene, reaches towards the risen Christ, the first one to witness the resurrection, but he gently stops her uttering the words Noli Me Tangere – do not hold on to me. It is the intimacy of this scene I find particularly beautiful. When we think of the resurrection we often imagine something triumphant, overwhelming, in art history Christ is often depicted bursting out of the tomb or sarcophagus holding a banner, this is a completely different language.
The first encounter with the risen Lord is not like that at all. It happens quietly, in a garden, according to the Gospels of Mark and John, between the risen Christ and Mary Magdalene. The Gospel of John tells us she even mistakes him for a gardener, and that is how Jesus is often depicted in the iconography of the Noli Me Tangere. That small corner in that grandiose Roman church feels slightly like that. It is hidden, intimate, easily overlooked, the kind of place where the divine can be encountered unexpectedly. This is how our Lord meets us.
As we journey towards these forty days of Lent, walking with Christ through the desert, towards the Passion and Resurrection, we might expect God to appear in dramatic ways, yet the Gospels often tells us something completely different. Christ can appear discretely in quiet places: in gardens, dusty roads, locked rooms, today, Christ appeared besides a well. Jesus is traveling through Samaria, when he arrives in a town named Sychar, where he sits beside Jacob’s Well. In the middle of the day, in the heat of the Middle East, Jesus is exhausted. Then a woman comes to collect some water. This detail is very important.
In that time, most women would have collected the water in the early morning or in the evening, when the heat was less severe. This woman came in the middle of the day. A number of scholars believe that this is because she wanted to avoid other women, possibly because of the difficult story that Jesus would later reveal. She comes to Christ alone. In that solitude she meets Christ. Jesus approaches her with a simple request: “give me a drink”. That may sound surprising, but for the woman it was a great shock, because Jesus is a Jew and she is a Samaritan.
For centuries, these two people had avoided one another due to political conflict, religious differences, and cultural hostility. A Jewish rabbi addressing a Samaritan woman would have been considered a scandal. Yet Jesus engages in that conversation anyway, and he does not begin with a sermon or lecture, but with a need: “give me water”, a sign of human vulnerability from the Son of God. And so, a door opens. She asks: “how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” The boundary is smashed. At that point, Jesus utters the words that shift the conversation entirely: “if you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you “give me a drink”, you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water”.
Initially, she the woman is confused, she looks at the well, wondering where the living water could come from. Jesus is speaking about something much deeper: “everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again,” he says. “But whoever drinks of the water that I will give will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” Jesus is speaking about the deep thirst of the human heart, the need for meaning, forgiveness, truth, communion with God. The water that he offers is not drawn from a well in the ground, but it is that life of God given in us, that grace which becomes a living spring within our very soul.
The conversion becomes more person as Jesus tells the woman to call her husband and when she says she has none, Jesus tells her he knows her story. She had five husbands, and the man she now lives with is not her husband. A moment that would have caused great shame then. Jesus does not condemn her, he does not end the conversation, he continues speaking with her, inviting her into a deeper understanding of God. At that point, the woman realizes she is standing before someone extraordinary. She recognizes him to be a prophet and then asks the question that divided Jews and Samaritans: “where is the true place of worship? On the mountain or in Jerusalem?” – Jesus changes the response completely: “the hour is coming, when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem… the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth”.
It is at this point that worship is no longer confined to the temple, God can be encountered wherever hearts are open to receive him through the Spirit. The woman then asks of the Messiah and Jesus replies: “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” Jesus does not reveal himself to kings, prophets or even the apostles but to a Samaritan woman in the middle of a simple, daily action. An ordinary moment that becomes a moment of revelation.
Something changes that woman. She leaves her water jar and runs to the city where she encourages everyone, she meets to see Jesus. Her errand becomes God’s journey of faith within the hearts of those in her town. The Samaritans come to see Jesus and many convert. Perhaps this is our invitation too. We don’t often encounter God in dramatic or spectacular ways, instead we often encounter him like Mary Magdalene did in that beautiful painting, in a quiet moment, in a hidden corner of our life, like he did with the Samaritan woman, who was expecting water and instead found God.
The promise of the Gospel is the same of that Christ who met her then and there and of that Christ who still meets us today, offering living water, a water that becomes within us a spring welling up to eternal life.
