Lent 3 A - 27 Mar 2011

The Church of the Transfiguration, New York, NY
Br. Adam McCoy, OHC
Lent 3 A - March 27, 2011

Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

What an extraordinary story we’ve just heard. Jesus, on his way north from Jerusalem to Galilee, passing through Samaria, a place most Jews would avoid, a sort of religious wasteland. Jesus and the remarkable, chatty lady he meets at the well. The therapeutic, almost clinical, conversation they have about her married life. Their banter about religious customs. The mysterious dialogue about water. And then the salvation moment for her entire community. How extraordinary.

Practically the first thing one learns in Sunday School about the culture of the New Testament is that Jews and Samaritans don’t get along. That’s the required background for understanding the parable of the Good Samaritan. So it is perhaps a little surprising to find Jesus and this lady chatting away, and that surprise is a reaction worth holding on to. This is one of those Bible stories which gets more complicated as you pay attention to it. Not only did Jews and Samaritans not get along: Jews actively despised Samaritans as collaborators who had interbred with the enemy during the occupation after the fall of Israel. Samaritans had strange customs. They worshiped on the wrong mountain. The Jews thought them unclean and treated them that way.

And this woman is strange. Drawing water was women’s work, and it had attached to it a lot of gendered significance. Women would come together in groups to the well, in their sisterly solidarity catching up on the news, commenting on the day’s events, checking up on the children, supporting each other, in their gossip implicitly upholding the village social morality. But John makes a point of telling us that the woman at the well is alone. Women generally would draw water in the cool of the morning or early evening, because hauling water is heavy work, not to be done in the heat of the day. John makes a point of telling us that she is there at noon. Is she alone and at the well at the wrong hour because she is being shunned, because of her irregular life? Men and women in first century Palestine generally did not talk socially with each other unless they were related and at home. In fact, women rarely left home at all, and certainly not unaccompanied. And yet here she is, surprised by Jesus’ request for water from her, but ready to engage a perfect stranger, all alone, out in public. She is clearly the wrong sort of person, in the wrong sort of place, doing the wrong sort of thing. And yet Jesus unfolds for her the secret mystery of his identity: "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." This to an unclean Samaritan, excluded by the other women of the village, with a scandalous marital history, living in sin, with no evident regard at all for what is proper. And not only is this woman a member of this despised group, the Samaritans: she is not even a successful Samaritan. She is the despised among the despised. And yet, how remarkable: Instead of sinking into depression, anger or worse, she bears her burden, literally and figuratively: Excluded from the sisterhood? She picks up her water jar every noon anyway and walks off to the well alone, ready to encounter what may come to her, ready for Jesus. An amazing woman.

But wait. There is more that is strange in this story.

The Old Testament lesson today tells us of the thirsty Israelites in the desert, nagging Moses about water. Those needy, pesky Israelites, always thinking about themselves. But who is thirsty in the story from John? This passage makes me think of the saying in Matthew: “Whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple--truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." (Mt 10:42) Who is giving the cup of water to whom? Is Jesus one of the little ones in this story? Is he the thirsty Israelite depending on God’s grace for what his life needs as he travels through this desert place?

There are so many reversals in this story: The woman excluded from her community, breaking ancestral custom and the laws governing the lives of men and women. Her almost rabbinic theological dialogue with Jesus, not what one expects from a woman in her culture, even more from a woman like her. And Jesus, out of place, in humility, asking for water in the wilderness, looking for that most elemental act of human kindness, a cup of water. And in return, opening the secret mysteries of the overflowing, never-failing grace of God. To an unclean, outcast, social misfit of a woman from an antagonistic, despised outsider group.

And then the unexpected conclusion to the story: This strange woman goes into the village, the village of her social exclusion, tells the elders what has happened, and miracle of miracles: those elders listen to her, and invite Jesus to stay with them. Even if his introduction to them comes from her. And he does. And they come to believe. I wonder if the key to this story is not the ending, which has often seemed to me to be something of a non sequitur: “But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.” Is this the harvest the disciples expected? The first fruits of Jesus’ ministry is – Samaritans? Samaritans? This is a great sign of God’s redeeming love for the whole world through Jesus Christ: the lowest of the low, the most despised and rejected are among the first to respond to Jesus’ presence and Jesus’ words. One is perhaps reminded of the prophet Jonah, sent to a place he did not want to visit, and it is there, in Nineveh, not in Israel, that people are found who listen and respond to the invitation of God. And here, as Matthew and Luke say, “Here you have a greater than Jonah.” (Mt 12:41, Lk 11:32)

Have you ever been a Samaritan? Even if you have had success in life, I am willing to bet that somewhere deep down this woman resonates with you. She does with me.

Do you remember, when you were in junior high school, how important it was to be accepted, to be part of the group? Do you remember the terror that you might be excluded? And the shame, humiliation, degradation of actually being labeled one of “them” instead of one of “us”? To work and work to be part of the right group and then to be dismissed with a cutting remark, a single word, a look: You aren’t one of the favored, one of us. You never will be. To be in the band instead of on the football team or in the cheerleading squad? Who, after all, are the homecoming kings and queens? Not first chair clarinet, I can tell you. And God help you if you are the last clarinet in the back row!

For me one of the great excitements of the story of the Samaritan woman at the well is that it shows that God’s message is not just for the victors, not for the in group that I will never really be completely at home with. Jesus comes to the well in humility and expectation, looking for that special lost one from whom he asks only what she is able to give. His openness to her opens her to him in return, and once over the surprise and shock of this seemingly inappropriate encounter, their conversation reveals her heart: What about the fact that my people are excluded, dishonored, Samaritans? What about my own irregular, failure of a life? It is to her, not to someone more seemingly worthy, that Jesus reveals his messianic secret, the inner meaning of salvation, the great good news: The burden you have to bear is no burden to God. God’s water is living water. You need never thirst again.

Who are we that God should come to us? Failed Samaritans? Who are we that God should ask of us only what we can give, even if it is a cup of water? Who are we that God should spend whole days and nights as a guest among us, unworthy as we are? Who are we that God should answer our questions, take an interest in our lives, even in our messy, serially-failing lives? Who are we that in these simple acts God should reveal to us the truth?

What grace, that Jesus in extreme humility comes to us as we carry the heavy water jars of our lives. How extraordinary that he should be the one to ask a simple gift of us, a gift we can actually give him, when we should ask what we need of him. How extraordinary that he should find in us a community from which he begins to build the kingdom.

May we be like that woman: failed Samaritans, yes, but possessed of the strength of character to encounter the stranger at the well, to engage him fearlessly, to perceive in ourselves the change he offers to us, and then the courage to tell our community. And may our communities, very likely Samaritans all in the eyes of the truly righteous, have the grace and courage of spirit to invite him in, to listen and to hear, and then to say with them: This is truly the Savior of the world.