To borrow a title from Charles Dickens, our Gospel passage today could easily be referred to as “A Tale of Two Cities”. One city was Samaria, the other Jerusalem.
Both were cities in Israel, but there was deep religious hatred between them because the Jews in Samaria had intermarried with those non-Jews who had conquered them years earlier. Samaria had become a melting pot of different cults and customs. Jews despised Samaritans as a stain on their country.
To make matters worse, Samaria was geographically situated right in the middle of Israel. If the Northern Jews wanted to travel South, they had to passed through Samaria, which often created hostile situations. If they went around it, the journey was twice as long.
The other city, Jerusalem, was Jesus’ destiny, the place of his suffering, death, and resurrection. In our gospel today, Jesus makes that final and decisive turn towards Jerusalem, and in doing so, enters willingly, courageously, and lovingly into totally fulfilling God’s plan of salvation for us.
Our own spiritual lives could be compared to a tale of two cities as well. There’s both a Samaria and a Jerusalem within each of us.
Samaria is that part of our life where we’re not our best,
- where life is messy and relationships are strained,
- where our thoughts and motives sometimes go in the wrong direction.
Samaria is the place in our hearts that needs Jesus’ to pass through it with his healing power and peaceful presence.
The Jerusalem part of our lives is where we desire to be Christ’s faithful followers. We want to be with Jesus, serve him, and learn from his example that the path to eternal glory and happiness is through suffering.
Today we remember St. Jerome who was born in 345 A.D. His greatest quality, that Jerusalem part of him, was his desire to study theology after his baptism as a young man in order that his faith could grow. Seeking a way to get closer to God, he moved to the desert to live the life of a hermit. In that quiet place, he wrote a series of religious writings. His greatest work was his translation of the Bible into Latin. This is still, over 2,000 years later, the Church’s official Latin translation of the Bible. He died in 420 and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1298. His most famous quote is: “Ignorance of scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
And what of his Samaritan side? History tells us that St. Jerome had a very bad temper! If someone taught an error about God, Jerome went after him with his mighty pen.
As the cities of Samaria and Jerusalem were at odds with one another, we are often at odds within ourselves. We want to be Christ’s followers, but we don’t always measure up to that ideal. That is the time we turn to Jesus with trust and ask him to walk with us on our journey.
Finally, may we remember with hope that Scripture tells us even Samaria gave us the Samaritan Woman whose heart was changed, the Good Samaritan who showed great charity, and the one Samaritan leper who returned to give Jesus thanks.
