The circle widens | a sermon for Lent

A Sermon by Jamie Howison on John 4:5-42

It is one of the distinctives of this particular year in the three-year lectionary cycle that we get very long Gospel readings on the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent, all drawn from the Gospel according to John. All three are the sort of stories that really can’t be hacked into shorter pieces, so for these three Sundays we’ll just sit tight and see what these long stories might have to say to us.

Tonight we have the story of Jesus’ conversations with a Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, just outside “a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.” “It was about noon,” which is interesting because in that climate one would go for water early in the morning or late in the afternoon to avoid the heat of the day. As the story unfolds, we’ll discover that this particular woman probably stands under some judgement from her own community, so perhaps a noon trip to the well felt more secure than going when she’d be surrounded by other women from the community.

So again, this is how John begins to unfold the story:

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

Not only do “Jews not share things in common with Samaritans,” but in that cultural milieu a Jewish man would not even be alone with a woman, and if he landed up in that space he would certainly not speak with her. So here Jesus is breaking more than one cultural convention, which isn’t incidental.

Now just a quick pause on Samaritans. While our strongest association is with the parable of the good Samaritan—a parable that has tended to entirely shift the character of the word—in that context Samaritan was anything but a good word amongst the Jews. When the Babylonian exiles began to return from their captivity in the early 500s BCE, they discovered that the land between Judea in the south and Galilee in the north was occupied by these Samaritans. Samaritans claimed that they were the descendants of the northern Israelite tribes who had not been deported from the land after the fall of the northern Kingdom of Israel, and they consider themselves to be the true religion of the ancient Israelites, seeing Judaism as a closely related but altered religion. Needless to say, this was quite at odds with how the Jews in Judea and Galilee would have seen things, and so there was a powerful tension between the two groups.

So there is Jesus with this Samaritan woman, engaging in a rather robust conversation. “Give me a drink,” he says, to which she answers with the requisite question as to why a Jew was asking a Samaritan for water. He comes right back, with “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

And this is how N.T. Wright summarizes the back and forth between the two of them.

Jesus puts his finger on the point where her life is most sorely in need of living water. Repartee again: ‘Call your husband.’ ‘Haven’t got one.’ ‘No – five down, one to go.’ Oops, change the subject… ‘Are you a prophet by any chance? We have this thing about which mountain we should worship on.’ Objection over-ruled. ‘Spirit, not mountain, is what matters; and the one God is looking for Spirit-people right now.’ ‘Oh, very interesting – of course one day the Messiah is coming. He’ll explain all that complicated stuff.’ Phew. Let’s not get too far with this.

Pause. No way off the hook. Jesus holds her gaze. ‘I am, who am speaking to you.’ Messiah, and … ‘I am?’ End of repartee. Time for action. Sower and reaper are about to rejoice together. (Wright, John for Everyone)

It is at this point that the disciples finally show up, and are rather aghast at seeing their teacher sitting there speaking with this woman, but they didn’t say anything about it. Meanwhile she is off to her town to bring back some of the people, saying to them, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

This is followed by a bit of a teaching time, with Jesus again pressing his disciples to truly see who he is and what he stands for, until the woman reappears with others from her community. And now comes what may be the most interesting moment of all, as John writes,

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, ‘It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.’

Remember, we’re talking about Samaritans here, the ultimate “other” for Jews, including those Jewish disciples and—this is not insignificant—even the Jewish Jesus. The old assumptions have now been stretched around who is “in” and who is “out,” just as it has been when Jesus approaches people with leprosy or heals the servant boy of the centurion or restores someone’s broken body even on the sabbath day, or, or, or. Cumulatively the message is that no one needs to be “out” unless they make that choice to put themselves out, just as the older brother does in the parable of the prodigal son. What the gospels proclaim is that inclusion precedes exclusion, and exclusion seems to be something chosen by the human character in the story, not by God. As Robert Farrar Capon famously wrote, “Both heaven and hell are populated entirely and only by forgiven sinners. Hell is just a courtesy for those who insist they want no part of forgiveness.” (Robert Farrar Capon, Kingdom, Grace, Judgment)

And you want no part of forgiveness why? Because you’re that older brother who resents first the failings of his younger brother and then the graciousness of the father. Because you’re a devout Pharisee who has done his best to follow all of the scruples of the torah, and Jesus forgives a tax collector who has a decades long record of being a schmuck. Because you’re a faithful, long-serving person who just can’t quite accept that the busted-up character who is dying because he has drunk himself into oblivion might also be beloved by Jesus.

What is it that Paul teaches? “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), to which I might just add, “so do your best to check your prejudices at the door, because Jesus is going to keep hauling us right through all of them, not letting us get away with thinking we can rebuild those dividing lines.

For as N.T. Wright insists,

The extension of Jesus’ ministry to the Samaritans, even during his lifetime, is a foretaste of that full extension which Paul celebrates throughout Romans. The Messiah’s death demonstrates the love of God, undercutting all regional or ethnic claims and boasts, and creating a new people, Spirit-people, worship-people. (Wright, John for Everyone)

So maybe it is time we once again set ourselves to living that way. Truly.