THE SAMARITAN WOMAN’S WILDERNESS
John 4:5-42
3rd Sunday in Lent, March 12, 2023
The Rev. Dr. Ritva H. Williams
Good morning. Welcome to episode 3 in the Lenten story of Jesus. So far, we have traveled with Jesus into the wilderness of discerning what it means to be God’s beloved Son. Last Sunday we met the Pharisee and Judean high council member Nicodemus, lost in a wilderness of confusion, stuck facing up to his privilege and letting go of entrenched ideas and attitudes. His last words to Jesus were “how can this be?” Episode 3 introduces us to a character who is a striking contrast to Nicodemus.
I chose the icon you see on the monitors to represent her story because it includes judging villagers and the disapproving disciples. Will you choose to sit with them or with the woman at the well?
The woman is disadvantaged in three ways.
She is Samaritan, tracing her lineage back to the northern tribes of Israel. 1000 years earlier these tribes seceded from the Israelite union. In the centuries following, repeated conquests and deportations by various super powers produced in an ethnically and religiously diverse population. Many Jews came to regard Samaritans as mongrels, half-breeds, and heretics. Jews destroyed the Samaritan Temple on Mount Gerizim. Samaritans disrupted Jewish Passover celebration in Jerusalem.
She is a female in a patriarchal society where women were not legally independent autonomous persons. Her social status and life choices were determined by male relatives and guardians.
Her multiple marriages and cohabitation with a man who is not her husband. Her history would include an arranged marriage at puberty, in which she was expected to produce a baby within a year or two. Failure resulted in divorce; perhaps a marriage to a man who died too soon; another marriage, another divorce; another marriage and widowhood without a child; a levirate marriage in which a brother-in-law was supposed to serve as surrogate for the dead husband. She very little say in any of these arrangements. Yet each divorce, each widowhood was a step down on the ladder of social status and honor. Labeled a black widow, and shunned by her neighbors to avoid catching and sharing her misfortune, the Samaritan woman lived in a wilderness of shame.
Brene Brown defines shame as the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and unworthy of love. We still live in a world where most people still subscribe to the belief that shame is a good tool for keeping people in line. Think how often we tell children they are bad boys or girls, or are chewed out publicly. Brown explains that our brains experience physical pain and the pain of social rejection in the same way, which makes shaming people highly dangerous (Daring Greatly, p. 69-71). Some people respond to shame by lashing out at the world around, others withdraw into themselves, experience depression, psychosis, PTSD, eating disorders, and engage in self-harm.
In the world of Jesus, shame was the primary means of keeping people in line. The Samaritan woman has learned her lessons well. She comes to the well at noon, when no one else goes there. On this day, she discovers a Jewish rabbi sitting by the well and cringes. But this man does not back away or refuse to look at her or keep silent — all common reactions for Jewish men and rabbis in that time.
This man is Jesus. He sees her. He sees her pain. He asks her for a drink. He makes himself vulnerable and transparent: he is a Jewish man traveling through enemy territory, tired and thirsty, with no bucket to draw water from the well. Jesus intentionally signals a desire to be received not as an enemy or a stranger but as a potential friend. To share food and drink in the ancient world was to demonstrate shared status and values. She has the power to say no. After all she is the one with the bucket.
She is surprised and wonders how and why he is doing this. Jesus answers by offering her a gift from God — living water — that will bubble up within her for healing and wholeness into abundant life. The woman struggles to understand what Jesus is offering, but asks for this living water, if only to avoid having to haul water from the well every day.
Jesus’ instruction: “go, call your husband and come back” seems to come out of the blue, except that they are sitting together at a well. In the biblical world, when man meets woman at well it typically signals a betrothal. Instead of marriage, Jesus is offering her a relationship with God she has never experienced before. When the Samaritan woman says she has no husband, Jesus compliments her for speaking the truth. He redefines her character — she is not a worthless outcast but a truth-teller! Then he zeroes in on the source of her greatest hurt and shame — the five husbands and the current partner. Jesus does so without judgment. He does NOT tell her to fix her life.
Instead Jesus allows the woman to lead the dialogue that follows. It is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the gospels. The question on the woman’s heart is where and how to worship God. The Samaritan temple has been destroyed. The temple in Jerusalem is off limits to Samaritans. Addressing her as “woman” — the same way he addresses his own mother — Jesus promises her that soon all people will worship together in spirit and truth.
Side bar. In this comment Jesus abolishes the temple institutions of both Judea and Samaria — a enormously radical move.
This is also the only time in John’s Gospel that Jesus directly acknowledges his identity as the Christ.
In this episode Jesus shows us how to reach out to those who are lost in a wilderness of shame: He “sees” the Samaritan woman at the well. He sees her plight. He speaks of her past with compassion and empathy. He offers her something of incomparable value — respect and dignity, worth and value. The Samaritan woman is transformed, energized, and emboldened to invite everyone she knows to come and meet Jesus — the rabbi, prophet and Christ who knows everything about her and yet does not judge or shame her.
Blessing of the Well by Jan Richardson
If you stand at the edge of this blessing and call down into it, you will hear your words return to you.
If you lean in and listen close, you will hear this blessing give the story of your life back to you.
Quiet your voice. Quiet your judgment. Quiet the way you always tell your story to yourself.
Quiet all these and you will hear the whole of it and the hollows of it:
the spaces in the telling, the gaps where you hesitate to go. Sit at the rim of this blessing.
Press your ear to its lip, its sides, its curves that were carved out long ago
by those whose thirst drove them deep, those who dug into the the layers with only their hands and hope.
Rest yourself beside this blessing and you begin to hear the sound of water entering the gaps.
Still yourself and you will feel it rising up within you, filling every emptiness and springing forth anew.
Amen.
