In looking at this Sunday’s propers, I came across the collect that was used on this Sunday in many of the modern Anglican prayer books, which reads as follows:
O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves: keep us both outwardly in our bodies, and inwardly in our souls: that we may be defended from all adversities which may happen to the body, and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul.
I love the strength of these Lenten orations.
Anyway, in our Missal, that collect was actually one of the options for last Sunday, the second Sunday of Lent, alongside a collect making more explicit reference to the Transfiguration. That is where it was in many of the older versions of the Roman Missal and from there going all the way back to the Gregorian Sacramentary in the tenth century, which is itself a compilation of earlier sources. Sadly, it is one of the many prayers cut from inclusion in the Missal of 1970. The Latin original is also quite strong: Deus, qui conspicis omni nos virtute destitui. “O God, who seest that we are bereft of all virtue.” Cranmer’s 1549 translation is expansive and a little more poetic, but I think very much in keeping with the character of the original: “O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.”
We might hear this and think it some depressing Calvinistic statement of depravity. Perhaps that is how Cranmer took it, and perhaps that is why the reformers in the 1960s disliked it, but this is a very old prayer of the Roman Rite, well over a thousand years old, likely dating to the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great. In a way, it questions what we often see as the whole point of Lent. Lent is about self-discipline and penitence, about preparing ourselves for Easter, right? But then we get this downer: O God, who seest that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
The collect stands as a warning and a prayer against that old heresy, Pelagianism—still a very live memory in the sixth and seventh centuries—which is the idea that we can earn the grace of God on our own merits, the idea that we can pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, whatever that means. But it is just as much a warning against a recurring variation of that heresy, known as semi-Pelagianism, that is the somewhat more attractive idea that “God helps those who help themselves.” No, the collect tells us. We have no power of ourselves to help ourselves.
The language is actually pretty subtle, because it doesn’t say we have no power to help ourselves, but that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves. That, perhaps, is an attempt to translate omni vos virtute destitui in a way that does not imply we are doomed to remain merely passive subjects forever. It’s an important distinction, because what it suggests is that we may, in fact, have some ways to help ourselves, but that even those ways are already given by the grace of God. This is a very useful thing to remember at this point in Lent, because it is always tempting to think about how much we’re doing to prepare our hearts for Easter, how much we’re giving up, or fasting, or praying, or going to church—but actually all of those things are already gifts. What we have is grace upon grace.
The difficult part is getting into that cycle of grace, that cycle in which the gifts of God give way to more gifts. St. Paul speaks to us in Romans, in the verses between today’s selection (5:3-4), about suffering that produces endurance, and character and hope—but surely, to many who suffer, suffering would seem to do no such thing. Sometimes suffering is just suffering, and often suffering leads to more suffering; pain begets pain, hardship begets hardship. Not always, maybe—certainly there are many people whose suffering gives character. But, especially when we think about people who are stuck in seemingly endless cycles of poverty or violence or addiction, whether here or throughout the world, the idea that suffering is character-building can sound cruel. In most cases, one cannot simply will to get out of the cycle; something dramatic has to change. The will to break free is only part of the solution: one needs the power to break free.
The Samaritan woman at the well was, pretty clearly, stuck. She was a Samaritan, for starters, stuck before she was even born in a centuries-old feud between the Jews and their less pure neighbors to the north. That cycle of hatred and resentment was not something she chose, but something she embodied. No self-respecting Jew would speak to her, however nice and respectable she chose to be. On top of this, it turns out that even her own people want nothing to do with her. She comes to the well at the middle of the day, in the heat of the sun, because that is the least likely time for anyone else to be there. She’s an outcast, probably, because she’s had five previous husbands, not to mention her current one, who actually isn’t her husband.
It may seem harsh for Jesus to air all these details at the well, but of course, he’s just stating the facts. He doesn’t delve much deeper than that, or try to give explanations or even condemnations, but he does name with stark clarity the situation she’s in. Whether it was something abusive, or manipulative, or violent, or just plain old-fashioned immoral, this woman is in a cycle that she has, no doubt, fed by her own volition, but that is, at the same time, far beyond her control.
The Church Fathers loved to read this story as an allegory of the human soul. In one version of it, the woman’s five husbands are the five senses. St. Augustine says that when Jesus asks her to call her husband, what he’s saying is: seek new understanding beyond the senses. She’s doing that already, in a way, because she’s with a sixth man—but this man, says Augustine, represents not true understanding, but error. Her true and perfect seventh husband is Jesus himself, the Word of God, who will lead her into truth and life.
Whatever you think of the allegory, I think it’s correct in suggesting the nature of Jesus’ call to the Samaritan. He’s not asking her to summon her strength and get herself out of the trap she’s in. He does, though, ask her to acknowledge the truth of her life, which then prepares her to receive the transformation that he offers.
When the Church administers baptism, whether to children or adults, the first step is this same kind of truth-telling: of acknowledging the reality of sin and evil, of naming our inability to get out of it ourselves, and then turning and accepting the grace of the one who offers us new life.
Baptism is one aspect of the living water that Jesus speaks of at the well. Baptism is meant to break us out of the world’s cycle of sin and death, giving us the power to pursue the life that God intends for us. Surely this is part of the logic why, early on, Christians started baptizing their children, not just adult converts: because they wanted to give their children from the very start the power to live a life of true freedom.
But the living water isn’t just baptism. It’s also, and more importantly, the Holy Spirit himself, who is the love of God poured into our hearts, as Paul says in Romans. And here’s the first answer to how we can ever break out of the cycles of sin and evil that trap us: we have to let the Holy Spirit break in. We can escape the cycles not because we have the power to do so, but because the Holy Spirit has the power to change us. It’s not so much that we escape the external situation as much as we escape our former selves. The woman at the well is no longer trapped in a cycle of immorality and social stigma, because she is no longer herself: she is a new woman, through the living water of the Word of God.
That is what God wants to give us this Lent: not just a booster shot in self-improvement, but an insistent reminder of the new identity that we have in Jesus Christ. It is in that identity, and no other, that we can escape the cycles of sin and evil that try to imprison us.