27 March 2011

“Faces of faith – Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well”
3 Lent A
John 4:5-42
27 March 2011


As we continue on in our Lenten walk with Jesus , the characters we meet along the way are in an outward progression …
… first, Jesus himself, dealing with his own demons, the temptation to be someone, anyone other than the One who Can Save Us …
… then, last week, Nicodemus, and questions about whether there’s room in the Kingdom for those who come from their own darkness, questioning, seeking, wondering if God is a God of punishment and condemnation, or a God of love and salvation.
Now, this week, we have a story about a woman coming to Jesus from her own darkness … and an explanation, a living out by Jesus of what, precisely, last week’s theme verse means: “For God so loved the world … God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
The darkness in this week’s text is more figurative than literal. Last week, Nicodemus came by night to Jesus. Today, this nameless Samaritan woman comes at the height of the daylight to find Jesus at the well.
Ah … but she brings her own darkness with her.
It’s a multi-layered darkness.
First, it’s cultural. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” And then … that perfunctory, John-the-Gospel-writer-trying-to-be-explanatory note, “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”
It’s not a very good explanation. So I’ll try to give a better one.
Jesus and the disciples were traveling through the hill country north of Jerusalem … “Samaria” was a catch-all phrase used to describe this area. Several hundred years earlier, this was the Northern Kingdom … when Israel split in half following King Solomon’s death, the North set up its own capital, Samaria, with its own kings and royal line, and its own religion … a mix of traditional Judaism and the religions of the non-Jewish people surrounding them. Nowadays we would call it “syncretistic” meaning “mixed together” or “not pure,” and that’s certainly how traditional Jews saw their northern cousins … as “unclean” country bumpkins, deluded, misguided, worshipping another god in their own religious places … not in Jerusalem, and the Temple there, which the Jews held as the center of their religion.
Had Jesus been a “good” Jewish rabbi … first of all, he wouldn’t have spoken to a woman at all … second, he wouldn’t have spoken to a Samaritan woman, let alone asked her for a drink of water.
That’s why the woman acts, sounds so surprised. Here is one, obvious to her by his dress, his mannerisms, his pattern of speech, that he isn’t a Samaritan, but a Jew; more, a rabbi, from the south. Why should he be talking to her?
And so her first layer of darkness slips away.
But there is another, second layer of darkness, which this woman has drawn around herself tightly, as protection … the reason that she’s at the well at noon … the brightest part of the day, but also the time when most people would be home, away, out of the heat of the moment.
Even in the bright light of day, this woman is hidden in darkness.
For Jesus, it is another opportunity to pierce the darkness with the light and life of his Word of love and grace … though, at first, it sounds like “tough love,” to be sure.
“Go, call your husband, and come back.”
“I have no husband.”
Jesus knows what is this woman’s darkness. She slinks around in the bright day-darkness of high noon because she’s one of those women … one that the neighbors point to and talk about, one that the mothers speak of, when they warn their daughters, “you had better watch out, or you’ll end up like her.”
Right here – right now – Jesus reaches deep into this woman’s darkness … and brings her into the light.
Today we’d say that Jesus is “breaking the cycle of abuse and addiction.” Where’s the abuse? What’s the addiction? We don’t know, and the text leaves the particularities in the darkness … maybe it’s alcohol … maybe it’s substances (yes, they had those even back then) … maybe it’s serial monogamy, abusive relationship after abusive relationship …
… it doesn’t really matter, this poor woman, living in her darkness, slinking around in the darkness, being spoken of by others in the darkness … this poor woman, Jesus loves her. And he calls her into relationship with him … and then, necessarily, with others.
Jesus speaks with her – he initiates the conversation. He’s authentic and honest and truthful – he says who he is and isn’t apologetic at all. And he gives this woman the gift of community, where before there was none.
Why does he do it? Why does he go out of his way, go outside of what’s seen as acceptable behavior, risk his own reputation, for her?
Simple. To save her. To rescue her from the mess her life has become. To save her neighbors, too. To create life – growing relationships where before there were none. Here is the Son who won’t glare at her, but who will water this woman with his Word, water which will cause the parched ground of her life to spring forth with newness, “gushing up to eternal life.”

It’s a great story … the woman’s life is changed, and through her, the whole village is given real LIFE.

“Yeah, but that’s Jesus,” we might say. “It doesn’t work that way for us.”

It’s true … relationships take work, community building is an effort. It takes humility and courtesy and honesty and trust and time for relationships to form and community to grow.
And what about the relationships we have already, the community or communities of which we’re already part? Sometimes, because we’re human, we annoy each other … and the relationships that we do have go sour and get broken and need extra work to put back together again … work and energy we might well feel we don’t want to spend – it makes us uncomfortable - we’d rather be doing something else – and so the relationships suffer and community gets broken.
Again, it’s all about our priorities, our life drive. With anything else but Jesus at the center, without life lived in this attitude of humility and worship into which we’re called into … well, it will be difficult to have the kind of relationships and community which will give us life, real LIFE as God intends for us.
The reasons we gather with friends, the times we do form community … it will be more and more about US.
That’s why it’s little wonder that some people who are outside the community of faith sometimes call us “hypocrites” and “duplistic” – saying one thing and doing another. They rightly point out that we who are called by Jesus’ name often are the worst examples of the life he calls us to live – when we’re not disagreeing with each other, we’re drawing tighter and tighter circles of doctrine, denominational correctness, rules and regulations as an excuse to keep us from really reaching out to others.
So how many of us have relationships with people who are outside the church as well as inside? Have we drawn the circle of relationship and community so tightly that we’re cutting ourselves off from the Samaritan women of our place and time?
In the end, “church” is no more and no less than this … being about the life-attitude of worship … hearing the call to repentance, receiving the Word of LIFE, and responding in humble service to others … … and part of that response is being to others just as Jesus was to the Samaritan woman at the well.
Because relationship and community aren’t an option for us who have heard the call of Jesus, who has pulled us into this new way of living.
They are this new way of living.
And what about the benefits?
They’re as rich and full as this LIFE into which we’re called.
Authenticity. In a world of phoniness and posturing, masks and facades, we’re real people. The Samaritan woman heard it from Jesus: “He told me everything I have ever done.”
Mutuality. We support one another. Always.
Sympathy. More than just a card and flowers, we’re there with one another … when one suffers, we all suffer together … when one rejoices, we rejoice along with them.
And mercy. There’s forgiveness aplenty and time for fresh new starts in life, as we who are in this LIFE-giving attitude around Jesus call others to join us … no matter where they are in their own lives, we do not judge and condemn, we just say, along with that Samaritan woman, “Come and see! Come and see!”
It means being open, personally and as a faith community, to the movement of God’s Spirit in our lives. It means things might be surprising … we may well be called to do things, or be led into places, we never thought possible before.
Surprising … but all part of this journey with Jesus … the journey of moving from darkness to light, moving outside ourselves and toward others, responding in love because of the One who gives our lives meaning and purpose … so we can be, will be, the Faces of Faith in others’ lives.
Amen.