Today’s readings: Exodus 17, 3-7; Romans 5, 1-2.5-8; John 4, 5-42.
“How am I to deal with this people?”, Moses asked the Lord when faced with the complaints of his people annoyed and frustrated by all that the desert offered them after their liberation. This leadership issue affects the Church even today. Many a time throughout the Old Testament the prophets lamented about shepherds and kings who wielded power over the people but were careless about their real needs.
Most people throughout the western world see what the Church has to offer, and find it to be wanting. The current credibility gap makes it hard to communicate the Gospel with clarity and authenticity. Yet this is also a time of great opportunity when the need for the Gospel and its relevance is to some extent unprecedented, and when, like the Samaritan woman in today’s gospel, people thirst for connection.
The Church, particularly nowadays, is not spared the challenge of good leadership and governance, as well as the call to be accountable and to gain its own credibility in all that it preaches and claims. We all acknowledge the massive shift in our culture, in science, in society in general, and in institutions.
Author Peter Drucker summed this up succinctly: “Every few hundred years throughout western history, a sharp transformation has occurred. In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself – its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world exists. And the people born into that world cannot even imagine the world in which grandparents lived and into which their own parents were born.”
In our times, the Church understands the implications of all this, yet it still finds it hard to respond in effective ministry and to propose new paths. It is actually the issue of effective ministry, coupled with that of leadership, which demands now a re-energising of mission and of a new pastoral sensibility.
The narrative in today’s gospel from St John of Jesus’s encounter with the Samaritan woman and the way it transformed her life is a powerful catechesis on effective ministry. In his ministry, Jesus not only went out of his way because he was passing through a Samaritan town. But mostly because he was deconstructing an entire tradition and culture. He was also redefining and relocating religion by claiming who are the true worshippers and that true religion belongs to the realm of “spirit and truth”.
There is a gradual revelation on the part of Jesus of his own identity, and John demonstrates uniquely how opening one’s eyes to this revelation is transformative and contagious. The moment the woman grasped who Jesus was, her eyes opened and she witnessed Jesus’s true identity as the Messiah. She was no longer hindered, neither by her past nor by her culture, to acknowledge him and her true self.
This is effective ministry at its best. This is how the Church today needs to rediscover its brief to make encounters with God happen, to decipher the deep thirst people have for truth and to seek to address precisely that. It is a case in point where the prophetic words of Vatican II come true: “In reality it is only in the mystery of the Word made flesh that the mystery of man becomes clear.”
The words from Exodus: “Is the Lord with us or not?” still echo profoundly the search and thirst of people. They are words that in all times, as with Moses, offer a new challenge for the Church not to sell a deceptive hope. It is a challenge that concretely translates in whether or not, as Church, we still can make “water flow for the people to drink”.
New times demand new ways to quench people’s thirst, to answer their questions and meet their needs. As the Church we have to beware the temptation of dreaming of the security of the past or of being nostalgic of times of glory. Our era is post-Christian. In the ruins of Christendom, there is the hope of new beginnings, of new ways of facilitating God’s encounter with humanity.