Deacon's Homily: Sin and Conversion

For the next three Sunday’s in Lent, our parish is honored to celebrate a ceremony called “the scrutinies” with our "elect." The "elect" are those who are preparing to become Catholic at the Easter vigil. They have been preparing privately with a team of catechists, but also publicly, here at Mass, with the parish. Today, with the scrutinies, we enter a new phase. Today the liturgy asks the elect to scrutinize their hearts, but also all of us to scrutinize our own hearts, in order to uncover everything that is weak, defective, or sinful, and to strengthen everything that is upright, strong, and good. As you’ll hear in a few minutes, when we pray over the elect, we’ll be praying especially for a spirit of repentance and a “sense of sin.”

We might wonder why cultivating a “sense of sin” is good news. The answer is in today’s second reading. St. Paul writes that the love of God has been poured into our hearts – the Holy Spirit has been given to us – during the time when we’re helpless and sinning. In other words, in order to have hearts ready for God’s love, hearts able to perceive the Spirit alive and active in our world, we confess our sinfulness. A sense of sin is a prerequisite for an authentic relationship with God.

Imagine for a minute what life is like when we don’t have a sense of sin. Imagine what it’s like when we are dull to sin. We’ve all had times when we’re proud, complacent, hard-hearted, dug-in, trying to be our own boss. In those moments, we’re shutting the door on God’s grace. It stands to reason: if everything is fine, or if I am trying to save myself through some technique or justify myself with an alibi, then I’m not going to be alert and ripe for God.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus and the Samaritan woman are at first talking at cross-purposes. She’s talking at the level of practicality, getting a drink, drawing from a well. He’s trying to take the conversation to a spiritual level. They don’t get on a wavelength and connect until she has a sense for sin:

Jesus said to her, “Go call your husband and come back.” The woman answered and said to him, “I do not have a husband.” Jesus answered her, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true.”

That’s the moment when the conversation changes. Once her place of frailty is on the table, once she’s allowed Jesus into the place where she’s ashamed, that’s when the conversation changes and conversion happens. If you recall that mysterious passage from St. Paul – when I’m weak, then I’m strong – or that paradoxical saying from Jesus – you have to lose your life in order to save it – think of this moment between Jesus and the woman at the well. Giving up the excuses, being candid and vulnerable before the Lord, that is the moment when grace can rush in and our lives can change.

I think it also matters that the passage is about sexual sin. Of course, not all sin is sexual sin. At different stages and ages of our lives, the sins that beset us can change. But in this scene, Jesus brings up her marriages and her adultery. Jesus engages the woman in that place where her longing for love, her failures, her restlessness, her need for protection – all of that is in the mix. In reply, after they talk about her marriages, of all the titles and images of God that Jesus could have used in that moment, notice how three times he invites her to worship God as Father, putting before her a healthy and holy image of masculinity. You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to admit that sexuality is psychologically deep and powerful. It’s a place of vulnerability where our hearts, our dreams, our self-image, our eyes and appetites, our culture, and, most of all, our longing for love, safety, and recognition – all these things converge in sexuality, and Jesus is working with this woman and with us, for our conversion, at these deep levels.

Sexuality is also a place where our pride kicks in, where the ego is especially tempted to make excuses and attempt self-justification: we say things like it’s nobody else’s business, it’s my husband or wife’s fault, it’s my ex’s fault, it’s my family’s fault, it’s the patriarchy’s fault, or the Church is hypocritical. And some of those excuses may have some truth to them. Sometimes we need a moment to assess those things, so that we can understand the different pressures and influences in our lives. If somebody else hurt you, God will hold that person accountable. But in the end, what other people do or did is not going to be decisive for our relationship with God. We are not responsible for other people’s sins. What blocks our communion with God is our own stubbornness, being hard, being selfish. It’s common to quarrel with the church’s teaching on chastity, looking for loopholes to justify ourselves, taking our cues from culture before we even read what the Church has to say, without really trying honestly to seek holiness. But negotiating and evasiveness is not the way. Remember, God’s grace comes to those who are vulnerable, who let the Lord into our private lives, who have the freedom to be honest about how we sin.

Today and over the next three weeks, in these scrutinies, not only are we asked to be honest about ourselves, we’re also going to encounter Jesus in his humanity. Today, when Jesus sits down at the well, in the desert at noon, it says he’s tired. Next week, Jesus will cure a blind man with his saliva, making a paste out of mud and putting it over his eyes. In the third week, Jesus will weep at the death of his friend Lazarus. It matters that Jesus had a human body that got exhausted and had feelings, that he got his hands muddy, that he loved people and had friends. He understands, he loves us, he longs for us. And he can give us living water, if we’re honest with him, if we confess who we really are, if we let him address the most intimate parts of our lives.

It’s Lent. One very practical thing we can do is get ourselves to a confession. If not now, then when? If not ever, then what we are playing at? God died for us, God made his grace available to us, when we were yet sinners. What Jesus offers the woman at the well is a taste of living water – an interior perpetual spring. But the proud and hard-hearted, those with nothing to confess, will never understand how this water flows and what it tastes like.