Saugatuck Congregational Church, UCC
© Rev. Alison J. Buttrick Patton
March 19, 2017 – Third Sunday of Lent
Scripture: John 4:5-42
Last week we listened in on Jesus’ conversation with a Pharisee: a Jewish insider by the name of Nicodemus, who came to Jesus after dark to interrogate him about the things Jesus had been saying and doing. This week, Jesus has a very different encounter with an unnamed Samaritan woman – an unexpected twist, because the Jews and the Samaritans hated each other. Unlike the exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus, this encounter takes place outdoors in broad daylight, between Jesus and a woman who was herself an outsider. Hear the story in the woman’s own words...
I didn’t realize that I was waiting, or for whom. When I set out late that morning, I thought I was just headed out to collect water, like I did every midday, as the sun beat down. This was my routine: walking one way along the well-worn path with an empty jar perched on one shoulder; walking back with the water-filled jar balanced on my head. Day in and day out, that’s what I did. It was as routine as grinding the barley flour, baking bread, preparing the lentils and sweeping the house, milking the goats, chasing the children…out to the well and back again.
It was only later, much later, that I realized I’d been waiting my whole life to meet the man who waited for me at the well that day. Normally, I would have drawn water alone. The other women gathered at the well at dawn, while the air was still cool. For them, collecting water was also a chance to collect the day’s news, to swap gossip and recipes. It’s true, the banter helped to lighten the load, made the walk to and from the village pass more quickly. But I prefered the silence, a little space in which to think, perhaps to pray. I prefered the company of my own heart-beat, the faint buzz of desert air, the hum of my own thoughts and of the desert insects. (I liked to imagine that they might be tiny messengers of God, if only I could discern what they had to say.) It’s not that I didn’t like the other women, but they were impatient with my questions and I was impatient with their chatter, their preoccupation with petty things like the latest perfume or the scandal du jour, their provincial tendency to find fault with anyone who was different than they…
On the day in question, I arrived at the well only to find a Jewish man sitting at its edge. I kept my gaze cast down and went about my business, retrieving the bucket to draw up the water, wondering what in the world a Jewish man was doing in Samaritan territory. I nearly dropped the bucket when out of the blue he spoke to me: “Give me a drink,” he said. I glanced back over my shoulder, wondering if anyone else had heard, whether this was some test of my piety by village officials intent on unearthing some transgression just so they could shame me in public. There was no one else around. Just the man. And he did look weary.
So I asked him: “Haven’t you noticed that I am a Samaritan woman? Why would you, a Jewish man, ask me for a drink?” Everyone knows that Jewish men don’t speak to women not of their own household; and besides that, the Jews hated Samaritans. We were the dispossessed cousins, the ones who stayed put in Israel when so many others were sent into exile by the Babylonian armies. We made nice with our occupiers, continued to worship and to study our holy scriptures. Our priests taught us that Yahweh wanted to be worshipped on Mt. Gerizim, where Joshua had conquered the Canaanites in times of old. So that’s what we did.
When the Jews returned from exile, they announced that God lived on Mt. Sinai, not Mt. Gerizim. So there we sat, all children of Israel, all descendants of Jacob who dug this selfsame well, fighting over the proper place to worship the One God. You’d think God might have clarified the matter for us. But it seemed the Holy One intended to remain mum on the matter, so Jews just kept on avoiding Samaritans, and we Samaritans kept on ignoring the Jews. We never spoke to each other. We certainly didn’t drink from the same vessel. Until that day by the well.
“Give me a drink,” he said. And when I confronted him about his unorthodox behavior, he answered, “If you recognized God’s gift and who is saying to you, ‘Give me some water to drink,’ you would be asking him and he would give you living water.”
The man seemed determined to start a conversation, taboo or not. His gracious manner, the way we spoke to me as if I was any other Jewish man – as if we already knew each other – disarmed me. But his words baffled me. Clearly, he had no bucket, else he would not have asked for my help in the first place. So where would he get this ‘living water?’ Was he a diviner or a traveling salesman? A priest or a scam artist? I asked him, “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob who gave us this well?”
“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, [he replied] but whoever drinks from the water that I give will never be thirsty again. The water that I give will become in those who drink it a spring of water that bubbles up into eternal life.”
Now I knew he was toying with me. What water could do all that? I had been walking the path to this well for years, in good times and in bad, and always the water in the pitcher ran out at the end of the day. Always, we needed more water to wash and cook and, yes, to quench our thirst. Always, there was another trip to the well, though I was weary from the morning’s labor, or heavy with child, or sick with fever, or just longing for a change in routine. We always needed water.
And thirsty? O yes, I was thirsty. Now that he mentioned it. Thirsty for conversation partners who shared my curiosity about God’s wide world; thirsty for beauty and wisdom, thirsty for respect and the assurance that my life mattered for more than lugging water… Dare I say it? I was thirsty for an encounter with the living God …on any mountain.
“So give me this living water,” I said to the man. That’s when he told me to go get my husband. Why did he have to go and spoil everything? Perhaps I shouldn’t have expected it to last. Of course, nothing truly significant could happen without the man of the house; of course, I had no right to expect that this living water was intended for me, a woman. My whole life had been determined by men, for whom we women were not much more than property. Even now, my life was controlled by a man who ought to have married me, but who had so far refused to do so, thereby relegating me to the bottom of the pecking order in our household. None of that really matters, except for this: When I informed the man that I had no husband, that I had no one who could come and appeal for this living water on my behalf, the man responded by recounting my whole history. This stranger, this Jewish stranger with the road-weary face and the gentle eyes, this man who had already treated me with more dignity than I’d ever before experienced, looked me in the eye and told me my story.
Have you ever had your life reflected back to you? It’s an extraordinary feeling, to have someone repeat your story, not to dissect it or critique it, but to honor who you are; as if to say all these parts: the highs and the lows, the marvelous and the mundane, the pain and the curiosity and the heartache make you who you are, and I am glad to know you.
Concluding that he must be a prophet, and impressed that he had not yet sent me away, I asked him the question I had so often pondered, the question that annoyed the other women and irritated the priests whenever I pressed them. “Where is God, really? Where can we find the Most High? Does the Holy One dwell on Mt. Gerizim, or on Mt. Sinai?… or somewhere else?
“The day is coming,” he replied, “when all will worship God in Spirit and in Truth.”
“Yes, of course. Someday the messiah will come, and all truth will be revealed. But I’m not sure I can wait that long… I’d like to know now.”
That’s when he said the one thing I will never forget:
“I am he.” I am. And the words reverberated through the chambers of my heart. “I am.” I knew those words, as well as I knew that well-worn path that ran from the village to the well. They were the words that Yahweh had spoken in another wilderness, long before Jacob dug this well, many, many generations back, when God first appeared to our ancestor Moses in a blazing bush, and commanded him to free our ancestors from slavery in Egypt. “Whom shall I say is sending me?” Moses had asked, as his knees knocked and his shoulders quaked. And the Holy One had responded: “I am that I am. Tell them that I Am sends you.”
I blinked in the midday sun. Did he mean it like that? Had I merely imagined some double entendre? Before I could recover, several more Jewish men arrived, laughing and jostling each other as they approached the well. The scandalized looks they shot my way told me I was no longer welcomed. I turned on my heel and headed back toward the village, my heart pounding, my mind racing, my ears still buzzing with the echoes of that strange conversation. By the time I made it back to the center of town, a new question was bubbling up inside me, so that I asked anyone who would listen. The women stopped their labor; the men, too! Maybe it was the excitement in my voice, or my newfound conviction: “You’ll never believe who I met at the well. Come and see! Could he possibly be the Christ?”
I realized only later that I’d left my water jug back at the well. What else did I abandon that day? The willingness to let others define my worth, and the fear that I would go unnoticed by God. The lie that God can be contained on any one mountain or controlled by any one people. All those things lay in the sand by the well, and good riddance.
In exchange, I got the one thing I’d been waiting for my whole life: A God who welcomes all my questions – and yours; also, a God who is bigger than all our answers. A God who crosses boundaries, rejects barriers, answers the question, “who is chosen?” by leaning in and saying, “tell me your story… and I will tell you about the people I love…” a God you might just encounter among the goats and the buzzing insects or among the laughing children; at the synagogue or on a desert path or – yes! – at an ancient well.
Jesus stayed with us for several days, teaching any who would listen, until I was no longer the only one whose curiosity had been sparked, whose heart had been filled, whose thirst had been quenched.
I kept tabs on Jesus after he left, heard the occasional reports – about a blind man whose sight he restored; and a friend he raised from the dead. People who had never met him said it was outrageous, but I believe it’s all true. For I have seen the light of God shining in his kind eyes, God’s love bubbling up like springs, and I know he is determined to share that living water with everyone he meets: with Jews and Samaritans, women and men, Pharisees, beggars, children and sages, nomads and farmers… indeed, is determined to share God’s overflowing love with the whole world. I don’t expect any barrier will stop him; not even death.
Scripture
John 4:5-42 New Revised Standard Version
5So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The 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.) 10Jesus 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.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but 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.” 15The 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.” 16Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But 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. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” 27Just 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?” 28Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, 29“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30They left the city and were on their way to him…
39Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41And many more believed because of his word. 42They 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.”