Close Encounters: Jesus and the Woman at the Well
Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
March 30, 2008
John 4: 1-26
A pastor shares this story: "A colleague was telling me about a woman who had joined his church recently. He said, 'She spent most of her life, until she got older, as a Las Vegas showgirl. Then, when she aged out of that job, she worked as a prostitute in a small town in Nevada. Now, at 60, she has joined our church, changed her life.'
"That's an amazing story of evangelism,' I said.
"To which my colleague replied, 'I just can't believe the sort of people that Jesus likes to hang out with.'"
Sometimes I wonder if people ever say that about me when they discover that I am a minister. Do they ever say that about you? "Can you believe that Jesus hangs out with someone like her? Boy, that church in Sebastopol must let in just about everybody." In these days of "God Is Still Speaking" in the United Church of Christ, we have been encouraged to get more comfortable with talk of evangelism, outreach and church growth. But I once heard it said that evangelism might be the supreme test of fidelity for a church; indeed, that evangelism might be defined as the enjoyment of Jesus as he engages outsiders and brings them in. Brings them in where? Brings them in here. And so, we have to ask ourselves, here in comfortable and cozy Sebastopol, if we really want to be with Jesus as he reaches out to the world. I mean, you never know who he might invite to come in and sit at his table. My God, we might even find him talking to a Samaritan woman. We've got to get this guy under control!
What we have in our text today is a conversation, the longest conversation recorded in any of the Gospels. Jesus talks longer with the woman at the well than he does with anyone else, even his own family. Sometimes, when I read this text I have the feeling that I'm eavesdropping. And when we get to her five husbands and her live-in partner, well, I'm thinking that's way more information than I need to know. Now there are any number of ways to approach this text, but today I would simply like to think about it with you as a conversation. And think about the huge barriers Jesus and this woman, this Samaritan, face in order for there even to be a conversation, in order for them really to hear and understand one another.
Consider the gender barrier. One of my favorite preachers, Fred Craddock, tells of a time he was shopping in his local Win Dixie market near Atlanta. "I asked a woman who was shopping there if she could tell me where I could find the peanut butter. She turned around, looked at me, and said, 'Are you trying to hit on me?' I said, 'Look, all I'm doing is looking for the peanut butter.'
"Later, when I found it over on aisle five, there she was. She said, 'Oh, you really were looking for the peanut butter.'
"'I told you I was.'
"She said, 'Well, nowadays, you can never be too careful.'
"I said to her, 'Oh yes you can. Oh yes you can.'"
This tension, this defensiveness we so often feel toward each other.
I was at a workshop on boundaries. We spent an hour talking about hugging in church and particularly the dangers of male ministers initiating hugs with female church members. You've got to be so careful.
And so the Samaritan woman, confronted by this male Jew, is careful and defensive. And, in her case, who could really blame her? She lived in a world where women did not have many doors open to them, indeed, it was made very clear each day that they ought to stay in their place. One rabbinical teaching said, "A man should hold no conversation with a woman in the street, not even with his own wife, lest other men gossip." And then there's the business of the five husbands. Oh the things male preachers have said about her over the years. The fact is we know nothing about the circumstances of her marriages, they might have all died, and Jesus clearly treats it as a non-issue, but we've judged her. In first century Palestine, the gender barriers to true conversation were huge, perhaps they still are. But that doesn't stop Jesus.
And then there's the racial issue, back in the news lately, as if it ever went away. I went to a liberal college in the east and we really liked to talk about our acceptance, our tolerance, our desire to cross racial, cultural boundaries. Being a scholarship student I worked in the dining hall. Every lunch and dinner, over in a corner at three or four tables, sat all black students. In four years I never saw a white student sit down at that table. I wasn't going to do it. When I think back to those years, I think how many significant conversations that I actually ever had with an African American student. Not many, not many. So we talked about tolerance and acceptance, but in practice we really didn't do it. We just talked.
There's a huge racial issue in this text. To put it simply, and you know this, Jews and Samaritans hated each other. Another rabbinical saying: "He who eats the bread of a Samaritan is like to one that eats the flesh of a swine." And you know about Jews and pork. That was one of the kinder sayings. When the Jews were carted off to exile in Babylon in the 6th century B.C., their captors took mostly the best and the brightest - professionals, artists, skilled laborers. They left behind the uneducated, the poorest of the poor. In those years there was inter-marriage, Jews marrying non-Jews. The result - Samaritans - thought of by Jews in Jesus' day as half-breeds, traitors, impure. A Jewish man talking to a Samaritan? No loyal Jew would ever think of doing such a thing. Asking a Samaritan - and a woman, no less - for a cup of water? Not in this lifetime. It doesn't stop Jesus.
And then worship. "Sir, I see you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain (which is Mount Gerazim where the Samaritans had a temple). But you say that the place where people must worship is in the temple in Jerusalem." Knowing that Jesus is a Jew, assuming he believes that the only true worship is worship in the temple in Jerusalem, she begins to defend her own people's tradition of worship. Even worship becomes a barrier.
Another Fred Craddock story, "Some people have had terrible worship experiences. Up in a church in Newport, Tennessee, I asked a woman in our church why it was that as soon as the sermon was over she always got up and shot out the door. Never stayed for the end. She told me that when she was ten or eleven she was at a service and, after the sermon, they sang and sang and sang. She said, 'Then the minister came down, took hold of my hand and said, 'Little girl, do you want to go to hell?' He scared me to death. So I leave now before all that starts.'"
Says Craddock, "I said to her, 'It's not going to start here.' But her bad worship experience was not so easily forgotten." And I find that to be true. When people have had a painful experience, or hurtful experience in church, when they've been wounded in some way, they never forget, and often don't forgive. They talk to me about that terrible experience as if it happened yesterday.
And this is how it is with Jesus and the Samaritan woman. She's assuming he'll judge her, put down her way of worship. It becomes yet another barrier. But again, it doesn't stop Jesus. Gender barriers, racial barriers, worship barriers: it would seem that any conversation, any relationship, between Jesus and this woman doesn't stand a chance. Jesus is determined to break through all of that and if we get nothing else from this text, from this unlikeliest of conversations, I hope we get that. Jesus breaks through.
When he first arrives at the well, meets the woman, her entire life history screams to her that nothing good can come from this. And when he expresses full knowledge of her life - the good and the bad - she knows that the very next words out of his mouth will be words of condemnation, the same words she's heard all her life. But the condemnation never comes. Expecting that, she receives acceptance, expecting the same old, same old, she finds herself being transformed. Talk about being born again, a new heart, a new life.
Now she isn't too sure about this at first. Much like Nicodemus, she doesn't completely understand. Jesus talks about living water, she points out he doesn't have a bucket. When he gets a little too close, she tries to change the subject. But it doesn't work. Jesus doesn't give up. Reflecting on this text, Barbara Brown Taylor says, "When she steps back, he steps toward her. When she steps out of the light, he steps into it. He will not let her retreat. If she is determined to show him less of herself, then he will show her more of himself. 'I know the Messiah is coming,' she says, and he says, 'I am he.'"
Says Taylor, "It is the first time he has said that to another living soul. It is a moment of full disclosure, in which the Messiah of God and this outsider, this Samaritan woman, stand face to face with no pretence about who they are. Both stand fully lit at high noon for one bright moment in time, while all the rules, taboos and history that separate them just fall forgotten to the ground."
Do you see the hope here, the power here, do you feel it? Maybe you came to church today as a church insider. You have been here a long time, you are comfortable here, you feel at home here, you know your way around, you've served on committees. You feel close to this church and the people of this church. Every Sunday is sort of like a little home coming. Or maybe you came today feeling more like an outsider - unsure of your faith, unsure of your place here. Unsure if this is the place for you...the faith for you. Wondering if you really belong. Are you really worthy? “Is this going to be the day I decide to stay for coffee? Maybe someone will talk to me.”
Well, the good news of this text is that insider-outsider, worthy-unworthy it doesn't matter a bit. In Jesus’ presence we can be who we really are, the good and the bad of it. Taylor again, "The Messiah is the one who shows you who you are by showing you who he is - who crosses all the boundaries, breaks all the rules, drops all disguises - speaking to you like someone you have known all your life, bubbling up in your life like a well that needs no dipper."
Look at how the woman is changed, at how she's transformed, how she is now empowered to act. Go home and read the rest of the story, because at the end of the text, she goes home, goes to the people, probably the same people she thought she could never face again. She goes home and preaches the good news. "Come and see…”
So many barriers. So much that divides us, so much we hide behind, so much we fear and suspect. And then that pesky Jesus shows up, and we discover he couldn't care less about all that stuff. No matter what our history, no matter what our successes and failings, no matter what our secret hurts and deep wounds, no matter whether we consider ourselves outsiders or insiders, he seeks us out, engages us and begins a conversation. This conversation may challenge and confuse us, it may encourage and embrace us, maybe all of the above, but know this...it will not leave us unchanged. We might even find ourselves saying to the unlikeliest of people, come and see...come and see, because you just won't believe the kind of people Jesus hangs out with.