III Lent – March 27, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
Today’s Gospel lesson has to do with a woman who, unlike Nicodemus, who came to Jesus in the dead of night, didn’t come to Jesus—just the opposite.
Jesus came to her.
Not only did this woman end up believing in what Jesus had to say—recognizing him for who he was—but she also went and told her friends about him.
It’s quite possible that she and her friends became the nucleus for the first group of Christian believers on Samaritan soil.
And all because of one woman’s faith…and the teacher from Nazareth who awakened that woman’s faith by reaching out to her.
Actually, the Book of Acts records that it was one of the first deacons of the Jerusalem church, a deacon named Philip—the same Philip who baptized the Ethiopian official on his way home from Jerusalem—it was Philip who established the first congregation of Samaritan Christians.
But that is no reason not to believe that the story of Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well explains why Philip’s missionary work among the Samaritans was so successful.
He may well have found a handful or so of Samaritan Christians already in place when he got there; for some reason, at any rate, at least one important strand of Christian tradition—the tradition behind the Gospel according to John—suggests that the first Samaritan church was founded by a woman.
This possibility alone should be enough to remind us of an important fact: Jesus was unconventional.
I think that’s the best way to put it.
Jesus was extremely unconventional.
That’s something we often forget.
But it’s something that Jesus’ disciples could hardly forget because their lives were so completely bound up with his.
So why should they have been surprised when they got back from their trip into town, probably to scare up some dinner and a place to stay for the night—why should they have been surprised to find Jesus talking with a woman, and a Samaritan woman at that?
They should have expected, if they went off and left him to his own devices, that he would do the unexpected.
Which is exactly what he did.
It was most unconventional for a Jewish man to engage in an extended conversation with a Samaritan woman.
Actually, it was more than unconventional.
It was unheard-of.
Jews made it a point to have as little to do with Samaritans as possible.
Jews considered Samaritans to be religiously and racially inferior.
There were strict prohibitions with regard to physical contact with them.
In fact, had Jesus accepted a drink of water from the Samaritan woman, he would have made himself ritually unclean.
Actually, Jesus’ willingness to speak to her takes the Samaritan woman by surprise, too.
“How is it,” she says, “that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
She knows that Jews and Samaritans aren’t supposed to have anything to do with each other.
But what really gets her attention is Jesus’ reference to “living water”: “If you knew the gift of God,” Jesus says to her, “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 says 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 this well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
Jesus answers, “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.”
“Sir,” she says, her eyes shining, “give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
What, do you suppose, did the woman imagine this “living water” to be?
She reacted suddenly, almost as if she had just been handed a map that would lead her to the Fountain of Youth.
“Living water” is a way to say “freely flowing water”; it can also mean “water that brings life”.
Would this “living water” that this stranger was talking about solve all her problems, make her life easier—maybe even make her life more pleasant?
If her succession of husbands is any indication, her idea of life may have been one “quick fix” after another.
In fact, more than one New Testament commentator has suggested that when the woman told Jesus, “I have no husband,” she may have been signaling to him that she was available.
It was, after all, at a well much like this that their common ancestor Jacob and his father Isaac before him had met their wives-to-be for the first time.
What the woman didn’t immediately realize is that her meeting with Jesus was no ordinary encounter.
Nor did she realize that the spiritual thirst deep within her could hardly be satisfied by a “quick fix”.
How often does the spiritual dryness you and I can experience in our own lives lead us to look for the nearest, momentarily pleasurable source of relief available?
And what disappointments such “quick fixes” turn out to be!
No, encountering Jesus had brought her face to face with the emptiness in her life.
She realized that her entire being was crying out for meaning; she was desperately searching for wholeness, though she was barely able to express the deep longing that she felt.
But Jesus was able to sense what she could not express and made, if you will, what we might call “the evangelistic move”: That is why he asked her to give him a drink of water.
Indeed, it seems clear that had Jesus not made the first move—had Jesus not initiated the conversation with this woman—the conversation might never have taken place, and the little band of Samaritan Christians in the town of Sychar might never have come to be.
The season of Lent is an especially appropriate point in the Church’s year for Christians to reflect on the spiritual dryness that we all are likely to feel at times because it offers us the opportunity to come to terms with what causes this spiritual dryness in the first place: our high rate of success in finding ways to distance ourselves from God.
Among the most effective ways we have of distancing ourselves from God, illustrated so poignantly by the Samaritan woman’s own headlong, yet ultimately disappointing search for happiness, are the substitutes we scramble after to take the place of God—whether it be the attainment of personal success at any cost or a dangerous dependency on some substance or other that promises to remove us from the responsibilities of the here and now.
None of these substitutes for God ultimately satisfies, of course, so that each time we finally turn away from the idol in question and turn back toward the God who is always turned toward us we feel again the springs of living water washing over the waste places of our lives and bringing with them the promise of renewed hope.
It does help to remember in this regard that Lent is by no means a time for us to brood over what we might imagine to be our wretchedness, but rather a time for celebrating our relationship with a loving and faithful God who overlooks our shortcomings—even forgives our silly hankering after pale substitutes—and sets us free, free to worship the God who brought the Children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt into the Promised Land, free to worship the God Jesus called “Father” in spirit and in truth, free to invite others we encounter to approach the fount of grace that they, too, might feel within them the springs of living water gushing up to eternal life.
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