Mass was offered this morning for the people of the parish, and for deceased parishioners as well, in so far as they are still members of our parish, though departed. They are never forgotten, and always close to our hearts.
Our readings continue to take us through the Acts of the Apostles and the history of the expansion of the primitive Church in the first years. Today's first reading concerns the conversion of Samaria (Acts, chapter 8). We may remember the story of the Samaritan woman at the well and especially the part at the end of the story, where we are given to understand that the Samaritans were more receptive of the Gospel than were the Jews, and especially the Pharisees, who held the minds of the people, and the Sadducees, who manned the Temple in Jerusalem and had managed to get Christ convicted and executed. The religious observance of the Jews, centred on the Temple, had been laid out in detail by these religious groups, and there was a certain complacency in the orthodox Jew of the time that allowed him to carefully follow the very letter of the Law, and miss its heart. We see this, for example, in the small battles that were raised against Christ for his healing sick people on the Sabbath, and in the story of the rich, young man who had observed the Law perfectly all his life, but went away sadly when Christ asked him to give his riches up and join His disciples.
But the Samaritans... well, now. That needs a little historical study. Briefly, when the Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Israel (Samaria, Galilee, the sea coast and Transjordan) from about 740 BC, they had followed a policy of replacing much of the native population with people from foreign countries, in order to reduce the probability of insurrection (more here). When the Assyrians later destroyed the kingdom of Judah, in 587 BC, in the guise of neo-Babylonians, they followed a similar procedure and carried most of the natives of Judah and Benjamin into captivity in Babylon (more here). When these Judaean captives were permitted to return at the fall of the Babylonian empire (about 540 BC), they came back with new ideas about who was Jewish and who was not, and who could practise the ancient religion in Jerusalem. Resettling Judah and Jerusalem, they carefully excluded the inhabitants of Samaria (that is, the Samaritans) from the new Jewish cult that was being erected in Jerusalem on the site of the old Temple of Solomon, that had been ruined by the Babylonians.
And that's where the story of the opposition of the Jews to the Samaritans seems to begin, and there are signs of it in the book of Esther (Ezra), which details the return of the captives and the building of the second Temple (the first being Solomon's):
"When news reached the enemies of Juda and Benjamin that the returned exiles were rebuilding the temple of the Lord, the God of Israel, they had a request to make of Zorobabel and the chieftains. 'Let us help you to build it, they said; we too have recourse to the same God whom you worship; witness the sacrifices we have been offering to him ever since the Assyrian king Asar-Haddon settled us here.' But Zorobabel and Josue and the clan chiefs told them, 'To build a house to our God can be no common task of yours and ours. The Lord is our God, and we alone must be the builders of it; such were the orders given to us by Cyrus, king of Persia.' Nothing would serve the neighbouring folk after that but they must thwart Juda’s purpose and interfere, as best they could, with the enterprise."- Esdras, 4: 1-4
Guess who the enemies of Judah and Benjamin were. The Samaritans They had taken up the Hebrew religion when they had been transplanted into the Holy Land by the Assyrians, and now they offered to help the Jews rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. And the reply from Zorobabel (an ancestor of Christ) and others was immediate: your religion is not the same as ours, and we alone will build our Temple. And some four hundred years later, the Samaritans were still practising their own religion at the site of Mount Gerizim in Samaria, an ancient holy site relating to the stories of the patriarchs Abraham and Jacob, and a rival site to Jerusalem. So the Samaritan lady said to Jesus:
"'Sir, I perceive that thou art a prophet. Well, it was our fathers’ way to worship on this mountain, although you tell us that the place where men ought to worship is in Jerusalem.' 'Believe me, woman,' Jesus said to her, 'the time is coming when you will not go to this mountain, nor yet to Jerusalem, to worship the Father. You worship you cannot tell what, we worship knowing what it is we worship; salvation, after all, is to come from the Jews...'" - Gospel of S. John, 4: 19-22
Christ says to the lady just what Zorobabel and others told her people before: the Lord is our God. You worship what you do not know (because your were not taught), we worship what we do know, for salvation comes to the world from the Jews. And yet, the Jews had locked salvation away from the Samaritans, and from just about everybody else. Christ had come to open those gates. Through Him, the graces of God, once destined for the Chosen tribes, would flow out onto the world. The Temple in Jerusalem would be replaced by the Temple that is the Body of Christ. We can appreciate perhaps how the radical inclusion of the Christian message would be attractive to a neglected people, as also the authority that the miracle-working deacon Philip showed in our reading today. The apostolic headquarters in Jerusalem at once dispatched the priests Saint Peter and Saint John, to administer the Sacraments to the new Samaritan Christians.
The Acts of the Apostles is our special joy in these weeks of Easter, as we approach the celebration of the Ascension this coming Thursday, and Pentecost soon after. This history of the early Church demonstrates how near we are in our faith and in our practice to those first Christians. There is a type of electricity running through the narrative and it is, at least for me, as interesting as reading a history of my own family, or a story of my own friends. It gives us a sense of a community that transcends time. When Peter tells us in our second reading this Sunday, that we should be prepared to defend our faith with gentleness, with respect, expecting to suffer for the sake of doing, good, I have a vivid sense of Christians obeying this instruction over centuries. And when Christ says to us in the gospel reading, 'If you love Me, you will keep My commandments... and I will send you the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth...,' I can see the life of every Saint in the history of the Church (and many who have not been called 'Saint,' too) that I know and love.
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