John 4:4-42
March 27, 2011: Third Sunday of Lent
During Lent, we are reading a series of stories from the gospel of John in which different characters encounter Jesus and are changed. Last week we met Nicodemus who came to Jesus believing in him because of the miracles Jesus had performed, but he left with a new kind of faith that was not as much about believing in as entrusting one’s life to Jesus. This week we meet the Samaritan woman at the well.
The conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman is the longest conversation between Jesus and any one person recorded in our gospels. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what this means – but I’m going to go ahead and assume that this encounter holds a great deal of meaning for the author of this gospel. Of course, figuring out why it was so meaningful is a little bit tricky since we know almost nothing about the author, including who he – or maybe even she – was.
But we know a little bit about the world in which the author lived. At that time women basically had no say in how many husbands they had. The woman at the well says she has had five husbands, but we don’t actually know the circumstances that led to this. In our modern times, there is an assumption made that because she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who is not her husband she is a woman of questionable character and morals. However, this reading is really more about our culture than the Samaritan woman’s reality. If someone today has that many past spouses and now lived with someone to whom she is not married, it’s conventional, even though it’s really unfair, to see her as having questionable character.
However, what we know about that time is that women had few rights and so no real choices about whether to stay in a marriage or not. And as for the current man she lives with, culturally it wouldn’t be unusual for a woman to be taken in by a former husband’s brother, or other relative, without marrying him. It meant she was pretty low on the household totem pole, but it was better than being left to her own devices. Bottom line: Women not attached to a man in some way did not fare well in those days.
The significance of five husbands was that we know she was bouncing back and forth between security and insecurity without any control over the situation…it was, to put it mildly, a cruel life. Now she is with a man who is not her husband, like a dagger suspended above her head at all times. She was, in short, a victim of her time.
We know from the author of John that Jesus went to Samaria deliberately – he went out of his way, in fact. And once in Samaria, he goes to a well – knowing it’s the women who traditionally come to draw the water. In other words, Jesus is specifically seeking out a Samaritan woman. Could it be because he knew Samaritan women were victims of an oppressive religious system and he felt great compassion for them?
He meets this woman, and in the course of the conversation he names her precarious reality: you have had a long life of vulnerability and insecurity, he affirms, and now you live with someone who is not really dedicated to your well being. And then, he offers a new reality – a new possibility. One not restricted by the stale, stagnant culture in which she lives – instead, he tells her, she can encounter the living God – living water – and find a world where women could be freed from oppression. And something about Jesus – maybe his insight, his compassion, an aura she sensed – something was powerful enough that she believed such a life might actually be possible.
She calls Jesus a prophet – someone who can see possibilities others cannot. And then, we know from later in the gospel, after her encounter with Jesus she runs back to the village to offer this possibility to her whole community. She plants a seed that might flower into a community where women are treated more compassionately – more humanely. When the Samaritan woman meets Jesus, she is given a vision for an entirely new way of living, and she shares it with others. And they catch the spirit. It was quite a transformation!
But the woman is not the only one to encounter Jesus in this text. The author was keenly aware that the readers would be encountering Jesus through this story too. And so the story does not stop with the woman’s transformation. It continues on into a theological discussion.
What begins as a very personal encounter with Jesus expands to a symbolic encounter between two entire faith traditions. This becomes about an encounter between the Jews and the Samaritans. In fact, John emphatically sets this up when he goes out of his way when he introduces the Samaritan woman to remind the readers that Jews and Samaritans had nothing in common with each other.
The Samaritans and Jews had a long, long history of very complicated relationships and disputes. Samaritan is often seen by modern readers as synonymous with non-Jew. And it’s true that many Samaritans were not Jewish. However, there were some people in Samaria who were descendents of the Jewish people who lived in the Northern part of Israel before Israel fell into the hands of occupiers. When the United Kingdom of David split 1,000 years before Jesus lived, when Israel was divided into a Northern kingdom and a Southern kingdom, the Jewish faith also began to split into a northern Judaism and a southern Judaism.
By the time of Jesus, Samaria had been occupied by foreign nation after foreign nation; there was great diversity in the population – including a small group of people who were descendents of the Jewish remnant of Northern Israel – and the woman at the well is one of these people. She identifies herself to Jesus as a daughter of Jacob, a worshipper of Yahweh.
But, Jews – those descended from the southern faction, no longer recognized their brothers and sisters in faith in the Samaritans. Samaritans were foreigners with different practices and ways. The Jews of the day did, in fact, believe that Samaritan was synonymous with non-Jew. But, that would be a little like the days when Catholics and Protestants saw the other as non-Christian.
One of the biggest differences between these two branches of the same religious family was what constituted the right place and way to worship. Those who identified with the southern kingdom – with Judah – believed that true worship of Yahweh must take place in Jerusalem, the Holy residence of God. The Samaritan Jews, on the other hand, worshipped on Mount Gerizim – the place they understood to be chosen by God and prescribed in the law of Moses.
This passage isn’t just about helping Samaritan women in one small community. The author of John is setting up an epic scene. Most readers of the time would recognize the showdown. Jesus, the Jew, and the Samaritan woman; standing at the well at high noon. And they begin to talk to one another…with the weight of thousands of years of deep distrust and bitter resentment hanging in the air around them.
The woman says to Jesus, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say the place we must worship is Jerusalem.” She was reminding Jesus – and the readers – of the problem between the two religions. She was naming the elephant in the room. And Jesus – a Jew, who should be defending the worship in Jerusalem, says that ultimately those distinctions are meaningless. Completely meaningless. “The hour is coming when you will worship Yahweh neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…The hour is coming and is already here when true worshippers will be recognized as neither Jew nor Samaritan but as those who worship in spirit and truth.” It doesn’t have to be the way it has been for so long.
And the well is a symbol. It is a symbol for the sources of one’s faith and one’s religious life. A symbol for what makes a religion distinct from others. The woman at the start of the conversation is standing by the well of her ancestor Jacob. This is where she draws her water – it is her source of religion and it is distinct from how Jews understood themselves. The Jews had their own metaphorical wells that contained their own beliefs, practices, and traditions.
In our story, Jesus is offering the Jews and the Samaritans not another well from which to come and draw water. He is offering living water – no well necessary. Well water is contained and stagnant. Living water provides a way to move beyond the containers. Spirit and truth are living things. Only if the source of faith is LIVING can it continue to nourish and not go dry. When the first readers of this gospel encountered Jesus and the Samaritan woman, they were offered a new vision as well – one where religious hatreds and distinctions fall away and all become one. And notice, this is not just about Samaritans giving up those things that define their religion and taking on the Jewish way – worshippers, he says, will be neither Samaritan nor Jewish. All must give up their wells with distinct, stagnant, centuries-long beliefs and instead find the living water, which transcends our differences.
In the context of the story about Jesus and the woman, it’s about Jews and Samaritans giving up their identities defined by specific religious practices in order to transcend a deep rift between these two peoples. In the context of those reading this story 100 years later, the rift was between Christians and Jews. They were bitterly divided over which was the true religion over who was right and believed the right thing. And the author of the gospel seems to be saying, through this encounter between a Jew and a Samaritan, both have to let go of those things that divide them – even their very identity as a Jew or Christian. You are no longer Jew or Christian, he’s saying, you are a worshipper of the living God who transcends such entrenched particularities.
Our encounter with Jesus in this text is also two-fold. Like the woman, as individuals Jesus can help us see and transcend the things in our lives and our culture – religious or o otherwise – that oppress us. But there’s a larger message for us as Christians in general when we encounter this text as 1st century readers did. The religions of today, ours included, are too dependent on wells that will always run dry. Is there not another source for our faith that would suggest another way – a way to transcend so many of long time disputes, and the need to decide which religion is right, which is the way to heaven, who is saved and who isn’t?
Jesus’ notion of living water can actually become the source we use to transcend today’s bitter religious rivalries. Rivalries between different Christian denominations, between Christians and Jews, Christians and Muslims, Muslims and Jews, and on and on. Christians, Muslims and Jews worship Yahweh – the same God. We just all believe we do it in the right way, with the right words, emphasizing the right person, choosing the right books for our scriptures. These are the wells from which we draw water – wells that go dry and don’t nourish our faith.
Religion is penultimate. It is a human construction, as much as a well is. It is the container and sadly it can be the very thing that keeps us from living in communion with our brothers and sisters of other traditions. For our part, as Christians, maybe beliefs like, “Jesus is the only way to heaven” are like believing Jerusalem is the only place Jews could worship. Maybe the well by which we stand, and from which we draw our water – the religion of Christianity – is only fueling centuries-long rifts and prejudices.
Living water – as opposed to the well water of distinct religions – is divine activity around us all the time. We are nourished when we see God’s activity in the world around us. Early Christians saw God’s activity in the world in the person and life of Jesus. But God’s activity is not confined to a historical person who lived 2,000 years ago. God is spirit and truth, God is hope and compassion, God is healing and grace, God is justice and peace. In those we see divine action in the world. Our brothers and sisters of other faith traditions see God’s spirit moving in the same ways. When we worship the God who is spirit and truth, rather than a God who is defined by limited, particular religious beliefs, we transcend religions altogether and become one.
We don’t, of course, need to give Jesus up, or the bible, anymore than a Muslim should give up Mohammed or the Koran – but we can stop trying to contain God by saying our well is the right one; that Jesus is the only way the divine can be known in this world. The spirit of God, the ongoing activity of God, is our living water. We make sense of it through our stories, our scriptures, but those are only ultimately containers. Maybe a day is coming when we won’t need those containers, when we can come together with those people of faith from whom we are long divided and distanced and say we all worship God – the God of spirit and truth. Amen.
