During Lent we’re thinking about “To Hear the Gospel and Make a Difference”.  Fr. Brian talked two weeks ago about “Does Hearing the Gospel Get Misheard?”  And, last week, Fr. Mario:  “Does Hearing the Gospel Transfigure Us?”  Today we’re asking ourselves, “Does Hearing the Gospel Make Us Open to Others?”

I would invite you to be open to three people from the Gospel that I’m going to talk about.   I think that their importance is great but I think you could miss it, but each one has a tremendous message for us.  They all have something in common; they’re all women and we don’t know their names.  In the ancient world if you knew somebody’s name and if you said their name, that meant you thought they were a person of importance.  So when the writers of the Gospel don’t mention the names of these three people maybe they didn’t think they were of any importance.  But I disagree.  See what you think.

The first is a woman who was caught in adultery, very serious sin. They found her and brought her to Jesus and said, “According to the law this woman must be stoned.  What do you say?”  They thought they had him because if he said, “Oh, no, you can’t do something as cruel as that,” they would say, “Oh, you think the law is wrong?”  I think if he said, “Go ahead and stone her,” they would say, “What about the compassionate Jesus?”   But, instead, he frustrated them.  He just reached down and wrote on the ground, inspiring Chesterton to say, “What a pity that on the day the Son of Man did write something, he chose to write it with his finger in the sand.”  So Jesus said, “Alright, whoever is without sin, throw the first stone.”  And, of course, they all began to file away, leaving him standing face to face with the woman.  St. Augustine who loved puns said, “Here we see miseria in the presence of misorecordia."  Here we see misery personified in the presence of mercy personified.

There is a whole strand in the Old Testament in the Hebrew Bible that when the Messiah came he will bring us a message of a merciful God, a God who showed his power not by destroying, not by judging, not by punishing, but by forgiving.  And here in this story, in the case of this woman we have the fulfillment of that promise as Jesus forgives her. 

I’ve see her as the Patron Saint of people who have led less than perfect lives, people like me who have led less than perfect lives.  I’m not going to ask for a show of hands of people who have led less than perfect lives and have been forgiven.  I think that she is our Patron Saint.  Can you have a Patron Saint without a name?  Looks like we do.  Nameless she may be, but I think she is very important because I think she is the Patron Saint of the forgiven.

Now the second woman is a woman who goes up to the temple. She’s a widow, and she puts two little coins in the basket.  And Jesus notices this and he said, “What a wonder, she’s given all she has, more than anybody else.”  By the way, the coin she puts in is called a lepton and this is one.  Someone gave me a present of it a few years ago.  This isn’t one of her coins, but this is the same coin.  It’s the cheapest, smallest coin in the Roman Empire called a lepton.  If you want to see it I can show it to you outside the Church afterwards.  This one is from 17 or 18 AD.

So, the disciples and Jesus went up to the Temple, and the disciples probably didn’t get up to go to Jerusalem all that often and so they were in wonderment, in amazement, in awe at this unbelievable Temple that had been built by Herod which was a wonder of the world. Alas, it was to be destroyed in 70 AD.  Here is one description of what an amazing building it was:  “The outward face of the Temple was covered all over with plates of gold of great weight and at the first rising of the sun it reflected back a fiery splendor, so that one had to look away for fear of being dazzled.  But from a distance the Temple seemed like a mountain covered with snow, for everything that was not gold was a brilliant color of white.”  No wonder the disciples were mesmerized. No wonder they marveled at the wonder of this sight.  But Jesus was marveling at quite a different sight, at the sight of a little old lady putting two small coins into a basket.  He said to them, “Please notice what has just happened:  Someone has done an act of extraordinary generosity; she has given all that she had.” 

So I see her as the Patron Saint of Generous Souls.  I see in her the fact that God never misses a good deed no matter how small it may be.  God is quite apt at overlooking our faults and failings but never misses the good we do.  She is another nameless Saint, definitely a Saint because Jesus praised her so highly, but nameless she may be. She’s a very important person because she shows us what God never misses:  the act of a generous soul.

Thirdly and finally, the woman in today’s Gospel, the Samaritan woman.  What a strange title—the American Woman, the Irish Woman, the Samaritan Woman.  Couldn’t you have a name, please?  We don’t.  Besides, this woman had three major strikes against her.  She should have been out but she wasn’t.  First, she was a Samaritan and the Samaritans were despised by the Jews and they had nothing to do with each other, as the Gospel said.  The Rabbis use to say, “Let no one eat of the bread of the Samaritans for he who eats their bread is he who eats swine flesh.” 

Secondly, she was a woman and for a woman to speak to a Rabbi in public was a total “no no.”  That was a bad thing, and the Rabbis would never permit it.  One commentator says, “For a Rabbi to be seen speaking to a woman in public was the end of his reputation.”  And then, this was no ordinary woman; this was a woman of very dubious morals, and Jesus knew well that she had had a whole litany of husbands and the man she was with now was not her husband.  She was an outcast.  And the disciples coming back from their shopping, we get the feeling that they were deeply shocked that Jesus was sitting talking to a woman, this woman, this Samaritan woman.  I can imagine them saying to each other, “We’ve just been in the town, and she’s the talk of the town.  Doesn’t He know it?  What’s going to happen?  He’s going to lose his reputation forever.  Shouldn’t we say something?”  And then maybe Peter or one of the others said, “Well, you know the Master; he marches to a different drummer. Better let Him be.”  Meanwhile, what Jesus was saying to her--more directly to her than to any other human being on earth--was the secret of the Kingdom.  Because most directly he said to her, “The long awaited Messiah, the one the world is waiting for, I am he,  I who am speaking to you right now.”  He reveals himself most fully to this outcast, thereby proving that there are no outcasts in the Kingdom of Heaven.  There are no outsiders.  Now she goes into the town, the town of the outcast Samaritan and becomes the Apostle to the Samaritans.  See how important a person she was?  And they believed…many of them believed.

So, here is another Saint without a name.  Nameless she may be but I see her as the Patron Saint of the Outcasts, of all those people who feel themselves to be a little bit on the outside but who have an important role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven.

So this week, as we attempt to Hear the Gospel and Make a Difference, we may remind ourselves to be open to some of the unlikely people in the Gospel and to the unlikely people who may well be his messengers to us in this world.