In many ways I am tempted not to preach to you this morning but to just encourage you to sit quietly and to re-read a couple of times today’s Gospel. Not only is it a long piece to read in a service of worship it also contains things that can turn on its head what we might first think is going on.
At face value we read about Jesus asking for a cold drink from a woman drawing water from Jacob’s well. He’s obviously thirsty. We might be struck, however, by the fact that he has to ask the woman for a drink. Why didn’t she just offer him a drink when she was filling her buckets? It would seem the most human thing to do. It would be but the Jewish Law forbade it!
Firstly, women were not allowed or expected to talk to men outside their family or social circle. Secondly, why is a woman at the well unaccompanied at the hottest part of the day?
Thirdly what is Jesus doing in Samaria? Not a place a good Jew would be seen in those days.
The woman seems to have been an outcast in her town. She admits that she is living with a man, who is not her husband and that basically highlights her a a woman of ‘ill repute’. It explains why she is at the well when nobody else is as she would have been ostracised by other women and men in her town. You can read the shock of the disciples when they see what’s going on and they wonder what she and Jesus have been up to. So many taboos have been broken in this conversation and the biggest broken taboo is the fact that Jesus and his disciples are no longer on the Promised Land but in alien territory.
Samaria was a no go place for the Hebrews because despite the fact that the Samaritans worshiped the same God they did not worship in quite the same way or places at the ‘good Jews’ of the first century did. The Jews so loathed the Samaritans that they preferred to add almost a week to their journeying between different Jewish territories.
To the good Jew, Samaria was a tainted country. The Samaritans worshiped the Hebrew God but they did not believe that he had to be worshiped most especially, in Jerusalem. The Samaritans built their temple on Mount Gerizim in Samaria which to the Jerusalem focused Jews made their worship inferior, (note: inferior not different). The Jews also disapproved of the fact that the Samaritan version of the Pentateuch was in Aramaic not Hebrew and the fact that the Samaritans did not acknowledge the poetic books and prophets writings really put them beyond the pale.
So in talking to this Samaritan woman Jesus is really defying convention. He is conversing with a heretic woman about the Hebrew faith. He is also challenging convention by talking to a woman any way! For women were not part of God’s chosen people (only free born adult males were included in that gang). And, this woman is also rather questionable full stop.
Yet, it is this outcast woman who recognises who Jesus is. She is one of the first non-disciples to be converted by that knowledge and in her joy she sets out with missionary zeal to convert others:
28”Then 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?” John 4:28-9
The story of the Samaritan woman follows on from the story of Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, a good Jewish male and the two stories are linked to make a point. That point being the fact that Jesus is not for the Jews alone but for all people who turn to him and acknowledge who he is.
In his encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus talked about being ‘born again’ which is something Nicodemus struggles to understand. Likewise the Samaritan woman fails to comprehend what the term ‘living water’ means. Both of them needed Jesus to explain what he meant.
Jesus recognises in the woman a spiritual thirst and tells her that the water he offers will quench that thirst. He describes the living water welling up inside her and flowing eternally if she can accept his gift of living water, meaning the Holy Spirit. Just as Nicodemus had to be made to realise that being born again was spiritual not physical.
Jesus is also very canny with the woman in his full acceptance of her, as she is. In no way does Jesus condemn her for her lifestyle. Because of this she is so taken aback and continues to express a deep interest in theology and worship, questioning Jesus again and again until at verse 26 he tells her who he is and why he can make her the offer of living water:
“Jesus said to her, ‘I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
This quite literally overwhelms the woman and she is converted by what he has said and wants to tell others. This in itself is remarkable because a woman’s testimony was basically legally worthless, in both Hebrew and Samaritan society and added to that this was a woman of dubious morals. What is amazing is how willing to believe the woman the Samaritans were and that they went on to not only hear but to trust this Jewish Jesus for themselves.
Jesus’ encounter with the woman contrasts enormously with his meeting Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a Pharisee, a very good Jewish man, educated and from a good family. The woman was probably uneducated, poor and in the eye of her society, shameful. She met Jesus while she was vulnerable at midday, away from others just as Nicodemus met him at night in secret. By putting both Nicodemus and this unnamed woman side by side in his Gospel account he shows that Jesus treated them equally with concern and respect. To Nicodemus Jesus says:
“I do not care how good you are, you still need to be born again.”
And to the woman:
“I do not care how bad you are, I still want to give you the living water.”
New birth and living water are both terms for receiving the Holy Spirit, the salvation of God. They are gifts freely offered and given once and for all time after one has repented of one’s past sins.
Jesus tells us that God’s love is so powerful that it can cleanse us from our past and free us from our addiction to worldly things as well. The only thing we have to be is ‘willing’ to change. Willing to open our hearts to his love and to invite him in. We must follow Jesus’ example and must not prejudge anyone, or be prejudiced against anyone for everybody has the opportunity to receive God’s love.
It is not for you or me to decide who is acceptable to God or not. We have to learn to let God be the judge. What we have to do is to be willing to share our faith with others, easily and naturally but not in any ‘hard sell’ way that can put people off. I liken this to the way we sometimes entertain angels unaware. When we have conversations that go deep and change us and then never see that other person again. The Samaritan woman entertained the Messiah initially unaware, and the encounter changed her.
If you only take one thing away from today’s readings In hope it will be the willingness to chat to others and to enjoy where the conversation may take you and them. You, may never know what your conversation might had led them towards or to do. Nor might they never know what it did for you.