February 24, 2008
The Third Sunday in Lent (Year A)
Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42
You have just heard one of the longest, if not the longest, Sunday gospel readings. So you get a short sermon! Look at it this way, there is so much in that story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman that one could write a book on it – and I’m sure someone has – and the sermon material? Role of women in a patriarchal society, symbolism of water, international politics, prophetic powers of Jesus, and all their ramifications, just to name a few possibilities.
I’m sure I have mentioned before that I write some of my “best” sermons when I’m out walking my dog. But he has learnt to ignore my mutterings! However, this past week it was not sermon, just prayer, “God, what is it you want me to say? There so much here.” And I went through that list I gave above. I waited, listened, and I knew none of those subjects was quite right. It can get a little scary then wondering what it is God has in mind for one to say. But trust is what one must have; let the Spirit take over and lead.
That’s exactly, I think, what happened that day at the well, for both Jesus and the Samaritan woman. The Spirit took over and both of them were led into paths hitherto untrodden. Jesus, having stopped to rest while his disciples went into the neighboring town of Sychar to get food, found himself engaged in a long and complex conversation, with . . . an elder of the temple? a priest? a Pharisee? no, with a woman, a foreign woman at that, a member of a sect shunned by the Jews, and even more outrageous, she was not a matriarch of society, a pillar of the local synagogue, no, she was presumably a sinner, a woman of questionable morals. The conversation started casually enough when he asked for a drink of water but it is how it ended that I find so amazing, so enthralling, so exciting.
Just as the disciples arrive back, the conversation comes to an end. No, it’s not because they, the disciples, said anything; in fact John makes a point of saying that no one questioned what had transpired in their absence. No, the woman has just said, “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes he will proclaim all things to us.” And Jesus had responded, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” And so with the disciples now there to take care of Jesus, the woman leaves her water jar and goes back into the city. Maybe she just had nothing more to say to this stranger or maybe she just needed to debrief. After all that, what a conversation, what a revelation!
And now we arrive at the part that becomes center stage for me. On getting back to the city – I think it was supposed to be about a half mile from the well, time enough to get her thoughts in order, “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?’” Yes, she is still mulling it over. He knows everything about her: five husbands and one man she’s now presumably living with but who is not her husband. This stranger at the well, she never did learn his name, she’s sure he’s a prophet but can he be the Messiah? Can he really be the Messiah? The atmosphere had to be electric! These people who are spurned by their neighboring state, considered aliens, suspect, partners in an animosity that began at the time of the death of Solomon some nine hundred years earlier, and has deepened at times into warfare so that travelers often were in danger of attack, these people are responding, favorably, excitedly, to what they hear about Jesus, who is, without question, a Jew.
And think about it, how did they hear about him? From a woman and remarkably they listened to her!!! This is just one more example of how Jesus’ presence and influence stirred up the status quo and went against the culture of the times. And then those people left the city and set out to find him, to find this Jesus that has so inspired one of their own. And they ask him to stay with them and he says, “Yes,” and he stays, for two days! We have no record of what happened in those two days, what was said or done. All we know is what John has written : “Many , , , believed . . . because of the woman’s testimony.” (4:39) and “[m]any more believed because of his word. [As] “they said to the woman, ‘we have heard for ourselves.’” (4:41-42a) Typical!
But we don’t need to have a record, do we? We know what Jesus would have been saying to them. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the sick and those in prison.” And when they asked, as I’m sure they would have, thinking literally of the country next door, “Who is our neighbor?” Jesus would have replied, as he always did, with a story, a story of the giving and receiving of mercy, kindness, forgiveness, love, with a story that would have knocked down all boundaries, political, racial, sexual, and religious.
And after having heard him, listened to him for those two days, the Samaritans said of Jesus, “We know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” They accepted him, recognized him, acknowledged him, openly and unashamedly, in sharp contrast to his own people whose leaders were always questioning, trying to find something heretical, sacrilegious. – But I won’t get too carried away with how virtuous the Samaritans were. Who knows what these new followers were saying a week, a month, a year later. Maybe some of them were even in Jerusalem, shouting, “Crucify him.” We humans are terribly fickle!
But I like to think that here, for a short time anyway, there was a place where people put aside their differences, their pettiness, their squabbles, their feelings of victimization, of despair, of “do it my way or no way.” I like to think that here was a place that united itself in a single purpose in life and a common worship of the one God, a place where the people said, “Jesus has shown us the way, let us travel the road together. Let us love one another as God has loved and does love us.” A place where they rejoiced in a relationship with one another and with God, a place that wasn’t caught up in power struggles, theological debates, or self-righteousness, but rather sought to live into that new freedom of spirit and truth that was there for their taking as easily as drawing water from the well.
Now I ask you: can that place exist today? (if indeed it ever did exist!) Can it exist in our world? In our community? In our church? I don’t have an answer to that because there are just too many factors that enter into the equation. We are too much like the Israelites that Moses led out of Egypt. We quarrel; we complain. Even when Jesus confronts us with his truth as he did the woman at the well, we question. We do not fully grasp his truth and follow his way. If we did, we would not have to confess our sins every week. We would not have to say, “We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.”
It is Lent! What better time to look ourselves in the mirror, to strip away the facades we put on to impress the world, to see ourselves as God sees us, and then to ask for forgiveness, to ask for that water of eternal life which Jesus promised at the well, water, that which cleanses, that which nourishes.
It is Lent! What better time to turn our selves, our lives, our hearts, our minds, towards what it is God would truly have us do to make our “kingdom” his kingdom.
Amen.
Sonia F. G. Stevenson, M. Div.
Church of the Good Shepherd