—Gospel of John, chapter 4:24

Worship? What is it?

There is a story told of Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy. One day during a church service, Dante was lost in meditation and forgot to kneel at the accustomed time. His detractors, eager to accuse him, demanded that the Bishop punish Dante for this act of sacrilege. Dante defended himself by saying, “If those who accuse me had their minds on God, as I had, they would most certainly not be concerned by my posture during prayer.”

Dante was right. True worship of God is not simply a matter of performing certain religious acts to be seen, as Jesus was quick to point out in Matthew 6:5.

Worship is first and foremost a matter of the spirit, and it can be conducted anywhere; in the privacy of your room, in church, or in the midst of God’s awesome world of Nature. Prayer is worship. Jesus tells us when we pray we should go to our room, shut the door and pray to your Father in secret (Matthew 6:6).

The wonderful conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well centered on worship (John 4:7–42). The woman perceived worship as something that should take place on a “mountain” as opposed to the Jews who held that “Jerusalem is the place where we should worship God” (John 6:20). In this beautiful encounter, Jesus freed worship from the restrictions of place and time, saying that the time is “already here when people will worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23).

St Paul faced a similar dilemma about worship in the early church, and argued that the gentile Christians, who did not share in the temple sacrifice of Jewish Christians, worshiped authentically because what mattered was how they worshiped. Thus He wrote: “offer yourselves as a living sacrifice to God, dedicated to His service and pleasing to Him. This is the true worship that you should offer ” (Romans 12:1).

The woman at the well recognized Jesus’s new kind of worship. It was a living worship, all wrapped up in His presence, and manifested by the power of His example. Not only did the woman respond wholeheartedly to Him, she rushed back to her village to tell the rest of the inhabitants. Many who met Christ face-to-face, told the woman: “we believe now, not because of what you said, but because we ourselves have heard Him, and we know that He really is the Savior of the world” (John 4:42).

When you realize what worship is, and live your lives as one successive act of true worship, then you begin to understand that worship in church should draw from your real lives and lead back to your lives outside of church.

Just as you engage in public worship in church on Sunday, so too you should always worship God during the rest of the week by the way you live and treat one another at work, at home, in school, in the gym, on the playground and during meals.

Now, is a good time to appreciate worship in spirit and in truth when Churches all over the world are being closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. This is a time to engage in the living worship that never ceases. As temples of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), our worship has its roots within and extends to everything we do, wherever we are, in thought, word, and deed.

This is the worship that is wholly acceptable to God.

—Fr. Hugh Duffy