One joy of ministry at St. Dunstan’s is the presence among us of people new to Christianity, to the Bible, to all of it. There’s a question such folks sometimes have: how do you, Miranda, find meaning in such a patriarchal text and tradition? Fair question!
The Bible definitely reflects several different patriarchal – male-dominated – cultures and times. And over the past 2000 years the Church has been a good bit more patriarchal than the Bible itself. So the women (and other marginalized people) who ARE in the Bible, aren’t as known and honored as they should be.
To my eyes (including those years studying anthropology before my life turned towards church), given its origins, it’s pretty amazing how many women we DO encounter in the Bible – Old Testament, Apocrypha and New Testament.
Today’s Gospel introduces one of them: the “woman at the well,” or “the Samaritan woman.” Like the Man Born Blind, she’s not given a name in the text, but I’m not going to keep calling her “the woman,” so let’s call her Samara.
This scene follows closely on the conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, and I’m confident that John means us to notice the similarities and differences. Nicodemus meets Jesus by night; Samara at noon. Nicodemus is a man, important, named; Samara is a woman; unimportant, perhaps stigmatized; unnamed in the text. Nicodemus shares religious and ethnic identity with Jesus; the Samaritan woman is an ethnic and religious “other.” Both have big questions for Jesus about God and faith and what it all means.
What do we know about Samara? Well, to begin with, she’s a Samaritan. John’s Gospel is the only Gospel in which Jesus visits Jerusalem several times, instead of only at the end of his story. Here he and his disciples have left the great city, headed back to Galilee, his home region, by way of Samaria, a region west of the Jordan River and north of Judea. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw writes, “For centuries, Samaritans and Jews occupied neighboring lands and practiced similar religions while actively expressing feelings of animosity toward one another… The Jewish-Samaritan enmity [peaked] in 128 BCE [about 150 years before this scene] when [the] high priest and ruler of the Jews… razed the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerazim to the ground. It is not surprising, then, that these groups [were] bitter enemies.” https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-john-45-42-6
It’s not just that Jews and Samaritans had different beliefs; it’s that the Samaritans felt like they were all worshiping the same God and the Jews were being really uptight about doing it their way, and the Jews felt like the Samaritans were practicing some filthy, degraded, misguided version of their ancestral faith. So that’s all in the background of this conversation about worship!
So, we know that Samara was a Samaritan. And we know something about her marital history: she has had five husbands, and the man she has now is not her husband. There’s a lot to unpack here!
How does somebody rack up five husbands? Well: divorce, or death. In first-century Judaism, divorce was something men did to women – women could not initiate divorce – but we know a lot less about Samaritan religion and culture at the time, and what was possible. People died a lot, and it’s certainly possible that a few of the five had died and left her behind, in need of a new husband to provide for her.
Over the millennia, people have been quick to assume that this woman is lusty, unfaithful, morally dissolute, and so on. There’s plenty of sexism and misogyny behind such readings.
On the other hand, I read a bunch of preaching commentaries this week that swing too far the other way, in my opinion – suggesting this poor woman has been five times abandoned or widowed, and entirely skipping over the one she has now who’s not her husband. It’s unclear from the English syntax whether the current dude is just not married to her, or whether he’s married to someone else. Either way, the arrangement is socially out of bounds. Many readers have wondered about the fact that she’s coming to the well to get water at noon – physically demanding work, when the sun is highest and hottest. Does that suggest that she was not welcome with the group of women and girls who likely went to get water together in the morning or evening?
One commentator suggests that the fact that the other people of her village listen to her, when she comes to tell them about Jesus, suggests she could not have been socially ostracized. I’m not convinced. If someone who’s seen as a problem in the village suddenly ran into the town square shouting, “Come see this man who told me everything I’ve ever done!!” – I think everybody would run and see. It also seems to me that that phrasing – “everything I’ve ever done” – hints at a sense of having been an agent in her own complicated story, at least to some extent. There’s room for interpretation, certainly! But I find that I am inclined to read her not simply a victim of happenstance but as someone whose life has been shaped by some seeking, some destabilizing need, as well as – undoubtedly – by sexism and other miseries beyond her control. Still, as another commentator, Meda Stamper notes, Jesus says nothing of sin or sinfulness, and doesn’t exhort her to change her life. He seems to know all about her at a glance – perhaps even stopped at that well especially to talk with her – and isn’t the slightest bit put off or unwilling to engage.
A word about the well! The well is where potential marriage partners meet. It happens twice in Genesis and once in Exodus – enough to suggest it was probably a thing. It makes a certain sense – it was a place where a young woman, or several young women, might be off by themselves, away from their family, and available for flirtation. Kind of like the mall.
This is a scandalous conversation. Samara gestures to that scandal by immediately asking Jesus why he’s talking to her. Likewise the disciples, when they return, have to restrain themselves from asking Jesus, “Why are you talking with this woman!?!?”
Which brings me to the third thing we know about Samara: her personality. She says what she thinks, and asks what she wants to know. There’s a recurring theme in the Gospel of John: Jesus uses metaphorical language to talk about holy realities, and people are confused. Here in chapter 4, Jesus offers “living water,” which could also mean running water – as in, water from a spring, stream or river – generally seen as cleaner and more refreshing than water from a well or cistern. But Jesus doesn’t mean literal water. In chapter 7, Jesus will circle back to the theme of living water, telling a crowd, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” The text then notes that Jesus means the Holy Spirit (John 7:37-39). Jesus seems to be trying to say that those who choose to follow him will be able to tap into something that will nurture them deeply, and slake their inner thirst. As a follower of Jesus I can’t say that I have always found this to be true, but I have sometimes found it to be true. And it’s also certainly true that I often try to satisfy my soul-hungers and thirsts with things that are not especially satisfying or life-giving – and that’s on me, and late capitalism.
Anyway: The confusion over living water is just one example of this theme that runs throughout the Gospel of John. In chapter 2 Jesus talks about destroying the temple and raising it in three days; people think he’s talking about the Great Temple, which took decades to build, but he’s talking about his body. In chapter 3, Nicodemus is perplexed about being born a second time. Later in chapter 4, Jesus’ disciples are trying to get him to eat, and he says, “I have food you don’t know about;” they wonder, did somebody bring him food?, and he says, My food is to do the will of the one who sent me. In chapter 6, Jesus promises his disciples bread from heaven; they say, “Sir, give us this bread” (does that sound familiar?). He says, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” There are several more examples when Jesus is speaking about death – his own death, when he says things like, I’m going where you can’t come with me, and the death of Lazarus, whom we’ll hear about next week. And then there’s the play around literal and metaphorical blindness in chapter 9.
Sometimes these misunderstandings are brief; sometimes Jesus goes on to say more about the larger realities at stake, as in the conversation with Nicodemus that we heard last week. Rarely does somebody engage him, ask questions, seek clarification. Just a chapter earlier, Nicodemus says, “What do these things mean!?!,”, and then falls silent, confounded.
And then there’s Samara. She asks Jesus, Why are you talking to me? She asks him, Where exactly do you plan to get this living water, Mr No Bucket? She says, Give me some of that special water, so I don’t have keep coming out here every day! She says, I have no husband. She says, Sir, I see that you are a prophet, so tell me: Who’s right, the Samaritans or the Jews? She wonders out loud about the Messiah – and whether Jesus could possibly be the guy. She’s bold, and curious, and I love her. I think Jesus thinks she’s pretty great, too.
Because she is bold, and curious, and ready to proclaim good news even when the people around her think she’s out of line or embarrassing, the woman we’re calling Samara becomes a disciple – one who meets Jesus and is transformed by that meeting – and an evangelist, one who invites others to come and meet Jesus. We only meet her here – but even this brief story should make her honored by the church, not disparaged.
And – as I preached about another of the women of John’s Gospel, Mary of Bethany, about year ago – dwelling with Samara doesn’t just warm my heart towards her; it warms my heart towards Jesus. Back in the 1930s, Dorothy Sayers, one of my favorite writers of both mystery novels and theology, wrote about how Jesus refused to be squicked out by women and women stuff: “Perhaps it is no wonder that the women [in the Gospels] were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man [Jesus] – and there never has been such another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them either as ‘The women, God help us!’ or ‘The ladies, God bless them!’; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; …. who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend…. Nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything ‘funny’ about women’s nature.”
(The disciples’ reluctance to ask Jesus, “Why are you talking to this strange woman?”, makes me think that they’ve asked questions like that before and been told to mind their business.)
Two thousand years later, it still doesn’t go without saying that a person who identifies as a woman has just as much right to be in the world, freely and joyfully, as anybody else. Perhaps less so now than a few years ago.
The God we know through Jesus Christ and his earthly life is a God who takes women seriously – among others whose autonomy and worth are questioned or graded as second-rate by others. The God we know through Jesus Christ isn’t interested in shaming, or shooing back into the kitchen. The God we know in Jesus Christ sees as as we are and meets us where we are, no matter what we’ve done or what’s happened to us, and offers us a place – each of us, all of us – in the great holy work of redemption, woven through time.
That’s a Savior who earns my loyalty, and my love.