Worship
23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
What was Jesus up to? He’s hanging about near a seedy well, talking to a woman of ill repute about the true nature of worship? How dodgy can you get? Yet he knew what he was doing for he told the amazed disciples the fields are white for harvest. He then proceeded to succesfully convince the whole town that he was the saviour of the world.
His points about worship are that no race or power structure owns God or religion. That worship of God is a personal spiritual quest, not a prescribed set of rituals or magic incantations. He is not located in a particular place or object. This was important to the samaritans as the Jewish powers did not recognise them and believed that God could only be worshiped in the temple in Jerusalem by people of Jewish birth.
I should also mention that this post ties into the old testament reading about the water coming from the rock when the israelites were in the desert. Jesus is going all metaphysical on us and making the analogy for a spiritual connection with God.
Jesus’ incarnation – his arrival here in human form was all about making this connection to God. He has become God’s human face. We no longer need temples, arks of the covenant, sacrificed lambs, voices from thunderclouds on volcanos or stone tablets to know God. We will find God through Jesus and through emulating him. Jesus told his disciples he didn’t need any bread from them because he had been provided for. He was so excited about what was about to happen in Sychar that he didn’t need to eat. It is in doing the work of God that we find our spiritual hunger met and we learn to worship in spirit and in truth .
Posted: February 25th, 2005 under Bible Bashing.
Comments: 1
Comment from James the cat
Time: 3/3/2005, 8:06 am
I would grant you the point that our life with God is greater than the mere externals of organised religion. Like many human endevours, the quest for the Divine is frequently led off track and may become that which it sought to avoid.
I suggest however that the path to God is more than a personal quest.
As distracted and misguided as organised religion can be at times, it has the potential to unite the ragged mob of indivividuals into the whole people of God in this place, who join with the saints of every age in unending worship of the Divine. The worship of God is of essence a corporate action, that points towards the consumation of the created world in the Kingdom of God.
A lofty ideal perhaps. Yet authentic Christian worship must bear this in mind, that we are gathered as a body for the purpose of God, and that in our worhsip we may yet see a glimpse of heaven, a foretaste of the kingdom.
Perhaps as Anglicans we have traded some of the inherent majesty of received tradition for trendy deconstructed local content and we miss aspects of what we are about. In my own (heavily biased) opinion, this is seen in the extreme in the ‘concert’ liturgies of certain protestant denominations based in the Hill suburbs of Sydney, and in the quasi pagan circle dancing found in some alternative parachurch movements.
I am told, that the grace and power of ritual is best preserved in the liturgies of the Eastern churches – but that is beyond my own experience.
For all this, I agree that the worship of God and our own ceaseless prayer is found not only in formal communal prayer but in doing the work of God. Our approach to God at the altar is validated, and validates in turn, our approach to God in the workplace and at the dinnertable. In all of this we are not alone but journey in the company of the communion of saints.