Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of land that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there. Jesus, tired from the journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” . . . The woman said to him, “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cistern is deep; where then can you get this living water? . . . Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” (John 4.5-7, 11, 13)
As we quickly sees, the selection from Scripture today is not from Matthew, as has been the case for Year A almost without exception since Advent. For today and for the next two Sundays, the Roman Lectionary drops Matthew and picks up John, whose gospel we will stay with for the most part until Ordinary Time resumes after the Easter Season is done. The simplest explanation is that this is a good way to get a taste of John’s gospel, since he does not get a year to himself on the three-year cycle, as does Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
Also, the selections from John fit nicely with the themes of the Lenten and Easter seasons, as we’ll see as we make our way through the weeks ahead. That correspondence is clear in the Johannine story that we have today, commonly called “The Woman at the Well Story,” an extended story that takes up most of Chapter 4 of the gospel.
Given its length, it is impossible for us to cover the multitude of messages that it provides in the time that we have today. Of course, the main message, front and center, is about water, since Rabbi Jesus asks the woman at the well for a drink of water, followed by a long conversation between Jesus and the woman on the topic of water, which, as we surely can guess, is not really about a cup of water, at least not in the Rabbi’s mind.
For good cause, water is a constant focal point in the Hebrew Scriptures, water a constitutive part of life, particularly for a people living in arid climates, dependent entirely on water–either from springs or from rains–to provide for the foods that they must eat as well as the drinks they must drink in order to survive. There can be no life without water, a fact that meshes easily with the understanding of the Lord God in the Hebrew texts as the One who provides life to the people.
No doubt the most familiar story–among many similar stories–is the one found in the Book of Exodus when the Hebrew slaves are wandering through the Desert of Sinai and are dying of thirst. When Moses implores the Lord God to give them water so that they might continue on their way, the Lord instructs him to strike a rock, which he does, water spurting from the broken rock, quenching the people’s thirst, showing them once again that their God is a god who gives life.
With this long tradition from the past, we should expect to find water often taking center stage in the Christian gospels, as we do in fact. It is a continuation of the same message that we find in the Pentateuch and in the prophets of old. We see a direct continuity in Rabbi Jesus’ words to the woman when he says, “Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
While we certainly can benefit from revisiting this important theme again, I would like to take us in a different direction, scratching beneath the surface to find another important message that will benefit us also. Rather than focus entirely on Rabbi Jesus and his words to the woman, we may want to shift the focus from the Rabbi to the woman. I propose she also has a message for us.
Taking a closer look at her, we are going to see that she is the least likely person in the world to tell us anything important, especially when we look at her circumstances and at her cultural context. As we examine her life, we find soon enough that she has three strikes against her, given the time frame in which she lives: first, she is a woman, second, a Samaritan, and third, a sinner. Any one of those attributes would under the circumstances of the times make her a second class citizen. Combined, she becomes a persona non grata.
Women back then–and today in many parts of the world and in our own culture to some degree–did not enjoy the same position and privileges as men did, her life, for the most part, dependent on the men in her life, father, husband, brothers, sons. There were official and unofficial rules regulating the lives of women, all based on the assumption that women were in some way inferior to men.
For our purposes, one of those rules was that men did not strike up a conversation with a woman in a public place. It just wasn’t done. So, for Rabbi Jesus to address directly the woman at the well was to break protocol, to ignore social norms. While the early listeners of the story would have been shocked at the start by that fact, we are clued into it by a statement later in the story. It reads, “At that moment his disciples returned and were amazed that he was talking with a woman.”
So, having a better understanding of the culture, we already know something important is being told to us as soon as the story begins. For whatever reason, Rabbi Jesus is ignoring the way things were done, speaking outright to a woman at the town well, the hub of the community, where anyone in town could see what was going on. The norm was so strict that he didn’t break it just because he wanted a drink of water. He broke it because he thought it was a dumb rule.
The second reality staring us in the face in the story is that the woman is a Samaritan, the arch-enemy of the Jews, the enmity between the two groups going back centuries when the Northern Kingdom of which Samaria was a part was captured by foreign adversaries, resulting over time in intermarriages between the Jews of the region and pagans who had moved in. That breach was enough to brand the Samaritans as inferior.
If that was not enough, there was more. The Samaritans over time decided to forego the long trip to Jerusalem to offer their sacrifices, probably recognizing they were unwelcome there anyway, and so decided to build their own temple within the region, on Mount Gerizim, a place with a long history, purportedly the site where Abraham had intended to sacrifice his son Isaac.
The dispute is brought to the fore when the woman at the well says to Rabbi Jesus, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem.” And what does the Rabbi answer? He says to her, “Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”
That reply makes abundantly clear that he does not share the same antipathy towards the Samaritans as his fellow Jews in Judea do. The fact that she is a Samaritan–with all the baggage that accompanied that reality–matters little to none for Rabbi Jesus. Apparently, he considers the feud to be nonsense, a stance reinforced several times in the gospel when he puts a Samaritan in the forefront of an action or of a story, something no good Jew would ever do.
So, not only does Jesus ignore the norm about not talking to a woman in public, he also ignores the long-standing antagonism between Jews and Samaritans and, in so doing, makes clear he isn’t bound by local prejudices. Refusing to choose sides, he intentionally made his way through Samaria on his way to Galilee, knowing he would encounter the enemy, unlike most Jews who would have never stepped foot inside Samaria, taking the long way around to Galilee. Obviously, he doesn’t view Samaritans as enemies, bringing down the second barrier in the story.
As he talks to the Samaritan woman at the well, it becomes clear that she has history and plenty of dirty laundry. One dead give-away was that she was at the well at noon–something the evangelist points out–which is not the time when women in the village went to the well. They went in the morning and in the evening, not when the sun was the hottest and not when their work was the busiest.
Yet, the Samaritan woman is at the well at noontime, indicating she is not welcomed among the women of town, not part of the in-crowd. Rabbi Jesus is smart enough to figure out that probably means some immoral behavior. So when she says to him that she has no husband, he answers, “You are right in saying, ‘I do not have a husband.’ For you have had five husbands and the one you have now is not your husband.’” The woman, astounded at his ability to read her conscience, says, “I can see you are a prophet.”
While Jewish rabbis typically allowed two marriages, sometimes three, they did not allow five legitimate husbands. Here she is, married five times and now living outside marriage with another man, causing the other women of the town to avoid her company, lest they be guilty by association, clutching their pearls so tightly in moral indignation that they almost strangled themselves.
And yet, Rabbi Jesus is seemingly unbothered by her moral turpitude, simply pointing out a fact, but not delivering a fire and brimstone sermon to her, refusing to censor her or cast her to the dogs as the rest of the townspeople apparently have done. With that refusal, he puts the third and final nail in the coffin of cultural attitudes that would demand that we see someone as “other,” as not like us. Whereas, everyone else saw her as someone with three strikes, Rabbi Jesus called no strikes, an umpire unlike any other in the world.
He didn’t allow the fact that she was a woman to prevent him from treating her as an equal, speaking to her directly. He didn’t allow the fact that she was a Samaritan, the enemy of the Jews, to stop him from treating her as a friend rather than as a foe. And he didn’t allow the fact that she was a sinner to shut her off from him. In each instance, he slammed through the wall, showing us that God never intended for walls of any sort to separate his children on earth.
Of course, the punchline is yet to follow. After her conversation with Rabbi Jesus, the Samaritan woman, a first-class sinner, goes door-to-door telling people of her unbelievable encounter with him, urging them to “come see a man who told me everything I have done. Could he possibly be the Christ?” We’re told that the people “came to him” and “began to believe in him.”
And in that moment, leaving her water jar at the well, rushing to tell the good news, the sinful Samaritan woman becomes a disciple, the unlikeliest candidate in the world, but equal to and the same as the fishermen who dropped their nets at the seashore to follow Rabbi Jesus, themselves unlikely candidates for the job as well, but selected intentionally by the Galilean who said more than once that the sick need a doctor, not healthy people.
Here, at Jacob’s well, Rabbi Jesus showed us again that the embrace of God is far and wide, and, truth be told, he brings those most estranged and most ignored nearest to him, close enough to hear the beat of his heart, a heart overflowing with love, a bottomless well that quenches the thirst of the least, the last, the lost, and the lonely in this world.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 