3rd Sunday of Lent
The pump formed the navel of Heaney's young world. It was the navel around which women gathered, traded secrets, exchanged gossip, supported one another, and celebrated life. They formed the lifeline that linked that community to this vital force. Through that chain of women, life was sustained and the communal thirst for life and love was slaked. That same pattern was replicated not only in every Irish village, but in every location on the planet where human beings settled.
Throughout the universal Church, the catechumens are spending these seven weeks preparing for baptism and entry into the community that is the Church. They progress through the seven 'scrutinies' as they are called throughout the seven weeks of Lent. That is the context of today's gospel: it is obviously a gospel with strong baptismal undertones.
St. John locates Jesus in an identical setting. As is so often the case with John, women or, in this case, a woman, is central to the story; - and this, despite the fact that women were very much second class citizens in Jewish law. Throughout John's gospel, women are consistently presented as being most receptive to the message of Jesus. Today's gospel extract is but one example of this. Worn out by a day's journey, he sits down by the Samaritan well for a rest. The Samaritan woman arrives to fetch water. He asks for a drink and engages her in some good humoured banter, teasing her about the colourful history of her love life. In this one act he smashed two taboos: he crosses barriers of sex and class, and the woman notices it immediately: "You are a Jew and you ask me a Samaritan for a drink?" He promises her a water that will slake her thirst forever."
20th century psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung identified water as the great womb symbol. It symbolised the paradise of prenatal life. Water was the formless world in which we first floated. Indeed Freud and Jung both advocated a return to the origins through psychoanalysis as an agent of healing. Childhood trauma would be revisited and the personality in some way reconstituted in a more satisfactory manner. On a mystical level, Jesus has introduced this idea 2000 years earlier. "Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God." We must regress to the state of Chaos that life in the womb symbolised before Cosmos or order is imposed through rebirth. A return to the origins was essential for salvation. In this way access can be gained to a new and higher mode of existence, gestation and birth must be repeated, but they are to be repeated mystically, ritually, symbolically.
Of course this symbolism would have been more obvious in the primitive Church when adult baptism was administered through full immersion at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday night. But a second layer of the symbol would have been obvious, given the time of the year the ceremony was celebrated. Stated explicitly: "If we have entered the tomb with him in baptism, we shall rise with him in glory." Death and rebirth are two instances in the same act. The adult neophytes were stripped naked, anointed with cleansing oil (the soap of our day); they stepped naked into the sunken tub, three times and the minister pronounced the Trinitarian formula. When they emerged finally from the tub, they were anointed again with what would be equivalent to our perfume. They were then vested in the white baptismal gown, symbolising the new life they had entered upon. They were then ready to receive the sustaining food of this life, the Eucharist. This was very clearly and very obviously a rite of rebirth, a return to the origins, a return to the womb and an emergence into a new life to be reconstituted by the Spirit.
We are about to re-enact again that ancient ritual when we baptise Baby Dara Murray there this morning. We pray that he may experience the community into which he is about to be baptised as a source of new life.