Jn 4:5-42 (5-54)

In the passage about the Samaritan woman, John contrasts the mechanisms of religiosity with the dynamics of Faith, comparing the images of an ancient well with a fresh spring of water [cf. Greek text].

While we bend over a well and have to draw water with effort, the spring is readily available. We can even dive into it without the danger of getting trapped and drowning.

The ever-flowing and ever-new spring of water is the Person of Christ: a gift that Providence offers us to grasp in the circumstances of real life, in perpetual becoming.

The water in the well is at the bottom of a dark tunnel - animated only by reflections here and there (coming from distant external light sources).

It is almost stagnant - and does not definitively quench thirst, but rather requires us to draw it again with the same effort.

Sometimes the bucket used to draw it is mishandled, swings and falls down - with no possibility of recovery.

Common religious sense leads us to continually have to recapture or seek perfection - focusing the examination, therapy, and relationships on ourselves: examining, identifying, correcting, redoing; verifying and starting all over again.

Exhausted, disappointed, irritated.

Devotion and fulfilment do not produce satiety - we know this well - on the contrary, paradoxically, they accentuate the thirst.

The procession of external obedience and mannered respectability, to be offered continuously to ingratiate oneself with this silent God and his elect (equally indifferent), unnerves the soul.

In this growing, albeit unexpressed, inner turmoil, unfulfilled desire risks ruining the foundations of our personality - and the impulse to walk the path towards another realisation, perhaps vague but ours.

Despite the constant forced return to drink and despite the 'certainty' of doctrines and disciplines, religious piety [which spirals] ultimately produces total existential dissatisfaction and spiritual bewilderment.

Living Faith is not a kind of object or ideology (which one may or may not have), but rather a Relationship.

It proceeds from a God who reveals himself, challenges us and calls us by name. And it addresses the deepest layers of being and reality.

Its varied, rich, open face does not coincide with common thinking, but rather intercepts our desire for fullness of life. In this way, it corresponds to us and conquers us.

In this relationship, Faith, which is born precisely from listening, is ignited when the initiative of the Father, who manifests and reveals himself in a proposal that comes to us, is accepted and not rejected.

This is not a one-off circumstance, but something that gushes forth and proceeds wave after wave throughout our existence. With all the surprises that time brings.

Incandescent magma, which from time to time challenges us, sabotages us or astounds us.

In evolution, this dynamic establishes an invisible Presence in the hidden Self, the unquenchable living fire of our founding Eros.

A perceptible echo - even in the genius of time, in the furrows of personal history, in the folds of events and relationships, advice, (opposing) evaluations and even fractures.

The Relationship of Faith has different approaches. The first stage is that of Faith Assent: the person recognises themselves in a world of knowledge that corresponds to them.

It is a very dignified level, but common to all religions and philosophies.

Scrutinising the Word, we understand that the specificity of biblical Faith concerns concrete existence much more than thought or discipline: it has a different character from codes, it is spousal.

Already in the First Testament, Faith is typically that trust of the Bride [in Hebrew, Israel is feminine] who has complete confidence in the Bridegroom.

She knows that by relying on God-With, she will flourish authentically and enjoy the fullness of life, even when going through unpleasant vicissitudes.

Faith lived in the Spirit of the Risen One enjoys other facets, which are decisive in giving colour to our journey in the world and to our full maturation, with the joy of living.

[In everything, it is essential both to listen to Sacred Scripture and to move from the whirlwind of thoughts that fragment our inner eye to perception, that is, to a more intense contemplative gaze that knows how to rest on ourselves and on things].

The child of God becomes a brother and intimate friend of the Lord not simply through a common, even passionate belief, but through a personal inner action.

The third step of Christological faith is precisely a kind of appropriation: the subject recognises the meaning of the Gospels in events and in himself.

He now identifies with the episodes of the Lord, without neurosis or caricature. From the Word within, he extracts solutions in a natural, immediate way.

Now sure of the friendly reciprocity experienced in the Gifts, he takes possession of the meek and strong heart of the Living One in him, with a stroke of the hand and without any prescribed merit.

Quoting St. Bernard, Alfonso Maria de' Liguori states: ' The merit that I lack to enter Paradise, I usurp from the merits of Jesus Christ'.

No arcane procedures or discipline.

Please note: these are not 'tests' of vicarious substitution - as if Jesus had to pay off a debt of sins because the Father needed blood and at least one person to pay dearly for it.

God redeems us with educational risk.

It is true that sending a lamb among wolves means its end is sealed. But it is also the only way to convince men - still in a pre-human condition - that competition is not the life of people, but rather of ferocious beasts.

The lamb is the meek being that makes even wolves reflect: only by completely appropriating it do the beasts realise that they are such.

Thus we can begin to say, 'I' as human beings rather than beasts. 

Of course, only people who are reconciled with their own circumstances do good. But the authentic and full best is critical and global; beyond our reach.

It is not a brilliant or personal achievement. We are not omnipotent.

A further stage in the journey of life in Christ and in the Spirit is that of the so-called Faith-Magnet.

This too takes the form of an action, because the soul-bride reads the signs of the times, interprets the surrounding reality and her own inclinations... and, grasping the specific weight of the Future, anticipates and actualises it.

Thus avoiding wasting life in support of dead branches.

But the final stage (I would say the peak), perhaps even more 'perfect' than this Faith-Trigger, is that of Faith-Wonder.

Revelation-Astonishment: it configures the specific belief of the Incarnation, because it recognises the Treasures that lie hidden behind our dark sides.

These Pearls will come into play during the course of existence [they will activate what they must when necessary] and it will be a wonder to discover them.

The pierced cocoon will make its Butterfly, which is not 'confirmation', or a construction homologated to prototypes, but rather enchantment. Unveiling.

Magic and a new Covenant of sunsets and sunrises.

To compare the varied work of Faith in us, and its multifaceted richness - and to emphasise (perhaps in a gestural and crude, but effectively paradoxical way) its specificity, I would cite James Ensor's painting 'The Entry of Christ into Brussels in 1888' as a counterpoint.

The author emphasises the depersonalising indifference of widespread religious life, where everything goes into the pot of indistinct devotion.

In the folklore of the colourful crowd, pious faces and caricatured grins are confused. A contrasting effect in which we perhaps recognise ourselves: pagan people, with many 'husbands' [i.e. idols].

As if to say: in the common and most customary Western religious sense, whether or not we desire Jesus to come into our lives - whether we follow or betray the crucified Lord - does not make much difference.

Christ sits on the Source, not on the well. Rather, he overlaps it.

What I did not know was there: Faith, the naked eye, guarantee

(Jn 4:43-54)

    Starting in the fourth week, the Lenten liturgy takes a decisive step towards Jerusalem, which is already taking shape in the light of Easter.

The evangelist wants to introduce us to a more intimate familiarity with the mystery of the person and story of the Son of God; a communion on the level of being that touches other areas.

He takes up the rhythm of the catechumen's inner journey (v. 47) to introduce us to his Vision, which regenerates our flesh and puts us back into the Exodus (v. 50), which unleashes a whole dynamism around us (v. 51).

On the Way, every creature is restored to itself and to the radical goodness of the original plan - rediscovered first within, then outside itself.

To have faith is to set out and allow oneself to be traumatised. 'For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honour in his own country' (v. 44). Why?

By the term 'country', the synoptics imply Nazareth.

The fourth Gospel, on the other hand, alludes to a more theological dimension: that of the Word, which transcends local privileges, targeting the ideology of the religious centre as well as the national institution.

After showing in the episode of the Samaritan woman (vv. 1-42) the meaning of Christ as the new Temple for both Jews and 'heretics', John illustrates its meaning for pagans.

It is as if the dimension of the Resurrection ('after two days': v. 43) moved the House of God to the whole world.

Observers of Judaism were forbidden to pass through Samaria and stay with the Samaritans (cf. Jn 4:9), who were considered mixed-race (theologically polygamous: Jn 4:17-18).

Jesus does not limit himself to his own lineage, nor even to his own religion.

In Galilee, he welcomes a super-pagan who begs for help because he realises that the world he comes from is incapable of generating life (vv. 46-47, 49, 53).

Often our piety prevents friendship between different cultures and neutralises the power of intimate self-healing that everyone - of any ethnicity or creed - carries within themselves.

The banal auspices of cultural baggage block freedom of thought from what is not yet foreseeable, fixing stereotypes.

Those steeped in idols no longer see anything; they do not even encounter themselves and their loved ones.

And they do not experience unknown forces. At most, they believe in the pagan god protector, who performs miracles at random.

Those who judge with the naked eye... suppose they see the Lord healing through extraordinary gestures (v. 48: 'unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe').

They miss the life-giving power of the Word, which touches without being seen, but makes Jesus present in his work and in his incisive, effective entirety.

Christ is interested in making people understand how Faith "works" in its pure quality: what dynamics it activates - not the spectacle of religion, which is entirely external and rhymes with impression, escape, sensation, devotion.

These superficial expressions close the crowd in intimism, or arouse interest in oddities that startle the senses, arousing a moment of enthusiasm, but not the centre of each person.

The newness of Christ is not transmitted by contact, but by deeply accepting his unexpected Word-event. It is not subject to a principle of locality or other religious guarantee.

The external gaze is convinced by miracles, but does not grasp the profound meaning of the Sign that speaks to us of the Person of the Lord - the true spectacle. Everything is still to be experienced.

Commenting on the Tao Tê Ching (xii), Master Wang Pi states: 'Those who are for the eye become slaves to creatures. For this reason, the saint is not for the eye'.

Master Ho-shang Kung adds: 'The lover of colours harms the essence and loses enlightenment (...) The disordered gaze causes the essence to overflow to the outside'.

The curious wait to see and verify. Thus they die of relative hopes, without roots in themselves.

Only in Faith can we discover what is not yet visible to the naked eye, nor did we know it was there.

To internalise and live the message:

How does adherence to the Word of Christ help to overcome the trivial desire for clamour or escape?

Returning to 'your home', did you discover what you did not know was there? Did someone announce the Good News to you?