by Rob Martin
The
Gospel of John 4: 5-42
So Jesus came to a Samaritan city
called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the
well. It was about noon. 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.) Jesus answered her, “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.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do
you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us
the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her,
“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink
of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will
give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The
woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or
have to keep coming here to draw water.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your
husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus
said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had
five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said
is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our
ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people
must worship is in Jerusalem.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship
the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know;
we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is
coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in
spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is
spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman
said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he
comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one
who is speaking to you.”
Just then his disciples came. They were
astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you
want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar
and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told
me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left
the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him,
“Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do
not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has
brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will
of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more,
then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the
fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is
gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice
together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent
you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have
entered into their labor.” 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 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 Savior of the
world.”
Unvirtuous Abbey is a group of slightly sarcastic, yet
hopeful monks, who try and elevate conversations about God, Scripture and Jesus
through blogging. I LOVE THEM! This is their commentary / take on the text
before us this Saturday:
_____
“I want to thank the woman at the
well,” he said. He was
a newcomer to the group of mostly older people who gathered each week to study
and read the Bible. He was also a professor and, as he said to the group, a gay
man.
Something
that attracts me to this story is that there is no “healing,” just good
conversation. We’re so used to “sound bite” Jesus that it’s interesting to see
the person behind the Messiah. It’s refreshing to think of Jesus sitting beside
a 1,200 year old well that was made famous by someone else. This story is
divinity and humanity holding hands, laughing back and forth, and even getting
a bit testy when the comments hit too close to home; but it’s a conversation
held in what becomes mutual respect.
Thomas Moore
said, “Heaven is not some impossible,
idealized world; it is ordinary life made brilliant by a philosophy of mutual
respect.”
That is
precisely the perceived problem here: mutual respect. It’s also what is at
stake. Because for several reasons, including race, religion, and gender, what
Jesus is doing is considered wrong by the people around him who loved him most.
Robert
Alter, in The Art of Biblical Narrative
talked about Hebrew “type-scenes”
in which stock characters would act a certain way every time. In the Hebrew
stories, it sometimes happens that when a man meets a woman at a well, they get
married. So, if you didn’t know who Jesus was, to Hebrew ears, this was a
possible outcome, and was a great way of telling a story.
Because not
only is this a story about divinity and humanity, it’s a story about love and,
while not hate, about the people whom we aren’t supposed to love.
John’s story
takes place in a Samaritan city called Sychar. More specifically, near a well
called “Jacob’s Well.”
It was and remains over 100 feet deep. It’s the kind of well into which water
percolates and gathers. The water that Jesus brings, he says, “gushes up.”
What gushes
up for me in this story is what a professor of mine once said. He said
that any time we label someone as “other”, for whatever reason be it social,
political, racial, religious, sexual, we dehumanize them. That’s a slippery
slope. With the label “other”, it becomes easier to call someone a name. It
becomes easier to limit rights and create a second-class citizen. It becomes
easier to do things that are so cruel and inhuman that we are left wondering
how did this happen?
The greatest
sin just might be complacency. What dictated the conversation between Jesus and
the woman at the well was respect. And when that humanity was shown in a
conversation about divinity, both left the experience fuller, having drunk
deeply from the well of mutual respect.
In the end,
the woman leaves her water jar behind. Perhaps it was an act of kindness
towards her new friend, or perhaps it was because her thirst had been quenched.
I want to
thank the woman at the well for reminding me that even when I know that things
aren’t what they could be in my life, or in the world, God draws closer into a
holy conversation.
What do
you do when you’re thirsty, and you have no bucket, and the well is deep?
