Welcome to a great love story

For a whole month we will be reading a short and beautiful book, the Book of Ruth. This book is quite easy to read, it contains all the elements to make it interesting: a dramatic background and credible, noble characters. It contains situations that, despite the distance that separates us from the story, everything that is told here is easily understood today.

Another element that helps us when reading Ruth is that its protagonists are ordinary people who face difficult situations, and their struggles and frustrations are not hidden from us.

As we complete our series of reflections in the Gospel of John this last reflection comes with a big reading as I suggest you read right through John 1-4 to get the whole sweep of what John has been saying.

In the final incident John records in John 4 we see a tragedy in the making. Jesus is back in Cana and he meets a royal official whose son was ill in Capernaum, a long distance away.

In our passage today we find Jesus still talking with the women at the well when his disciples return. They realise it is an awkward moment as Jesus speaks to the woman.

Our world is full of divisions. People are different from one another. Race, gender, wealth, class…the possibilities are endless for us to think of ‘us’ and ‘them’; to consider people as ‘other’ than us.

In the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgement Day Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a cyborg who comes for the future to rescue a mother and her child from attack from another deadly cyborg. The problem is that Arnie looks exactly like a cyborg who had previously tried to kill the mother in the first Terminator movie.

Apparently, Plato said that we can forgive a child for being afraid of the dark, but the real tragedy is when people are afraid of the light.

Nicodemus was right. It is impossible for anyone to be born again by their own effort, whether this understood physically or as a word picture of a spiritual reality.

‘How can these things be?’, he asks before fading into the night.

Would the child you were be proud of the person you have become? No doubt the answer to this is mixed, but many of us can feel weighed down by the past, the decisions we have made, the errors and sins we have committed. At times we may catch ourselves thinking that it would be great if we could have a fresh start, a new beginning, a clean sheet of paper. But is this possible?

In John 2:13 we find Jesus in the temple at Jerusalem at the time of the Jewish Passover.

He looks around and sees cattle, sheep, and doves. He hears the noise of these animals and the clink of coins instead prayers and conversation about God.