On Sunday, March 12, 2023, I gave a sermon at Shalom Community Church. This is an adaptation of the sermon. Here is an audio version.

Doubt

Scripture

Adapted from John 4:1-30 (The Inclusive Bible)

Narrator: He stopped at Sychar, a town in Samaria, near the tract of land Jacob had given to his son Joseph, and Jacob’s Well was there. Jesus, weary from the journey, came and sat by the well. It was around noon.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her…

Jesus: Give me a drink.

N: (The disciples had gone off to the town to buy provisions.)

Samaritan Woman: You’re a Jew. How can you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?

N: (This was because Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.)

J: If only you recognized God’s gift, and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked him for a drink instead, and he would have given you living water.

SW: If you please…

N: (She was challenging Jesus.)

SW: You don’t have a bucket and this well is deep. Where to you expect to get this “living water?” Surely you don’t pretend to be greater than our ancestors Leah and Rachel and Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it with their descendants and flocks?”

J: Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. But those who drink the water I give them will never be thirsty; no, the water I give will become fountains within them, springing up to provide eternal life.

SW: Give me this water, so that I won’t grow thirsty and have to keep coming all the way here to draw water.

J: Go, call you husband and then come back here.

SW: I don’t have a husband.

J: You’re right–you don’t have a husband! The fact is, you’ve had five, and the man you’re living with now is not your husband. So what you’ve said is quite true.

SW: I can see you’re a prophet.

Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you people claim that Jerusalem is the place where God ought to be worshiped.

J: Believe me, the hour is coming when you’ll worship Abba God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you don’t understand; we worship what we do understand–after all, salvation is from the Jewish people. Yet the hour is coming–and is already here–when real worshipers will worship Abba God in Spirit and Truth. Indeed, it is just such worshipers whom Abba God seeks. God is Spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.

SW: I know that the Messiah–the Anointed One–is coming and will tell us everything.

J: I who speak to you am the Messiah.

N: The disciples, returning at this point, where shocked to find Jesus having a private conversation with a woman. But no one dared to ask, “What do you want of him?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

The woman then left her water jar and went off into the town. She said to the people…

SW: Come and see someone who told me everything I have ever done! Could this be the Messiah?

N: At that, everyone set out from town to meet Jesus.

Sermon

Like the protagonist in The Itchy, Itchy Lion, I want to talk today about someone who has been misunderstood: the Samaritan Woman at the Well. Before going any further, though, I want to acknowledge right up front that yes, I now fall into the long tradition–on the heels of International Women’s Day, no less–of non-Samaritan men who like to moralize one way or the other about this particular Samaritan woman. Recognizing all this, one thing I will try to do today is at least point you all to a few women along the way that have had a significant impact on my understanding of scripture and who I drew on as I prepared for this reflection.

The Setup

So let’s set the scene. Along a dry and dusty way, by the side of an ancestral well, a parched traveler, a thirsty rabbi… he just wanted some water (just… wanted his mane scratched). But the woman he encountered there and whom he asks for a drink RESISTS. “You’re a Jew. How can you ask me, a Samaritan, for a drink?”

This got his attention.

According to Catherine Keller, professor and theologian and the author of this beautiful little book called On the Mystery, “He liked this sort of chutzpah in women.” The opening salvo of the Samaritan Woman at the Well reminds me of a quote by Mary Daly, who was a feminist philosopher and theologian with her own kind of chutzpah. (Actually, I first encountered her while doing an “Atheism for Lent” course, which I’d highly recommend). She gave a sermon once at Harvard’s Memorial Church that, and spoke about about Paul:

Paul wrote that in Christ there is neither male nor female, but was not exactly concerned about social equality for women. The repetition of that famous line from Paul by the would be pacifiers of women invites the response that “even if in Christ there is neither male nor female–Jew or Samaritan, I might add–everywhere else there damn well is.”

And, in this story of the Woman at the Well, then, it’s fitting then that the very first thing she says to Jesus is, “hey, you’re a Jew, a Jewish man. And I am a Samaritan woman.” Those parts of their identities are important. They have significant meaning and context for this exchange.

Samaritans were an ethnic group descended from intermarriages mostly between Jews and Assyrians. Unlike Jews, they thought that only the the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) were legitimate. And unlike them, they believed worship should take place on the mountain referenced in the story, Mt. Gerizim, not in Jerusalem. Religious leaders on both sides discouraged contact with the opposite group. While John’s Jesus is favorable to Samaritans throughout, earlier sources, such as Matthew, have Jesus instruct his disciples not to even enter a Samaritan town (10:5). And yet, here we have Jesus and his disciples crossing the border into Samaria and ending up at Jacob’s Well.

Jesus also broke with gender norms of the day by asking the Woman at the Well to give him a drink. In his world men rarely spoke to women in public, even if they were married to them. When the disciples came back from buying food in town, for example, they where “shocked” that Jesus was having a private conversation with a woman; and that’s because within this patriarchal context, this interaction should not have happened at all. (To be fair, it’s also because in John the disciples are often portrayed as… not particularly smart.) Her question back to him–again, “Why do you, a Jewish man, ask for something to drink from me, a Samaritan woman?”–reflects this breach of etiquette. The conversation that follows almost has the character of a trial (even if it is one that’s infinitely more gentle). Not only that, it is one of the longer dialogues in the Bible and the longest 1:1 theological conversation Jesus ever had with anyone.

If the Samaritan woman tests Jesus with her first question, he responds with playful courtesy: “If you knew… who it is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you LIVING WATER.’” “Living water” has the double meaning of running rather than the kind of stagnant water you might find in a well AND water of a more mysterious liveliness, a symbol of salvation or new life. She challenges him by pointing out his lack of a bucket–it is Lent after all when we recall that Jesus experienced not only many of the extremes of human existence, but also just human existence, like being actually thirsty for actual water that you’d need an actual bucket for–and Jesus responds: stick with me, and you’ll never go thirsty again! “The water I give will become fountains within you, springing up to Eternal life.”

A Misunderstood Woman, a Misunderstood Story

And then, things get weird. Not with the dialogue. Not with the Woman at the Well. But with all with us.

Jesus says to the her, “Go, call your husband and then come back here.”

She replies, “I don’t have a husband.”

Jesus “exclaims” in this translation, but others just say “says,” “You’re right–you don’t have a husband. The fact is, you’ve had five, and the man you’re living with now is not your husband.”

When I was a kid, I thought of this as a kind of “Gotcha!” moment. “Jesus knows your secrets!” But what I want to talk about today is the fact folks have taken this extremely brief summary of her marital status and run with it, and often in very bad ways. Here, I think of Rachel Held Evans, who was… she died unexpectedly at 37… an American Christian columnist, blogger, and author–“part of a vanguard of progressive-Christian women who fought to change the way Christianity is taught and perceived in the United States.” She once Tweeted, ironically, “Was the woman at the well a ‘bad girl?’” (This is around the same time, by the way, that Donald Trump referred to Hillary Clinton as a “nasty woman” during one of their debates.) It turns out that for much of the Christianity in the United States that Rachel Held Evans took on in her work, the answer to that question has been an unequivocal “yes.” There’s this kind of ideology that Jo Hatlem told us about last week that celebrates David and hails him as the poster boy for being contrite WHILE CONVENIENTLY GLOSSING OVER the whole situation of his relations with Bathsheba, the fact that David the KING had a coerced sexual relationship with Bathsheba and then had her husband Uriah killed. In that same ideology, later preachers have loved to moralize about the unnamed Woman at the Well and demonize her as a “bad girl” or a “nasty woman,” WHILE CONVENIENTLY GLOSSING OVER the whole situation of the reality of the religiously sanctioned patriarchal society she lived in and that still continues to this day. The kind of society that: subordinates women in the church and at the home; that keeps them from being able to vote, that pays them less for the same work; that prevents them from getting the medical care that they need (an especially pertinent one these days). That instrumentatlizes them for water or sex or whatever. I was even thinking about the anniversary of Title IX: that keeps them from equal opportunity in sport. And, yes, that elects known womanizers like Donald Trump and men like him to the highest offices in the land.

This is all despite the fact that the text does no moralizing; Jesus just reports the facts of her life without the slightest hint of condemnation. He doesn’t tell the Woman at the Well to repent or to “go and sin no more.” Why she’s had five husbands doesn’t seem to matter to either to Jesus or even the writer, John. So it’s us, we’re the ones concerned. And I am convinced that the folks who like to demonize her have internalized one too many sermons about this woman that Jesus’ SHOCKED-that-he-was-talking-to-a-woman disciples might have given, but not Jesus himself.

And here is where Gail Wallace, co-founder of The Junia Project, which advocates for the full inclusion of women in church leadership and for mutuality in marriage, is really helpful. And thank you, Shelly Weaverdyck, for pointing me to her article. According to her, in recent years we have learned more about marriage in the first century, and this knowledge suggests that we have misjudged the Woman at the Well. When we consider the historical context and the realities of life for women in that time we can come up with several possible scenarios for her situation, none of which involve her being “a sinful woman”, as the story is often told.

  • She could have been widowed, possibly because she was unable to have children or because she was forced to marry young and outlived several older husbands.
  • She could have been divorced. And yes, divorce carried a stigma, like it can now. If so, it definitely wasn’t her choice. Divorce was a very patriarchal institution. When Jesus condemns divorce elsewhere, for example, in Matthew, he was really condemning a system where men could use the threat of divorce to control their wives and keep them living in fear (5:31-32). I’m going to return to this one in just a second.
  • Finally, there’s a lot of folks who condemn her for being a prostitute or for “shacking up,” AND PEOPLE WHO ARGUE AGAINST THEM saying that she wasn’t and that she had no choice, but I feel weird even bringing those up because of our modern understandings of sex work–without the connotations of criminality or immorality–and cohabitation–for love and companionship, even finances and convenience. So sometimes I think those kind of comments those say more about the people who make them than they do about the context of the story.

Regardless, this is someone who is hurting. We may not even be able to imagine the unfathomable pain of all those husbands, the inevitable sense of curse, social marginality, and finally unmarriagability that this woman endured.

Back to divorce. When I was growing up, I went to church just about every Sunday as a young child. I have very fond memories of the music, mostly the campy guitar, of holding hands and praying with complete strangers, communion, even–and I know this might sound weird to some of you–of going up after every service, kneeling at an altar, and having a pastor pray with me. But, my parents got divorced when I was in middle school, and I learned really, really quickly that church can be a terrible place for folks like them, already going through a… not amicable… divorce, yet full of the kind of judgment and condemnation and shame that the Woman at the Well and Jesus don’t seem to care about but that we definitely do. All of which is to say that it’s helpful, I guess, to see commentators “forgiving” the Woman at the Well for possibly being divorced but I can’t help but think it’s complicated and not necessarily bad in the first place and in any case I don’t think we need this kind of historical context to help us recognize bad sermons or biblical interpretation AND their real world consequences that alienate people like my parents when we see them.

You Can’t Own the Truth in Spirit

Back to the story. Interested in her unexpected honesty, in her risky trust, Jesus goes on to eventually makes his own revelation, revealing his true identity to her. “I who speak to you am the Messiah.” Along the way, he also announces that “God is spirit.” Interestingly… and this is just an aside… this is one of only two definitional propositions about God in scripture. The other is “God is love.” The Woman at the Well, infinitely practical, asks where the proper place to worship this Spirit is, Mt. Gerizim or Jerusalem. She was a Samaritan, after all, and he was a Jew. Jesus replies by essentially saying, “well, they’re both wrong.” In other words, the question is no longer about Jews or Samaritans. The work of God is not bound to one location any more than to one gender or ethnic background. None of us have a monopoly on spirit and truth.

This fresh sense of spirit Jesus offers does not deny divine presence in local sites or practices. But it does resist the DIS-spiriting absolutism that would lock the mystery of God in a single location or space or with a particular group of people. God the SPIRIT is in all of these places and containable in none. Jesus models the need to go beyond conventional boundaries like gender, ethnicity, or geography, and the Samaritan Woman at the Well goes off to town to tell her fellow Samaritans the Good news. God is Spirit, Jesus is the Messiah, and he’s got “living water.” And, importantly, they responded. She seems to have had the trust of her community, which probably would not have been true if she had a poor reputation. Wells are where God starts something new.

Resisting the Temptation to Overspiritualize

OK. I started my reflection with that quote from Mary Daly: “Even if in Christ there is neither male nor female, everywhere else there damn well is.” Upon closing her sermon she urged her “sisters and other esteemed members of the congregation” to join her in what she called “an exodus from centuries of darkness.” More than half the women and some men in the congregation joined her in walking out of the church before the service was finished. (Don’t worry, we’re not doing that today. As I understand it, that’s planned for Palm Sunday. John…)

And so, while all this “God is spirit” stuff is nice, at the same time, I think we should also resist the temptation to overspirtualize. I pulled that quote out from a longer passage in which Mary Daly is naming the “many ways of REFUSING TO SEE a problem.” In her particular case, she’s talking about “the problem of the oppression of women by society in general, and religion in particular.” Things like:

  • making the problem appear trivial (why care about sexism when there are so many other important problems, like war, racism, pollution of the environment);
  • particularizing it (“Oh, that’s a Catholic problem, the Catholic church is so medieval” (Mary Daly did not like the Catholic church) or, maybe, to give some more contemporary examples, that’s an evangelical problem, that’s a conservative problem, that’s a Christian nationalist problem… etc.);
  • universalizing it (“But, isn’t the real problem human liberation?” OR, you know, don’t all lives matter?); and…
  • spiritualizing it, refusing to look at the concrete, oppressive facts.

To say things like I just said, “Jesus models the need to go beyond conventional boundaries like gender, ethnicity, or geography” without recognizing, without SEEING and HEARING (or NOT REFUSING to see and hear) like Jesus did when the woman insisted on ABSOLUTE CLARITY about the her situation, that those boundaries are REAL and not easily overcome, even when you have “living water” to parch your thirst and you worship God the Spirit. They have concrete, oppressive consequences that benefit men like David and all the powerful men like him whose moral failings are excused because of his story. They hurt women like the Woman the Well, and the way this story has been interpreted hurt people like my parents who have been divorced. We can’t be color-blind or gender-blind or anything-blind.

Disarming Honesty

But I think you all know this. In the end, I like this story because above all it is about DISARMING HONESTY. If this dialogue comes across like a trial, even a friendly one, it’s because it is. The Woman at the Well, with her complicated backstory and her complicated socio-historical context, understandably enters it with her guard up. But she meets Jesus with a kind of honesty and truth-telling that disarms both of them, even makes Jesus rethink his own sense of calling. We cut this for time, but later in the chapter John tells us that when the disciples came back with food and offered it to him, he told them that he’d ALREADY been fed, nourished by the woman. While she may have carried shame, she displayed none of it, and Jesus didn’t want it anyway, because they both knew that shame should not keep us away from naming the reality of our situation. And like Jesus, we have to see and hear that reality and recognize it’s concrete, oppressive facts. Without trivialzing it, parituclarlizing it, universalizing it, or overspiritualizing it. You know, SEEING it and HEARING it with eyes to see and ears to hear. And, for those of us out there–like me, I think–who are more like the disciples in this story, we also have to recognize where we might be complicit in it.

During Lent, may we practice this kind of truth-telling, and truth-seeing and truth-hearing. And may we create spaces like wells with water that springs up even to eternal life, and relationships like the one between Jesus and the woman where all this is possible.

Categories: talks