Listen to the Audio of Today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-january-18-2024
John 4:4-26
4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)
9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
17 “I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.”
This is a great story, in my opinion, but it’s a pretty long one. (As you might remember, the Gospel of John tends to have much longer stories than the other gospels – stories in which people wrestle with important questions of faith with Jesus.) So today’s Reflection will be longer than usual – thanks in advance for your patience.
This story takes place as Jesus was traveling through Samaria. That in itself would have been surprising to some of the people who read or heard the story when the Gospel of John was originally published. Many of the Jews of Jesus’ time despised the Samaritans so much that they wouldn’t set foot in the region – they’d walk all the way around it if they had to get to the other side.
The Samaritans’ ancestors had been Jews who had been conquered and absorbed by the Assyrian Empire and then had intermarried with gentile subjects of that empire. So the Hebrew religious establishment considered the Samaritans to be ethnically “impure.” The Jewish leaders refused to allow the Samaritans to worship at the temple in Jerusalem.
So in a sense, just by traveling through Samaria, Jesus was making a kind of theological statement – he was demonstrating that his mission in the world would include breaking down some of the walls the religious Jews had built around themselves. Jesus was reaching out, as he would on other occasions, to those the Jews had labelled as ‘unworthy.’
In the story, Jesus sits by a well alone outside the town of Sychar while his disciples go into the village to buy food. As he waits, Jesus speaks with a Samaritan woman who has come to draw water. That’s the second surprising aspect of the story. Religious Jewish men – and especially rabbis – were taught to avoid conversation with women other than their family members. Women were considered frivolous at best, and also objects of sexual temptation. But Jesus asks the woman for a drink, the third surprise in the story. His request would be something like a white southerner during Jim Crow days asking for a drink out of black person’s bottle of soda.
And Jesus has more surprises for the woman. He says that he can offer her “living water” that would satisfy a deeper thirst in her. And even more, this living water would start to flow out of her, so that she would become a source of eternal life for others. And then he goes on to reveal that he knows details of the woman’s unusual personal life. She’s had five husbands, and she’s now living with a guy she’s not married to.
When you hear sermons or read Christian commentary on this story, it’s striking that almost all the interpreters describe the Samaritan woman as promiscuous, or at least as not committed to the marriages she’s had. But that might say more about the interpreters than it does about the woman. We have no idea how her five marriages had ended, or anything else about her circumstances. Jesus doesn’t speak a word of criticism or condemnation.
(One of the most powerful scenes in The Chosen is a scene based on this story, in which Jesus describes to the woman the sad sequence of marriages that had led her to this point. It’s a fictional scene, but no more fictional than most preachers’ “she’s an immoral woman” take on the story.)
It seems that the woman’s unusual marital history might have made her the target of gossip and hostility in her village. In that hot climate, women typically go to the well for water first thing in the morning, when it was still cool. But since this woman was there at mid-day, when it was hot, avoiding judgmental neighbors seems like a reasonable reason.
But whatever led to their mid-day encounter, Jesus just tells the Samaritan woman that God is doing a new thing. God is washing away the barriers between people – ethnic distinctions, gender boundaries and apparently perceived notions about what was “appropriate.” Now, Jesus says, God is concerned only with finding those who are willing to worship him “in spirit and truth.”
So, as we said, in this story Jesus does and says a lot of really surprising things – even things that would have been considered shocking – both for the woman in the story and for the readers of John’s gospel.
And there’s one more surprise to come, because it’s to this unlikely person – to this Samaritan woman with an unusual past – that Jesus reveals something he has revealed to no one else in the Gospel of John: that he is the Messiah.
The woman doesn’t exactly get the message right away, but it starts to sink in, and she responds by leaving her water jar – probably one of her most valuable possessions – at the well. She sets off running back to town. And when she gets there, the woman starts spreading the word that the long-awaited Messiah might be sitting out at the town well.
We’ll think about the conclusion of this story tomorrow.
Let’s pray: Lord, we know you often work through surprising people in surprising ways. Guard us against rejecting your work when it is done through people who might seem ‘inappropriate’ to us. And guard us against being shocked to learn that you intend to work through us, as well. Amen.
Blessings,
Henry
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