Christ is risen! Indeed he is risen!
When we hear that the Samaritan woman had five husbands, and that the one she has now is not her husband, we may be shocked at her apparently-tumultuous personal life. Without denying the literal sense of the text, however, there is more to our Lord’s words of accusation. The five husbands represent the five books of Moses, the Pentateuch, to which the Samaritans, who are descended from the Jews left behind at the time of the exile, once adhered. The one who is not a husband, then, is the admixture of false belief and practice that entered Samaritan culture when their Hebrew ancestors intermingled with Gentile settlers. The Lord, however, tells the woman that he is beyond this dichotomy of Judaism versus Samaritanism. “Neither on this mountain or in Jerusalem,” he says: neither orthodox Judaism or Samaritan syncretism are adequate to the “worship in spirit and truth” that Christ has come to introduce to the world. Orthodoxy is no longer to be defined by place or by blood, but by the presence of the Spirit and by witness to the truth, both of which are expressed, first and foremost, in worship: pravoslavie, correct glorification. Thus, as the fathers in the first days once wandered the lands, building shrines to the Lord as they went, so do Orthodox Christians sojourn throughout space and time, erecting temples to the glory of God throughout the world even as we look beyond this world, to our true homeland, which is nowhere on earth, and our true lineage, which is spiritual descent from Christ himself, the New Adam.