Third Sunday in Lent
In the Gospel story today, Jesus is on a road trip to Galilee and he is going the dangerous way through Samaria. It was the direct route, but it wasn't the safe way to go, which would have been the popular route through Perea. Travelers were frequently attacked and robbed on this route, especially Jews, because Samaritans hated Jews and Jews hated Samaritans.
Then in the middle of this hostile land Jesus gets tired. Once again, Jesus is simply being human, so he stops and sends the disciples off to find food and he's left alone. Along comes a Samaritan woman and he starts talking to her. A Jew should never have been talking to a Samaritan, but especially to a woman in public. It wasn't even considered appropriate for a husband to speak to his wife in public, much less a woman who was a stranger, an unclean Samaritan.
Jesus initiates a conversation with the woman by asking for a drink of water. It was high noon, Jesus was hot and exhausted, alone, vulnerable and thirsty... and he says "Will you give me a drink of water?" Here is God incarnate, the Messiah, a worker of miracles, but he's still asking this outcast Samaritan woman for a drink of water. And the woman wants to know why he's asking her, a Samaritan for water. “Aren’t we Samaritans your arch opponents?” Jesus tells her that if she knew the gift of God and who it was that was asking for a drink that she would ask him and he'd give her living water.
We're accustomed to hearing of living water in the spiritual sense, but for a Jew or Samaritan, living water simply meant water that was moving, running water. So they launch into this discussion where Jesus is talking on a spiritual level and the woman is responding on a literal level. She's concerned that he doesn't have a pitcher to scoop up this living water and Jesus is going off about how if she drinks this living water she'll never thirst again. As the conversation progresses it begins to sound like one of these British comedy sketches that you see on Public television, and you think it's leading nowhere, until they get to the point that Jesus lets her know that she really isn't a stranger to him, that he knows her rather well. Well enough to know she has had five husbands and that the man she's living with now is not her husband. Well, that's a little too literal and for the woman, but it convinces her that Jesus is in tune to her and knows something.
Now notice that Jesus doesn't moralize or condemn her, he isn't interested in her failings and weaknesses. He is interested in her person, her spiritual being. When she realizes that Jesus is no ordinary stranger, she starts pointing out the differences in their faiths, that the Jews believe that you should worship in Jerusalem, but the Samaritans believed that you should worship on top of this great mountain there in Samaria. Jesus isn't interested in these details either, and explains that God wants us to worship in spirit and truth not according to specific geographical locations.
Finally, the woman says that the Messiah will know the answer to all these things and Jesus lets her know that he is the Messiah. I think it finally connects here for the woman because she realizes that Jesus the Christ does know. And what he knows is more than just cognitive
knowledge, or even theological understanding. Jesus the Messiah knows her; he knows persons even before they know him, even though the world may consider them to be outcasts and not worth knowing. She realizes that the long hoped for Messiah is not just a prophet with all the answers, or a leader with all the power, but that Jesus is the Messiah who knows her for what she is and is willing to enter into a relationship with her. She realizes that Jesus Christ is fully God enough to have all the answers and all the creative power of the universe, but still fully human enough to ask for a drink of water and to be interested in her as an individual person.
This understanding of the messiah was something the woman had never encountered or even imagined, and it was such Good News that she felt compelled to go and share it with the entire city. And the people listened and came to see Jesus for themselves because the woman spoke with an authority that only comes when we enter into a relationship with Jesus Christ. She knew of what she spoke because she had experienced this person of Jesus Christ herself.
There's a great Henri Nouwen story about a woman who loses control as she is being admitted to a psychiatric hospital. She is yelling and raving and scaring everyone to the point that the doctors feel they have to take everything away from her, which they did, except for one small coin she kept clenched in her fist. It finally took two men to pry open her hand . Nouwen says that it was as though she would lose her very self along with the coin. If they deprived her of that last possession, she would have nothing more, and be nothing more.
Very often we are all like that woman with the coin, we have things clenched in our fists, things we need to let go of, but we're afraid that if we do, we'll lose our very selves. The Samaritan woman's coin was a rather colorful personal history that included five husbands, and she thought this knowledge was clenched so tightly in her fist that Jesus couldn't know and that’s why she was so shocked when he told her about it.
We all have our failures in life, our dark sides, but God wants to be in relationship with us
anyway, God wants to connect with us, even with our dark sides, especially our dark sides. And when we realize that God does see that shadow side, and yet still loves us, still values us, we are able open up that clenched fist and look at some things in our lives that we wouldn't have the courage to look at alone. But when we open our hands and begin to reveal those secrets: the pain, the failures, the tragedies, and we look at them secure in God's love, then just like the Samaritan woman, what was once darkness is transformed into light, and we become a part of God's glorious recreation and we also have Good News to share with the world. AMEN
The Rev. Dennis Campbell
