FINDINGS II

Lent III - A - March 27, 2011

John 4: 5-42       

John 4: 5-42    

Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground it was said that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, weary of travel, had sat down next the well. It was around noontime as a Samaritan woman came to draw water. Jesus, whose disciples had gone into the city of buy food, asked if she would give him a drink. The woman was taken aback, saying, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask me, a woman of Samaria, to give you a drink." [Jews and Samaritans do not share things in common, each scorning the other as unclean.] Jesus replied, "If you knew who this given-of-God is asking you to give him a drink, you would have asked him to give you a drink of living water [as opposed to that swill down your well there]." Totally missing the point, the woman said, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where would you get the living water of which you speak? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave our people this well and with his family and animals drank from it himself?" Jesus replied, "Everyone who drinks this well water will be thirsty again, but those who drink the water I will give them will never be thirsty. The water I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." Finally, the woman said, "Sir, give me some of this water so I won't ever be thirsty again and can have done with this stupid job of coming back here again and again to get water." Jesus then said to her, "Go and get your husband and return." She said, "I don't have a husband." Jesus said, "That's right, you have no husband. You have had five husbands, and the man you're now with is not your husband." The woman stood with jaw agape and finally said, "You must be a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but your people say the place where people should worship is Jerusalem." Jesus said, "No, no, my dear. Believe me when I tell you that the time is coming when you will worship the father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem . . . but the hour is coming and, in fact, now is when those who worship sincerely will worship the father in spirit and in truth."  She said, "I'm told that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will tell us everything we need to know." Jesus said, "I am he, the one who speaks to you right now" . . .  The woman dropped her water jar and hurried back to the city and said to people, "Come with me and see a man who told me everything ever I did. Do you suppose he is Messiah?" Some of them went to see Jesus, believing on the strength of the woman's testimony that he was Messiah. After hearing him speak for himself, they devalued the woman's witness because, they said, "we have heard for ourselves, and now we know that this one if he who will save the world." (Translated, condensed and paraphrased by Harry T. Cook)

RUBRIC

Many a thorn reaches out from the underbrush of this story to catch the hem of the garment of the passerby, diverting him or her from a clear passage onto the next thing. The woman-at-the-well story is typical of the fourth gospel in that it is full of such circumstantial details that may or may not matter (e.g., 4:6b: It was about noon). Even so, like unto few other stories in the New Testament canon, this one is rich with irony and surprise.

HOMILETIC WORKSHOP

The evangelist is taking Jesus home via Samaria where lived descendants of Israelites who had intermarried with Assyrians 700 or so years before and were considered thereby unsavory. The Samaritans here do not quite get the favorable treatment afforded them in Luke 10:30-37, but John was able by this story to help his readers share his sense of the cosmic sweep of the gospel by transcending geographical, cultural and ideological boundaries.

Whether or not Jesus "had to" go through Samaria is debatable, but if John wanted his points made, Jesus would have had to go there and be there long enough for such points to be made. John spares neither custom nor tradition here. His Jesus has a conversation with a woman, with a Samaritan woman. His Jesus would drink from a vessel belonging to a Samaritan and from a well frequented by them. [I remember the first time I saw a drinking fountain in the South bearing a sign: WHITES ONLY.]

The boundary between Galilean and Samaritan is made of non-effect by the momentous declaration of the Johannine Jesus that he is not only living water of the kind that slakes human thirst permanently, but, more than that, messiah himself. "I am" that, he said - all over a simple request for a drink of water from the hands of a woman who couldn't possibly have understood who Jesus was, other than a wandering Judean or Jew, which, strictly speaking, he was not. - One question here: "By what means did John imagine the woman knew that Jesus was not a Samaritan? Accent? Word choice? Garb? Mien?

It took verbal sleight of hand to convince the Samaritan woman that, besides not being a Samaritan, Jesus was also no ordinary person. She was astonished that he knew her marital history. "Sir," she said, "I perceive you are a prophet!"  Yet she remains suspicious, because if Jesus was Judean by adoption or birth, he should be advocating Jerusalem as the exclusive cultic site. Ever since Josiah in the latter third of the 7th century B.C.E., the northern cultic sites had been disregarded by those in the south. Only Mt. Gerizim remained as the center of Samaritan worship.

That objection is set aside in just the way John set aside the silly taboos against men conversing with women, men alien to Samaria talking with a Samaritan (woman, no less) and "foreigners" drinking from a well in a strange land. Never mind about the mounts Zion and Gerizim. All that is over. Sh'ma Yis'ra'eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.

By the time the fourth gospel was being compiled, Jesus Judaism was becoming more and more a Graeco-Roman myth religion with fewer palpable realities. Now the deity is "spirit" and must be worshipped "in spirit" if worship is to be truthful. For John, the spirit is like the wind which blows how, where and when it will, and no one can tell whence it cometh or whither it goeth. Moreover, the enfleshment of the divine intelligence and power (John 1:14) is a human being for all times and seasons, for all people and places.

Worshipping such a deity in spirit is to worship it "in truth," that word in Greek (άλήθεια) means "truth" in the sense of disclosing or unveiling what is. Withal, the well woman remains obsessed with "messiah's" mysterious knowledge of her love life. She tells those in her city who would listen, "Come and see a man who told me everything ever I did!" That the man she encountered for the first time at the well could tell her such "truth" made him in her mind "messiah." How easy was that?! Finally, her fellow residents come to that conclusion, too, and not only because she told them of her experience but because they believed what Jesus apparently told them about himself. From the horse's mouth, in other words.

The fourth evangelist's vision is momentous, monumental and altogether sublime. Yet Jesus' disciples were scandalized that he would speak to a woman, never mind a Samaritan woman. And the woman couldn't get past his other-worldly knowledge of her marital history. In that irony is to be found an explanation for the continued misappropriation of Jesus for a seeming infinite variety of lesser and sometimes banal causes.

FOOTNOTE: It is interesting to note the detail John provides about the woman's testimony to her neighbors. The neighbors are made to tell the woman that, once they have seen and heard Jesus, their personal experience trumps her testimony. This can be seen in at least two ways: 1) she was a woman and therefore to be discounted just as Luke at 24:11 depicts the apostles as dismissing the Galilean women's story of the empty tomb as "an idle tale," or 2) for John, first-hand personal experience is the gold standard of religious conviction.