“A Well, a Woman and Living Water” (John 4:1-42)

Just outside the city of Nablus on the Palestinian West Bank is the village of Balata. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was the site of the major rioting that is now infamously known as the First Intifada. All told, that violence led to the deaths of more than a thousand people.

Perhaps less known is the fact that until the time of those uprisings, Balata was also the home of as many as half of the world’s tiny remaining population of Samaritans. But for Christians Balata’s claim to fame lies within the precincts of its Eastern Orthodox church and monastery. There you will find what purports to be (and likely is) the site of Jacob’s well—the very location of this morning’s reading from the Gospel according to John—and from which you can still draw water to this day.

In New Testament times the town was known as Sychar. But its Old Testament name was Shechem. It was at Shechem that the Lord appeared to Abram and gave him the promise, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:6-7). It was at Shechem that Jacob later settled and built an altar to the Lord (Genesis 33:18-20). It was at Shechem that Joseph’s bones were buried (Joshua 24:32). And generations later it was at Shechem that the people of Israel assembled before Joshua and solemnly pledged, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord… The Lord our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey” (Joshua 24:16,25).

Lying on major trade routes that ran both east-west and north-south, Shechem had once been a significant commercial centre. However, over the centuries it had gradually gone downhill, so that by Jesus’ time all that remained was a sleepy wayside hamlet.

Now if you were travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem, the shortest route would take you through Sychar. That is, if it were not for one serious complication. The problem was that such a route would take you through Samaria. And, as we read in this morning’s passage from John, “Jews [had] no dealings with Samaritans.” The result was that the vast majority of Jewish travellers going from Jerusalem to Galilee would be forced to take a wide sweep eastwards across the Jordan River and later cross it again to head back west into Galilee. Needless to say, this added anywhere from two to four days to their journey.[1]

A Well

Jesus, however, had no such reservations. So it is that we find him with his disciples in the tiny Samaritan village of Sychar. Now John does not tell us what time of year it was when Jesus and his disciples were travelling. But he does tell us the time of day. It was the sixth hour, which means noon. So the sun was at its height. And I know that for much of the year the temperature in that region can reach well into the thirties. So perhaps you can imagine what it must have been like for them to have been journeying on foot under the blazing heat of the near eastern sun.

The sight of the little village must have been a welcome one. Wearied from all the walking they had been doing (Eugene Peterson in his translation in The Message used the words “worn out”) and while the disciples went off to see where they could buy some provisions for lunch, Jesus took the opportunity to sit down in the cool shade beside a well.

So it is that John gives us a little reminder of Jesus’ humanity. He was not Superman or Captain America or Thor. He was not faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive. And he could not leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Rather, as we read in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness…” (Philippians 2:7).

So it is that at the outset of his ministry we find Jesus being tempted by the adversary. A few weeks ago, reading from John 2, we saw him angry, as he drove out the money changers from the Temple, lashing at them with a whip and overturning their tables. Later in the Gospels we find him exhausted to the point that he fell asleep in the stern of one of his followers’ boats—so soundly that even with the waves crashing over the gunwales and threatening to sink it, he continued to sleep (Mark 4:36-38).

Now why is all this important? In the early years of the church there sprang up a form of heresy called Docetism. The core teaching of the Docetists was that Jesus only appeared to be human. That doctrine was quickly rejected by the church for several reasons. First, the fact that Jesus was fully human enables him to relate to us in the fullest possible way. The Letter to the Hebrews affirms that in Jesus “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”. This gives us the assurance that we can come to him in our own weakness, in full confidence that we will find mercy and grace to help us in our times of need (Hebrews 4:15-16).

Secondly, it was the fact that Jesus was fully human that enabled him to be fully your and my representative when he bore our sins on the cross. The Bible recognizes Jesus as the new Adam, who has come into the world to undo all the wrong and destruction that are the result of sin. As the apostle Paul declared to the Christians in Galatia, “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5).

And so in this morning’s reading we meet with a fully human Jesus. Weary and thirsty after a long trek, he took a moment to sit down by the side of a well and rest.

A Woman

The next time he looked up, there was a woman from the village coming to draw water from the well. Not having a bucket of his own, he asks her if he might take a drink from hers. His request is met with a look of horror and raised eyebrows. “What? You, a Jew, asking me, a Samaritan, to share from my bucket?”

At this point you may be asking yourself, what was that about? First of all, the Samaritan woman was well aware that for centuries Jews had regarded all non-Jews—and particularly Samaritans—as unclean. That meant you couldn’t come into physical contact with them or anything they had touched.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, think back a year or two to the covid epidemic. Imagine yourself coming up to a complete stranger and asking if you might take a sip from their water bottle. What kind of response do you think you’d get? “Are you crazy?” “Don’t you take any precautions?”

So begins one of the longest conversations in John’s gospel. And there is something about it that is utterly delightful, as the woman engages Jesus in a deeply thoughtful theological discussion.

Today in our age we might think nothing about it. But you have to realize that the attitude towards women in the first century was poles apart from what it is nowadays in the twenty-first. The very first prayer that every Jewish male recited in the morning, waking with the cockcrow, having barely opened his eyes and before he placed a foot on the ground, was this: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, that you did not create me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.” And here was Jesus, a Jew, engaging in what can only be described as a profound theological dialogue with a woman.

Now when you read the gospels, you find that this is not a one-off incident. Jesus’ attitude towards women was highly countercultural for a first-century Jew. He was happy for a woman—and an unclean one at that—to interrupt him while he was in conversation with a ruler of a synagogue (Luke 8:43-48). He was satisfied to allow Mary to take a place among the men while he was teaching in her home (Luke 10:38-42). He commended a widow as a model of generosity (Mark 12:41-44). He accepted the anointing by a woman’s precious oil as a beautiful foretelling of his death (Mark 14:3-9). And it was women who were the first to bear witness to his resurrection (Mark 16:1-7).

Jesus’ acceptance and honouring of women continued in the early church. As early as the day of Pentecost, quoting from the prophet Joel, the apostle Peter proclaimed,

And in the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

The apostle Paul has been maligned for being a misogynist. But it was he who affirmed that “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28).

And so what we see in this conversation are the seeds of a revolution. We are given a glimpse of the new society—the Jesus community—in which women take their proper place as equals alongside their male counterparts, even as Eve was drawn from the side of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Living Water

But let’s take a look at the conversation itself. Jesus answers the woman’s objection with the response, “If you were aware of who you are talking with, you might have asked him for living water.” Of course the woman thought that Jesus was referring to running water. “Are you crazy? Where are you going to get that kind of water from? You don’t even have a bucket to draw water from this well!” To which Jesus replies, “Whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty again. The water I give will become within them a spring of water gushing forth to eternal life.” But the woman still doesn’t catch on. “Sir, give me that water, and I’ll never have to break my back hauling water from this well again!”

At this point Jesus shifts the conversation in a deeply personal direction. “Go and bring your husband over and we’ll talk more.” When she claims to have no husband, Jesus reveals that he is well aware of the half dozen men who have been a part of her life. You can only imagine the shock and discomfort she must have felt at this revelation. She may have lived a sordid life, but this woman was no slouch. She had all her wits about her. “So! I see you’re a prophet!” she retorts. Then she vainly attempts to divert the conversation into a religious argument: the age-old hostilities surrounding the question as to which group was worshipping in the proper way—the Jews or the Samaritans? This, she thought, would be sure to get away from the touchy subject of her relationships with the opposite sex.

But Jesus is ready for her. God is not concerned about which mountain people worship him on. He is infinitely bigger than that. No, says Jesus, the true God is far more interested in what’s happening on the inside of our lives, not in external rituals. “God is spirit,” Jesus tells her, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. That’s the kind of worshipper God is looking for.”

At this the woman begins to open her true heart and expresses the deep yearning that has long burned within her for the Messiah to come and rescue her. To which Jesus answers, “I who speak to you am he.”

And of course what happens? Just as the conversation is reaching a critical point, who walks into the scene but the disciples! They kept silent, but the woman must have seen the look of horror on their faces, that Jesus was alone with a woman and engaging in conversation with her—and a Samaritan woman at that! She didn’t need anyone to tell her to make herself scarce.

Whether it was in fear of the disciples or in amazement at the man she had been talking with, she dropped her water bottle as she ran off into the village. And there she became the first evangelist in the New Testament: “Come and see a man who told me all that I ever did!” (As though any of the villagers hadn’t been whispering about exactly that topic for years!) “Can this be the Christ?” she asked. And John tells us “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.”

And that’s the thing about living water. If you’ve really had a taste of it, it’s something you can’t keep to yourself. As much as we might like to, as much as we might be tempted to, we cannot bottle it in. The streams of living water will always well up and burst their bounds. And the one who gives them is not only the one who came to the woman at the well, asking, “Give me a drink.” He is also the one who would later cry out for you and for me and for all humankind, “I thirst…” (John 19:28).

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[1]     https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/new-testament/3-pilgrimage-paths-from-galilee-to-jerusalem/

“Rachel and Leah” (Genesis 29:1-12 [16-30] et al.)

 My wife Karen and I may be the only two people in the whole of Canada who do not lament the disappearance of door-to-door mail delivery. About a month after we moved back to Halifax last summer, Canada Post erected a new “superbox” diagonally across the street from our house. For the little while, almost every time we went to pick up mail, it gave us the opportunity to meet our new neighbours and introduce ourselves—and I don’t think it could possibly have happened otherwise.

I remember being present at a presentation some years ago where the speaker made the comment that one of the early factors that have led to the decline of the sense of community in our society over the past 150 years has been the disappearance of the community well. (It has also led to the disappearance of dysentery and cholera, but that’s another issue!) The point he was making was that the well provided a place for people to gather and also a place where they could exchange information and catch up with one another—much like our community mailbox.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that in the Bible wells are often the places where significant conversations transpire. This morning, for example, in the gospel reading, Jesus meets with a woman at a well, who not only discovers where she can find living water but that the person she is speaking with is the Messiah. Last week we saw how Abraham’s servant found a wife for his son Isaac at another well. And in this morning’s Old Testament reading we witness yet another pivotal meeting at a well, as Jacob sets his eyes for the first time on his cousin Rachel and the two fall instantly and incurably in love.

Rachel’s Romance

The story of Rachel and her relationship with Jacob is one of the great romances of the Bible. It is hot and passionate, as Jacob displays the strength of a superhero, dashing across to lift an enormous stone from the mouth of a well so that she and her sheep can have access to its cool, refreshing waters. It continues as he embraces and kisses her and begins to weep aloud, abandoning all the customs and conventions of the day. He is hopelessly smitten with this rapturously beautiful woman.

I wonder how many of us generally think of the Bible as a romantic book. If you’re like me, you’re probably more inclined to go to it to learn about doctrine. I was brought up on the inductive method of Bible study: observe, interpret, apply. And I have no desire to knock that method. It brings a discipline and a focus to Bible study that are vitally important. But the Bible is not just about doctrine—and one thing that the story of Rachel teaches us about, if nothing else, is romance, passion.

Rachel and Jacob’s attraction to each other was instantaneous, as passionate as anything you might see at the movies. Yet it was far more and far deeper than a summer love affair or temporary fling. Theirs was a love that sustained them through time. For seven long years Jacob and Rachel patiently waited for the day her father Laban would allow them to be married. And Genesis tells us, “They seemed like only a few days to him because of his love for her” (Genesis 29:20). Then, when Laban substituted his older daughter Leah for Rachel on their wedding night (and Jacob the trickster was tricked!) he was willing to work another seven years to earn the right to call her his wife. It was a love that did not dim in the face of years of family conflict and of the disappointment of childlessness, and that carried them through to the time of Rachel’s death in the anguish of childbirth.

Of course Rachel and Jacob’s relationship is not the only account of romance we find in the Bible. We have only to go as far as the second chapter of Genesis. Think of Adam’s words when he first sets sight on Eve: “At last! Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh!” (Genesis 2:23) Think of the tender love between Boaz and Ruth, of Hosea’s unrelenting pursuit of Gomer in spite of her unfaithfulness—or of the Song of Songs, eight chapters of unabashed and sometimes embarrassingly sensual love poetry. (I once preached a series of sermons on the Song of Songs, but kept an eye to make sure the children were out of the congregation first!)

Against this backdrop R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, draws some broader conclusions. He writes:

As … [Rachel and] Jacob’s hot passion illustrates, the biblical view treats passion as the engine of destiny, for good or ill… Our loyalty to the future of sin cannot be broken by cool reflection… Only a counterloyalty, a counterlove, can set us free from our bondage to false loves… Only the madness of love and its arrogant disdain for human limitations can motivate us to seek fellowship with God. Thus, the sheer ambition of the promise of salvation encourages a view of the human in which the urgency of desire plays a more fundamental role than deliberations of reason… Christianity and Judaism prize the gift of reason. But neither misconceives its role or overestimates its power… The intellect needs to be informed, but it must also be energized, and to do so the passions must be engaged.[1]

Is it any coincidence therefore that the final pages of the Bible give us a picture of another romance, of a bridegroom awaiting his bride and the overwhelming joy that follows (Revelation 21:2-4)? If Rachel teaches us nothing else, it is that God has made us to be passionate—relentlessly pressing on, as Paul put it, “to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philippians 3:12).

Erica Sabiti was the first African Anglican Archbishop of Uganda. As a boy he had been educated in church schools; he had attended a Christian college, studied in seminary, been ordained to the ministry. Yet through all of that he would describe himself as having for many years been eighteen inches away from the kingdom of God. What did he mean? The eighteen inches between his head and his heart. We need to have a faith that touches us deeply, that invades every area of our lives including our deepest emotions, our passions.

Rachel’s Rivalry

There is a whole other side to Rachel, however, that we cannot neglect—a deeply negative side to her passion, if you will. It is reflected in her fierce competitiveness, her utter unwillingness to settle for anything less than first place, even if that meant resorting to less than honourable means to achieve it. In that regard she was the perfect match for her husband Jacob and it led to what to me are two of the strangest incidents in the Bible.

Rachel had been forced through her father Laban’s trickery to share her marriage to Jacob with her sister Leah. What made matters worse, indeed deeply painful for Rachel, was that for years she was unable to conceive, while Leah gave birth to boy after boy. One day, Leah’s eldest, Reuben, was working in the fields when he came across some mandrake plants. Mandrakes are in fact poisonous, but their fleshy, carrot-like roots often resemble miniature human figures and in the ancient world they were commonly believed to have powers as an aphrodisiac or fertility enhancer. When Rachel saw them, she immediately wanted them. Indeed, so desperate was she to gain possession of them in the hopes of bearing a child that she traded her place in her husband’s bed for them. To her chagrin, it was not she but Leah who became pregnant, and bore Jacob a fifth son.

The second strange incident took place as Jacob finally decided he had had enough of living as a member of his unprincipled father-in-law Laban’s household, where life had become increasingly intolerable. It was during sheep-shearing time, when Laban was safely off with his flocks, that they decided to make a break for it. Just before they left, Rachel sneaked into her father’s tent and stole what our New International Version Bibles describe as Laban’s household gods. The word in Hebrew is teraphim, and it probably refers to a small idol kept in the house as a protective talisman. In 1926 archaeologists discovered an ancient near-eastern document from the 15^th century BC suggesting that such figures belonged to the primary heir in a family, that possession of them was the prerogative of the head of the household. So was this Rachel’s way of finally supplanting her older sister Leah? Or was it just a means of finally gaining mastery over her father Laban after his deceitful behaviour all those many years ago? No one really knows, and Rachel’s motives remain a mystery.

It not long before that incident that the Bible tells us that God “remembered” Rachel and she gave birth to a son. Of course God had never forgotten Rachel. Her name means “ewe” and she had always been one of his sheep and always would be. Her problem was that she was so driven, so consumed by wanting to be on top in the worldly sphere, that that eclipsed for her the truth that she was of infinite value to God—that his passion for her burned hotter even than Jacob’s. She was a sheep for whom the Good Shepherd would lay down his life.

Leah the Unloved

Rachel named her first son Joseph. He was the most famous of Jacob’s sons and he would later save the whole family (and as a result the nation that descended from it) from famine. Her second son was Benjamin, from whose lineage would come Israel’s first king, Saul. Centuries later from the tribe of Benjamin would come another Saul, the man who later became Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles.

However, it would not be through Rachel, but through her sister Leah, that the greatest line, the line to the Messiah, would be traced—Leah, whose name means “weary” and about whom the only thing that is said is that she had delicate eyes. Poor Leah, always having to live in the shadow of her younger, ambitious, outgoing, clever, ravishingly beautiful sister! I suspect that she too may have been at the well that day when Jacob fell head over heels for Rachel. But he would have taken no notice of her. No one ever did. It was as though she was never there. She bore six sons to Jacob, and while he looked after her and was in all likelihood kind and tender towards her, it was always Rachel that he truly loved.

Yet while Rachel was Jacob’s choice from the get-go, God had his eye on Leah. And isn’t this God’s way again and again? As you thumb through the ancestry of Jesus in the gospels, you come across some of the most unlikely people: Rahab, the prostitute who plied her trade so conveniently just inside the town wall of Jericho and is commended in the great gallery of the faithful in Hebrews 11; Ruth, a widow and a Gentile who had no thought of ever finding another husband; David, the least likely of Jesse’s sons to take on the leadership of a nation, who was good for nothing more than to strum his harp among the sheep, but the one whom God had chosen as Israel’s king; Mary, a girl barely in her teens living in a remote village in far-off Galilee—and, what was more—a virgin! “How can this be?” she asked. But it was. And why? Because we have a God who delights in surprising us, who again and again chooses the least likely, the most unobvious people, to be heralds of his kingdom, channels of his grace. And that improbable lineage includes the likes of you and me!

Brothers and sisters, [wrote the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth] think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption. (1 Corinthians 1:26-30)

Rachel’s story tells us about passion. Leah’s story tells us that we must never underestimate what our mighty God can do through us or through others. Indeed, his strength is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). May their two stories combine to impel us to trust in him with passion.

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[1]        Genesis (Brazos Commentary), 238

Sermon – “No Condemnation” (Romans 8:1)

You probably didn’t notice his obituary. I’m not even sure that it appeared in the local newspapers. But in April of this year the world said goodbye to Edward Norton Lorenz. And who, you may ask, was Edward Norton Lorenz? Lorenz was a meteorologist who developed a mathematical model for the way air moves in the atmosphere. One day, while using a numerical computer model to rerun a weather prediction, he took a shortcut and entered the decimal .506 rather than the full .506127. To his surprise, he came up with a completely different weather scenario. Several years later he published his findings using the now famous query, “Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?”

The lesson he learned was that all actions—even the most seemingly insignificant ones—have their consequences. And sometimes those consequences can be altogether out of proportion to the original action. Most of us are probably familiar with the six-hundred-year-old rhyme that tells how “the kingdom was lost for want of a nail”:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

I often think that we have a version of that same principle expressed in Scripture, in the warning that accompanies the second of the Ten Commandments. Do you remember how it goes—about the children being punished for the iniquity of their parents to the third and fourth generation of those who reject the Lord, but of his showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love him and keep his commandments?

It seems a dire admonition, almost like karma—that somehow through the actions of the past we can be made victims of a cruel and unbending fate, as though strapped to an enormous flywheel spinning out of control.

In a sense, when we look at this morning’s reading from the Old Testament, what we have before us is the gentlest flapping of the butterfly’s wing. After twenty years of childlessness, Isaac and Rebekah become the proud parents of twins. Even during the pregnancy we hear adumbrations of future tragedy. The twins wrestle within Rebekah’s womb, and the Lord tells of an enduring rivalry that will follow. At the time of birth, the younger twin is born grasping at the older one’s heel. Perhaps no one thought very much of it at the time, but the name that was given to him, “Jacob”, from the word haqeb, “heel”, would be a lifelong reminder of the peculiar circumstances of his birth.

The scene swiftly moves to their youth. Esau was a strapping, outdoors kind of guy, “a skillful hunter, a man of the field”, as the Bible describes him. Jacob, on the other hand, was more of a mama’s boy, who preferred to spend his time indoors—in the kitchen of all places.

That was how Jacob developed the reputation of being something of an amateur chef. Esau could smell the delicious blend of aromas that Jacob was cooking up one day as he made his way, sweaty and dirty, in from his work in the fields. “I’m famished,” he bellowed. “Give me some of that red stuff.”

Now whether this was the moment that Jacob had been waiting for, or whether it was just an idea that popped into his mind, we don’t know. But something made Jacob hesitate before he dipped his ladle into the stew. “How about a trade,” he said to Esau, as he leaned over the steaming cauldron, “your birthright for a helping of my stew?” “I’m so hungry right now I would be willing to give just about anything,” replied the older brother. “Then give me your word of honor—now,” said Jacob, as he tasted a sample of the stew for himself. “OK, OK, it’s a deal,” gasped Esau. You could practically see the saliva running down from the corners of his mouth. And in a moment he was sitting in front of a heaping bowl of Jacob’s tasty concoction, scarfing it down as though there were no tomorrow.

As the Bible writer lets down the curtain on this little vignette from the life of Jacob and Esau, he comments, “Thus Esau despised his birthright.” Three little words in Hebrew, yet they fall with devastating power. “Thus Esau despised his birthright.” The butterfly had flapped its wing.

Little did either of the two brothers have any idea of the consequence of what they had done. Esau had a full stomach. Jacob had become the heir to the family fortune. But that scene would come back to haunt them again and again, as the animosity between them grew into full-fledged vengeance and the threat of murder; and one dark night Jacob would find himself alone and unable to sleep, cowering in fear of what his powerful brother was going do to him.

In subsequent generations the hostility between Israel (the descendants of Jacob) and Edom (the descendants of Esau) would only grow worse. In Moses’ time, as the people of Israel made their way back towards the Promised Land, the Edomites refused to allow them to cross their territory. This led to continued wars and retribution for centuries—right to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, when the kingdom of Edom took advantage of the Babylonian sweep of the region to slaughter and plunder their distant cousins, the Jews.

In a later generation still, it is a descendant of the Edomites, Herod the Great, who orders the slaughter of innocent children in Bethlehem. And in turn it is his son, another Herod, who has John the Baptist beheaded, and who, though not directly responsible for the death of Jesus, joins in mocking and humiliating him on his way to the cross.

“Thus Esau despised his birthright.” The author of Genesis matter-of-factly tells us. And there follow nearly two thousand years of consequences. Who ever would have thought…? Yet on a smaller scale I see this same principle being worked out again and again in people’s lives. Well do I remember a woman who lived what was probably the most secretive life I have ever seen. Only years later did I discover that her secrecy was really a cloak to hide an intolerable burden of guilt that she had carried around with her for more than a generation. Another woman continued to be haunted by the way she treated her mother at the time of her high school graduation, forty years after the event.

In his book Guilt and Grace Swiss physician Paul Tournier relates case after case of men and women who lived their whole lives unable to escape the consequences of something they may have done at an earlier time in their lives. Reflecting on the unending parade of such people who have come through his office, he writes,

Complexes, secret imaginations, temptations, vain and unconfessable dreams, a whole world of impulses more or less conscious, often of no clear form develop within us. They defy the censorship of our will, as we realize with confusion. It is another self which lives within us, which we cannot stifle…

What Tournier describes does not sound altogether different from what we read in last week’s epistle, from the seventh chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans:

I do not understand my own actions [he confesses]. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do… So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members.

Who among us has not shared this anguish? Of course there are all kind of things people do in their attempts to escape it. They receive psychiatry; they engage in philanthropy and acts of selflessness; they delve into asceticism; they numb themselves with alcohol and drugs; they immerse themselves in hedonism; they may go as far as suicide. Some even try religion. Yet there seems to be nothing that can enable them to escape. They have been tried, sentenced, condemned and punished by a jury of one—their own heart within them. With Paul they cry aloud, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?”

In the midst of this bleak picture there is good news. It comes to us again from St Paul, not in last Sunday’s reading but today’s. I cannot say the words without chills running down my spine: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”

What Paul is telling us is that Jesus Christ has done for us what we (or anyone else in all the world) could never do for ourselves. At the time it must have seemed that he too was a victim of unalterable consequences. That must have been the way it appeared to Esau’s descendant Herod as he watched the bruised and humiliated Galilean walk from his court on the way to his death. In spite of all the miracles, all the idealism of his teaching, all the cheering of the crowds, the wheel of karma had taken him too.

Yet it was on the cross, as he hung utterly powerless even to swat a fly that might have landed on his face, that Jesus brought that seemingly all-powerful, unstoppable wheel to a grinding halt. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” declares St Paul.

Paul Tournier reflects,

So from one end of the Bible to the other, we constantly witness the same paradoxical happening. The guilt that men are never able to efface, in spite of sacrifices, penance, remorse and vain regrets, God himself wipes away… But the wonderful announcement of God’s free grace, which effaces guilt, runs up against the intuition which every man has, that a price must be paid. The reply which comes is the supreme message of the Bible; it is God himself who pays, God himself has paid the price once for all, and the most costly that could be paid—his own death, in Jesus Christ, on the cross.

“There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Because of what Jesus has done for you and for me on the cross, and through faith in him, we need no longer be victims of the events of the past. He has set us free from the law of sin and death. That doesn’t mean that we won’t continue to do things that we regret. But it does mean that they no longer have the final say in our lives.

At morning and evening prayer in the old Book of Common Prayer we used to confess that “we have left undone those things that we ought to have done, and we have done those things that we ought not to have done, and there is no health in us…” As we look at our own lives and our own past, may we recognize that we bow before a God of infinite mercy and grace, who has done what we could never do for ourselves. And may you know within your heart, in spite of all that might want to tell you otherwise, that truly “there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus”.

Heavenly Father,
we cannot praise you enough,
that in the mystery of your love,
you have reached down to us in your Son
and given him to die for our sins on the cross:
help us to know in the depths of our hearts
that there is therefore now no condemnation
for those who are in Christ Jesus,
and so to live as those who have been set free,
for the glory of your name.