Lent III – A
February 24th, AD 2009
Meadowvale
Lutheran Church, Mississauga Pastor Peter Lisinski
"GOD'S
PERFECT LOVE"
(Romans
531~115
St. John
4.5-26)
Last weekend I heard a news report about a Nigerian woman,
Amina Laval, who was sentenced to death for the crime of adultery.
Although that's an extreme example of the Sharia law associated with
Islam, it does reflect a commitment to upholding marriage as the foundation for
a stable society. Jews and Christians also share the conviction that sexual
intimacy is rightly reserved for, and restricted to, two consenting adults who
have made a publicly recognized commitment of exclusive fidelity to one another.
The Judeo-Christian tradition of marriage traces its origin
to Genesis 2 (24). "Therefore
a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become
one flesh." Jesus himself quoted those very words to discourage divorce
--and he added the familiar words still quoted at many Christian weddings today.
“What God has joined together, let no one separate" (Mk. 10:9).
Jesus discouraged divorce in order to protect women from the
injustices of a patriarchal society in which they had no legal rights or
status except as property of first their fathers, and then their husbands.
Only men had the right to file for divorce, and divorced women were often
abandoned to a life of poverty and homelessness, which forced many them into
prostitution or into marriages of convenience, which meant living with the
public humiliation and personal shame of being labelled an 'adulteress'! Today's
Gospel tells the story of one such socially stigmatized woman.
On his way through Samaria Jesus met a woman who had been
married and divorced five times. John
tells us that she came to Jacob's Well alone, at noon.
Were she not a social outcast she would have joined some of the other
women in their daily routine of coming early in the morning to avoid the heat of
the noonday sun She was also rejected by any eligible bachelors looking for a wife.
After
all, a woman divorced five times must have serious difficulty relating with men. Even in a permissive society like ours, where the standards
of sexual morality are set by Hollywood celebrities, five is an unusually high
number of marriages.
Probably the most common reason for divorce was a woman's inability
to conceive children, which the Bible portrays as the worst possible public
disgrace for any married woman. But
whatever the reason, when Jesus met the Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well she
was living in a common-law relationship, without the support or blessing of her
community, and without the personal security or legal protection of a marriage
covenant.
It is clear that in a society where sexual relationships
outside the sanctity of marriage were strictly forbidden -- and often severely
punished -- this woman was, at best, a moral failure; at worst, a sexual
deviant, and therefore not a suitable role model for what it means to be a
woman, a wife, or a mother! In the
eyes of respectable, religious people she was unworthy and unwelcome to share
in the social life of her community.
But not in the eyes of Jesus! Knowing full well, as she herself later confessed, everything
she had ever done, Jesus shocked his own disciples by welcoming her into his
companionship without a single word of condemnation, or command to break her
current relationship! Jesus
reached out to offer her the living water of God's perfect love -- love that is
unconditional and unlimited; the very love for which her weary soul longed; the
very love all sinful human beings need -- believers and unbelievers, married and
unmarried, divorced and remarried!
God has established marriage as the foundation for human
society because, more than any other relationship, marriage teaches the two
sinners who live within its holy communion to love one another in the same way
that God's perfect love in Jesus Christ loves all sinners.
As the Apostle Paul says in today's reading from Romans, "God proves
his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”
What a blessing it has been to know that, in spite of all the
un-lovable things about me that my wife, Rosarie, has discovered over the past
thirty-five years, "she still loves me any way!
Whatever your marital status at the moment -- married or
single, divorced or remarried, engaged, or just hoping to get married someday
(or not) -- may the living water of God's perfect love in Jesus Christ bring
healing to any old relationship wounds, and strength to survive any new ones;
and may the grace of God's unconditional and unlimited love well up within us,
and spring forth to renew all our relationships with God's perfect love.