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“The encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is a famous one for its delicious irony. There is Jesus, the Lord of life, asking a woman of a supposedly enemy race, to give him a drink. His mastery over the waters at the wedding in Cana shows us that he is indeed the Lord of life. And the reversal in the narrative doesn’t disappoint us, for we know this Samaritan woman becomes a disciple of Jesus and an apostle of his Gospel. The frequent mention of water in this Sunday’s readings (Exodus 17; John 4) is of great significance for us in our Lenten pilgrimage to the Good Friday cross, on which hung the Lord of life with the spring of living water coming from his pierced side. So water is very much a gift from God, whether it’s Moses in the desert we’re talking about with a whole nation of dead thirsty people, or Jesus himself hoping for a drink flowing from the faith of a repentant sinner.
The Samaritan woman, we are told, has had five husbands, and is shacked up with a sixth man. She is by no means a “Good Samaritan.” Almost certainly, she has come at midday because she can avoid the gossiping villagers who have already collected the day’s water from the well. And it’s Jesus who becomes the seventh man in her life, and in so many ways the perfect man for her. Would that Elizabeth Taylor had chosen Jesus over Larry Fortensky! Jesus becomes the one by whom all other relationships are defined, because he reveals himself to her as God: “I AM, the one speaking with you.” Jesus invokes the divine name once given to Moses, and in so doing calls her to himself as his very own, just as God once did with the Israelites. She belongs to him because she knows he is God. The impressive holy ground of Mount Sinai, the place where God revealed his name to Moses, is here delightfully counter-balanced by a dark well of idle water.
Jesus speaks of himself as the bearer and source of living water, by which he refers both to the waters as they flow in a river and the “resurrection waters” of baptism. It’s a curiosity of our time that so many go in for the New Age movement, which looks to the natural elements for guidance and inspiration, especially water. The New Age promises wholeness and harmony, but you and I know that it’s Christ who promises and gives us reconciliation and healing, life and peace. And this is because it’s not an impersonal goddess like “Gaia” or “Mother Earth” in whom we believe and trust, but a Person, a Man who is God, Jesus Christ. Natural elements cannot love, forgive or raise up, but they can be instruments of grace from the hands of the One who made them.
In this Lenten season, the Church especially proposes to us the use of sacramentals, such as holy water, crucifixes, images of Christ and the saints especially the Blessed Virgin Mary. These help us internalise the spring of living water which was struck in us at baptism and is purified at the offering of the Mass. Using holy water in the home and on entering a church and venerating with our eyes and hands images of the holy ones lead us to move entirely from the stagnant colourless waters of Jacob’s well, symbolic of the old covenant, to the great waters of the glorious resurrection.
The water quenching “that thirst” isn’t found in Jacob’s well deep in Samaritan territory, but within us, once we have encountered the Lord Jesus. This Lent we’ll move out of the dark pool to a spring of fresh, living water given for the eternal life. And that unique encounter which strikes up the spring is given us first in baptism and now here at Mass, and continued in the sacramental life of the Church, the spotless bride of Christ, who is worthy of our greatest praise for ever and ever. Amen.”
- homily delivered Sunday 27th March
St Mary Magdalene is co-patroness of the Order of Preachers together with the Blessed Virgin Mary. This wasn't the case in the very beginnings of the Order (St Dominic is not recorded as having had a particular devotion to St Mary Magdalene), but came about due to a number of historical circumstances and, ultimately, to divine providence. One tradition held in the West (as also recorded in the Golden Legend (c. 1265) of Bl Jacopo de Voragine, himself a Dominican friar), was that Mary Magdalene travelled to Marseilles with her siblings Lazarus and Martha and some other companions, including a certain St Maximin. Once they had converted the whole of Provence she retired to a cave in what is now called the Sainte-Baume mountains (Baume is a word in a mediaeval dialect of Langue d'oc (Southern France) which means “cave”) in the south-east of modern France, and lived as a hermit for the last thirty years of her life. Somehow her relics ended up, having travelled as far as Vézelay for fear of the Saracens, hidden in the crypt of Saint-Maximin's Church in a town at the foot of the Sainte-Baume mountains, now called Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. When Charles II of Anjou, king of Naples, erected a convent for the Dominicans in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in 1279, the shrine was found intact. Miracles were said to have taken place at the sarcophagus and a great number of pilgrims began to travel there. Charles II of Anjou began construction of a basilica there in 1295, the Basilique Ste Marie-Magdeleine, with the blessing of Pope Boniface VIII, and this was placed in the care of the Dominicans. At the same time, many converted prostitutes who had gathered into religious communities were living under a Dominican constitution, and had taken Mary Magdalene as their patroness. The Dominicans must have taken these indications, that providence had gifted them the relics of this great biblical saint, that a part of the Order had already taken her as patroness, and that the rest of the Order had a great devotion to her, that it was a small step to declare her as patroness of the Order. Subsequently Mary Magdalene's feast was first celebrated as a solemnity throughout the Order in 1297.
As patroness of the Order, not only does she have a special intercessory role to play, but like the Virgin Mary, she offers us a model of the Christian life. Firstly, Mary is a converted sinner. Regardless of the gravity of one's sins, anyone who resolves to follow Christ must go through a conversion, even daily, where the reason for hope in forgiveness lies not in one's own efforts or goodness, but in the munificence of God. Mary did not allow her sins or her past state (“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out”, Lk 8:2), through pride, to prevent God's grace from raising her to great holiness.
Mary and her sister Martha used to call Jesus “Rab-boni”, which means “teacher” (Jn 11:28; 20:16) and Mary gave great example as the one who sat at Jesus' feet and loved to listen to His teachings. Like St Dominic, who always carried around with him St Matthew's Gospel, Dominicans should follow the example of Mary and look upon Jesus as the supreme teacher, especially in the Beatitudes, the “heart” of the Gospel of Matthew. Mary truly fulfilled the Dominican motto coined by St Thomas, contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere, first to contemplate and then to bring the fruits of this to others.
Mary is also a witness of the death and resurrection of Jesus. In contrast to the Apostles, Mary did not flee at the hour of Jesus' passion, nor did she hesitate to believe in His resurrection. Dominicans must also be witnesses of the death and resurrection of Jesus. This obviously cannot be done in a literal sense, but through prayer and meditation on the passion narratives we too must stand at the foot of the cross with Mary, contemplating the death of the Lord, and not despair, but rejoice with Mary in the fact that, through His resurrection, he has conquered death and sin.
Mary has been known, since early Christian times, as the apostola apostolorum, that is, the Apostle to the Apostles. It is she who is the first recorded witness of the risen Christ, and it was she who first brought the good news of the resurrection to the Apostles. This honour bestowed on Mary, to be the first to deliver to the apostles perhaps the most important message of our faith, shows the great role Mary played in God's plan to redeem mankind. As St Paul says in his first letter to the Corinthians, “if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain” (1 Cor 15:14). While we can't know with certainty the veracity of the early stories of Mary and her companions evangelizing southern France, there can be no doubt that it is she who first preached the good news of Christ's resurrection to the Apostles. Following her lead, let us go forth and deliver the Good News that Our Lord, by his own death and resurrection, has conquered sin and death and redeemed mankind.