In Spirit and Truth

Lent and the Freedom to Worship

The Promised Land, as seen from Mount Nebo, where Moses died.

Given originally in a Lenten Speaker Series at Sacred Heart Parish, Glyndon, March 2022.

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I. Introduction

What is the season of Lent all about? We typically think of Lent as a penitential season that prepares us for Easter — which it is — but I’d like to focus on how the liturgy during the season of Lent is concerned with how we worship, what we worship, and, ultimately, who we worship. Yes, Lent is a penitential season, and Lent prepares us for the paschal joy of the Lord’s Resurrection, but I think more fundamentally, Lent is a season about worship, and this is something that the liturgy in Lent helps us see. As I hope to show, thinking of Lent in terms of worship correctly places both our current penances and our anticipated joy in the Resurrection in their proper context and, in fact, makes them both possible and fruitful. 

I’m going to limit my focus to only two ways in which, to my mind, the Lenten liturgy is concerned with worship. First, we’re going to look at the Book of Exodus, from which the Church reads in the beginning of Lent in the Office of Readings in the Liturgy of the Hours. Exodus, you will recall, recounts the story of God’s deliverance of his chosen people Israel from their slavery in Egypt and his leading them into the desert on the way to the promised land. Considering what is the essence of the Exodus story — specifically, looking at why God chose to liberate his people from captivity — will set up the second half of our focus, the Gospel that we hear on the Third Sunday of Lent, that of the Samaritan woman who meets Jesus at the well, recounted in John 4. We hear this Gospel normally only in the A Cycle of the Sunday Readings, but when we celebrate the RCIA scrutinies, this Gospel (and the beautiful preface that accompanies it) is always read on the Third Sunday of Lent. In this encounter, Jesus says to the Samaritan woman, and to us, that God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth (Jn. 4:24). That is the point toward which I’d like to build: to see how the season of Lent, particularly in the liturgy, is concerned with enabling us to worship in spirit and truth.

II. Land as Condition for Worship

The Book of Exodus is fundamentally a book about divine worship. Let’s recall Moses’ first encounter with God on Mount Horeb. Moses is told by God from the burning bush that God has heard the cry of his people suffering in Egypt and has come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey (3:8). God tells Moses to go with the elders of Israel to the king of Egypt and say to him, The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has met with us; and now, we beg you, let us go a three days’ journey into the wilderness, that we may sacrifice to the Lord our God (3:18). What is worth noting is the connection between God’s promise of the land and his desire for his people to worship him. The two are folded into each other. Having their own land is not merely for their own material prosperity and security from the threat of other nations but for them to be able to offer sacrifice in the way that God prescribes without any external pressure that comes from a non-Jewish or anti-Jewish ruling body or culture. The land is so necessary to right worship that, conversely, right worship cannot take place without the people having a land of their own.

Right away, in point of fact, evidenced in the negotiations Moses undertakes with Pharaoh, we see how right worship is not possible for the people of Israel without their own land. Pharoah and Moses go back and forth on the terms of Moses’ proposition. Joseph Ratzinger (later, Pope Benedict XVI) pointed this out in his monumental work, The Spirit of the Liturgy, published in 1999.¹ Moses goes to Pharaoh and says five times, each time with slight variation, Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness (7:16; 8:1; 9:1; 9:13; and 10:3). After the first request, Pharaoh admits the people to sacrifice to their God within the land (8:25). Moses refuses: the order was to go into the wilderness. After some of the plagues, Pharaoh is willing to compromise again and says that the people may go into the wilderness, but only the men; the women and children and their cattle must stay behind. Again, Moses refuses: that was not the command. Pharaoh, in turn, concedes and permits the women and children to leave, but the flocks and herds must be left behind. Here, Moses objects that their flocks and herds must come too, for we do not know with what we must serve the Lord until we arrive there (10:26). In light of this negation with a foreign power over the prescripts of divine worship, Ratzinger draws out the connection between land and worship: The land is given to the people to be a place for the worship of the true God,² that is to say, that they may worship him in freedom. The people need to be set free from any oppressive power that would inhibit, restrict, or qualify their worship. Only God can determine how his people are to worship him. What they need is a space properly their own where they may worship him in full freedom.

The Book of Exodus concludes with the construction of the tabernacle, with the ark of the covenant, the table, the lampstand, the altar of incense, the altar of burnt offerings, the laver and the court — all the objects that are necessary for Israel’s worship within the wilderness, as they make their way into the land that God has promised them.  The final verses read, Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle… For throughout all their journeys the cloud of the Lord was upon the tabernacle by day, and fire was in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel (40:34, 38). Although the promise of the land remains to be fulfilled, by the end of Exodus, the glory of the Lord has come to dwell with his people that they may truly and rightly serve him in the wilderness.

At this point we should ask a fundamental question: why does God want his people to worship him? Wouldn’t it have been enough for God to simply liberate his chosen people from the tyrannical rule under which they suffered at the hands of Pharaoh? Why is the restoration of justice not enough for the Lord God? Here, we can turn again for guidance to Joseph Ratzinger. Ratzinger notes that, in every culture throughout history, the human race has tried to respond to an existential need, seemingly co-extensive with the essence of being human, to worship. I quote Ratzinger here at some length:

The awareness of guilt weighs down on mankind. Worship is the attempt, to be found at every stage of history, to overcome guilt and bring back the world and one’s own life into right order. And yet an immense feeling of futility pervades everything. This is the tragic face of human history. How can man again connect the world with God? How is he supposed to make valid atonement? The only real gift man should give to God is himself.³

Ratzinger goes on to note that, in response to the human race’s sense of insufficiency in what it can offer to God in atonement for its guilt, in the most extreme cases, cultures turn to human sacrifice, as an attempt to offer God that which is most precious to human existence, human life itself. Seen in this light, then, God’s desire for his people to worship him in the desert (and in greater ways thereafter) is in response to a natural yearning throughout all humanity to worship: to offer sacrifice in atonement for their guilt to God however they may understand him. This calling out of the slavery in Egypt to worship God is thus among the first stages of God’s revelation of humanity to itself: to show his people (Israel then and us now) how he desires us to worship in accordance with how he has created us to exist. What Ratzinger teaches us, on the foundation of biblical evidence, is that the need to worship is an inescapable part of the human condition and that the Exodus of Israel from slavery in Egypt to worship in freedom is part of God’s self-disclosure of himself and his plan to us, by which alone we are capable of truly understanding who we are and why we were made.  

Now, we may be tempted, from the brief sketch of Exodus that I just have provided, to think that authentic Christian worship likewise requires its own land in the same sense as it did for Israel: that we ought to work to establish a thoroughly Christian state in which we will be entirely free from all outside pressure that we may worship God as God has commanded us. That has been tried before, in search of ‘Christendom’, and that led not to a perfect society in which God alone is worshipped, but to the waging of ‘holy war’ and to the burning of heretics at the stake. My point is not to argue in favor of attempting anything similar. 

Rather, the point of Exodus, on my reading — and this certainly follows Joseph Ratzinger’s exegesis of the book as well — is to say that the ‘land’ that we require for worship is not a political reality, a well-defined geographic boundary with a governing set of laws that ensure the practice of right religion, but rather an ‘interior land’ in which we may offer to God the sacrifice that he commands of us. The sacrifice that God commands of us is not one that is dependent on any political leader, policy, or form of government but transcends all of them: it is the sacrifice of a humble and contrite heart. At Mass, the priest prays quietly at the Offertory, With humble spirit and contrite heart may we be accepted by you, O Lord, and may our sacrifice in your sight this day be pleasing to you, Lord God. The interior land in which we worship the true God is that of a humble and contrite heart, a heart that does not let itself fall into the compromises offered by the competing powers of the world, but one which offers in complete humility everything to the Lord our God. And it is this interior land, the nation of the humble and contrite heart, that enables Christians, no matter where they are or under what forms of political oppression they may suffer to offer sacrifice to the Lord, as the witness of the martyrs down the ages attest.

Now, if we approach the book of Exodus through the perspective of the allegorical sense of Scripture, we can read all that we’ve said in light of our own experience of ‘slavery’ and God’s desire to liberate us from that slavery to worship him in spirit and truth. We can identify the slavery by which we are bound and restricted from the fullness of worship in any number of ways. It can be a particular sin, especially a habitual sin or vice, or a set of sins that feed one upon the other. It can be an influence in our life — a friend, co-worker, spouse, sibling, etc. — which pulls us away from giving God all that we ought. It can be the guilt that we carry with us of our previous life, of past sins, of the damage that our pride and selfishness have done to us, to others, and to even the entire world. It can be the fear of being led out from the comfort of our present condition, even as oppressive as it may be, into the unknown wilderness of where God calls us to worship him. When we look into our hearts, we can also notice how we are tempted to negotiate with Pharoah for a half-way house, to follow God only so far, but then to still keep one foot within Egypt. We may be willing to make some of the resolutions necessary to move toward freedom, but we may have compromised on others. And for God, that simply will not suffice. He is everything, and he demands that we give him everything in return, and that is what we call worship.

What is at stake, here, is the fact that if we do not worship God completely — if we do not give him our entire heart — then we will, inevitably, put other gods before him. We are made to worship; and if we are not worshipping God, we are worshipping something or someone else. And who and what we worship determines the form of our life, our way of being in the world, what we value, etc. That is why God does not allow Moses to settle for anything less than full and complete worship in the wilderness in his negotiations with Pharoah. Everyone, men and women and children, along with their flocks and heard must go out, into the wilderness, to worship God as he himself determines. In Ratzinger’s words, Man himself cannot simply ‘make’ worship. If God does not reveal himself, man is clutching empty space… [Man] can reach out toward God in his thinking and try to feel his way toward him. But real liturgy implies that God responds and reveals how we can worship him…. Liturgy implies a real relationship with Another, who reveals himself to us and gives our existence a new direction.⁴

III. Worship in Spirit & Truth

That brings us, conveniently, to the second half of our consideration and to the Gospel of the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon (Jn. 4:5-6). Let’s use these two introductory verses to get our bearings historically and theologically so that we can allow the encounter that is about to take place to unfold in all its wonder and power.

First, Samaria was the land along the West Bank of the River Jordan that separated Judea in the south from Galilee in the north. To give a brief historical summary, after Israel fell to the Assyrians (c. 721 BC), the Samaritans, finding Jerusalem and the temple on Mount Zion in ruins, established their own cult for worship in Samaria on Mount Gerizim. The Samaritans, however, assimilated their religious practices with those of the pagan Assyrians and intermarried with them, thus, to the Jews’ minds, defiling themselves and their religion. For this reason, Jews and Samaritans had nothing to do with each other. When passing between Judea and Galilee, Jews would go around the middle-ground of Samaria to avoid themselves being defiled by their wayward beliefs and practices. Now, that historical context puts some teeth on the Gospel text, which the Lectionary only softly translates to read Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar. More accurately, the text says, Jesus had to pass through Samaria. So he came to a city of Samaria, called Sychar. It wasn’t by accident that Jesus came to Samaria, nor was it a matter of typical activity, but something profoundly intentional and deeply counter-cultural for Jesus to voluntarily choose to go to Samaria.

Second, the specific place to which he goes is illuminating on what is about to unfold. Jesus goes to Jacob’s well. By making reference to Jacob’s well, we are taken back to the very foundation of the people of Israel, for the Lord would change Jacob’s name to Israel and thus establish, through his sons, a great nation, his own people. What the Lord Jesus is signaling by his coming to Jacob’s well is that he is about to complete the work that was begun with Jacob, continued through Moses and all the patriarchs and prophets, to establish his people in a place where they may worship God in spirit and in truth. We should perhaps read the necessity that Jesus had to pass through Samaria in the following light: Samaria, although defiled, is nonetheless part of the land. It is part of the promise that God had made to his people, and as God is always faithful to his promises, the God-man Jesus will not exclude from his own mission an act of redemption toward that part of the land that has fallen away. Thus, in ‘having’ to go to Samaria, Jesus evidences a desire to reunite and restore the people of Israel and, as we will see, to make them the seedbed for what he is about to reveal.

Turning now to the encounter between Jesus and the unnamed woman at the well, let us notice how this encounter is fundamentally about worship and what it will take for this woman (and by extension Samaria and by further extension us) to worship in spirit and truth. The conversation begins with a discussion about water, a profoundly meaningful theme in the Gospel of John that is always connected to faith. As the preface for the Third Sunday of Lent, when this Gospel is read states, For when he asked the Samaritan woman for water to drink… so ardently did he thirst for her faith. Thus, in asking for a drink, Jesus is not only seeking to satisfy the bodily desire for water, but rather he desired her faith, which he would call out of her in the course of this conversation. In eliciting her faith, Jesus is moving her toward worship, as worship is ultimately an act of faith.

To move her toward faith, Jesus then steers the conversation toward her husband. Here we have at least three layers of meaning. The first to consider is the literal words on the page. This woman has had five husbands and now lives with a sixth man. Obviously, this woman’s life has not been easy. As with any relationship, we can presume that each of  the six relationships began with some hope that it, at last, would bring her to a better life. Thus, to each man, this woman would have given away part of herself and, further presuming that the first five of these relationships ended badly, she in a way lost those parts of herself in those relationships to the point that when she meets Jesus she is but a shadow of who she once was. Her ability to trust, hope, and love were damaged by these prior engagements. We can presume this is the case simply based on our own experience of being damaged by relationships, romantic and otherwise. Further, we can hear in her reaction to the spring of water welling up to eternal life that Jesus offers her — Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst — she is clearly searching for something to make her whole (4:14-15).

The second sense of this passage is to see represented in this woman the whole of Samaria. Exegetes have long connected the five husbands of the woman to the five foreign tribes who intermarried with the Samaritans and introduced five male deities into their religion. As the Ignatius Catholic Study Bible notes, These idols were individually address as Baal, a Hebrew word meaning ‘lord’ or ‘husband.’ Thus, at this level, Jesus is making reference to the way in which Samaria, as part of the unfaithful Israel has played the harlot and wedded herself to five husbands. 

The third sense of this passage is how the same spiritual sense applies to each of us. We are each represented in the woman at the well because we, likewise, have been unfaithful to God and given ourselves over to various ‘husbands’. And each time, as we do so, we are hurt by those relationships and lose part of ourselves in them. In other words, sin damages us and therefore we stand in need of redemption.

Now, in light of all three senses, here enters Jesus the Bridegroom. John’s Gospel situates this encounter at Jacob’s well, which is significant, because Jacob, Isaac, and Moses first met their wives beside wells. Jesus, then, as the divine Bridegroom has come to claim his Bride, who is at the same time, this Samaritan woman, all of Samaria, and all of us. Let me be clear, Jesus does not take this woman to be his wife in a literal sense. Rather, he reveals himself to all of us as that for which our hearts truly long, as the one through whom, with whom, and in whom, divine worship is possible.

From this exchange about her husbands, the conversation narrows in on worship itself. She says, Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that in Jerusalem is the place where we ought to worship (4:20). In reply, Jesus says to her:

Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth (4:21-25).

Notice how she brings up worship with respect to the land. For her (and for both the Jews and Samaritans more generally), right worship can only happen within a geographic boundary. Jews worship on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; Samaritans worship on Mount Gerizim. That is that. What Jesus reveals in what follows (and this is truly revelatory!) is that worship is not, against what they understood of the partial revelation made in the Old Covenant, intrinsically linked to a physical, geographical land, but rather a land that is interior and spiritual land of true and authentic freedom: free not from the oppression of any political power but free from all that has claimed part of us — part of our love — which we call idols or, in this case, husbands. In order to truly worship, this woman needs to be set free from her husbands, Samaria needs to be set free from her foreign gods, and we need to be set free from everything to which we’ve wedded ourselves and put before the living God.

As Jesus moves the locus of authentic worship away from either Mount Zion or Mount Gerizim, he tells us that those who seek to worship God, who is Spirit, must worship in spirit and truth. That means that God’s Holy Spirit must be poured into one’s heart before they can worship in spirit and truly, rightly, authentically worship. And to worship in spirit —that is, in the Holy Spirit — requires that anything that is intrinsically incompatible with that Spirit first be removed before true worship can take place. Now, the Holy Spirit is divine love, and thus whatever is inconsistent with divine love cannot coexist alongside the Spirit. Hence sin, in whatever form it takes for us as individuals, must be rooted out for us to worship in the Spirit, who is love itself. That, in the final analysis, is why we undertake the traditional Lenten penances of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. That is why we are told to repent from sin and be faithful to the Gospel. All that happens in Lent serves to dispel whatever sins we have erected as idols within our hearts that threaten the life of the Spirit within us that enables us to completely and unreservedly engage in the supreme act for which we were made: divine worship.

IV. Conclusion

Now, worship in spirit and truth is not an abstract concept or something that we can carry out wherever we are, whenever we want, in whatever manner we want. While, yes, we can pray wherever we are, and prayer is an act of worship, the perfect form of worship that Christ commands us to make has a defined character. It is the worship in which Christ, the Bridegroom, and his Bride, the Church commune with each other, and that is what we call the liturgy.

God commanded his people to depart from Egypt that they could go into the wilderness and offer him worship. He promised to give them the land that they would have a place to offer that worship. Eventually, they were able to build the temple and offer sacrifice there, according to the law, unto God. Yet with Jesus comes the destruction of the Temple and its replacement with his own Body. Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up (Jn 2:19). At the moment of the consummation of his sacrifice on the Cross, the veil in the Temple was rent, signaling the end of the time of worship in the Temple. With the Cross, the capacity for true worship has come.

Yet, with the Resurrection, a new temple has been erected, in the living Body of Jesus. Here again, we turn to Ratzinger: With his Resurrection the new Temple will begin: the living body of Jesus Christ, which will now stand in the sight of God and be the place of all worship. Into this body he incorporates men. It is the tabernacle that no human hands have made, the place of true worship of God, which casts out the shadow and replaces it with reality.⁵ In the words of the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy:

Christ indeed always associates himself in this great work [the liturgy] wherein God is perfectly glorified and men are sanctified. The Church is His Beloved Bride who calls out to her Lord, and through him offers worship to the eternal Father. Further, in the liturgy the whole public worship is performed by the Mystical Body of Jesus Christ, that is, by the Head and His members.⁶

The Church’s liturgy, then, is the way in which God desires us to worship. It is the place where Bridegroom and Bride give themselves to each other and offer themselves together to our most Merciful Father. And for us to enter into this act of divine worship completely and wholeheartedly, we need the interior land in which we are free from all the oppressive powers of false and empty gods that in habit, restrict, or qualify our worship that we may worship in the manner that God has commanded us, in spirit and truth.

1. Joseph Ratzinger, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” in Joseph Ratzinger Collected Works Vol. XI: Theology of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward, Kenneth Baker, Henry Taylor, et al., ed. Michael J. Miller (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2014), 6-7.

2. Ratzinger, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” 7.

3. Ratzinger, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” 20.

4. Ratzinger, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” 11.

5. Ratzinger, “The Spirit of the Liturgy,” 25.

6. Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Sacrosanctum Concilium (December 4, 1963), 11.