St. John’s Lutheran Church, Toluca, IL – 3rd Sunday in Lent
Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42
Gospel: John 4:5-42
5[Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.6Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
7A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” 13Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” 15The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
16Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” 19The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” 26Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
27Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” 28Then 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?” 30They left the city and were on their way to him.
31Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” 34Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. 37For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
39Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” 40So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. 41And many more believed because of his word. 42They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
NRSV
…
The Kingdom Seen, Part II: The First Impression Not Always Remain
Grace to you, beloved of God, and peace from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
The divinely inspired storytelling by John the evangelist continues from where we left news week. The person visiting with Jesus could not be more different than the one from last week. And so is their encounter.
Nicodemus was a leader among his peers and someone with vast knowledge of scripture. He is also a Jewish male. All this gives him a much higher status than the character of today’s gospel.
The lady from Sychar is a Samaritan. She is deemed inferior by the rest of the Israelites because, as we heard, Samaritans claimed the right not to worship in the temple in Jerusalem. She is also a woman in a patriarchal society. These are undisputed historical facts. Nicodemus is high, and she is very down low in comparison.
If that is not enough, she is often perceived as an outcast and a sinner in most Christian circles. I say “perceived” because we don’t know any of it for sure. The label of outcast is actually a good, educated guess. The fact she is getting water by herself at the hottest time of the day is telling. Women would likely come in groups to the well for water either earlier or later in the day when the sun would not be so high. It is telling, but it’s still a guess. Maybe she missed the later shift for some reason and could not wait until the end of the day to get water. Maybe she didn’t mind the hike at noon. We don’t know.
The sinner label? That is pure imagination from a modern puritan bias. There would be myriad reasons for her to have had 5 previous husbands for no fault of her own. For instance, she could have been barren, but that is only one possible scenario. That alone could make her undesirable to most men. If she can’t keep a husband, maybe that causes her to become an outcast among her female peers. Now she lives with someone who is not her husband? My gosh, that could be a relative for all we know. What makes such a person a husband is that she has a male providing for her. Maybe he unlawfully asks for favors to keep providing for her.
The point is, this encounter between the woman at the well and Jesus has the power to trigger all kinds of assumptions about this lady, and most, if not all, are not good. What, then, it says about us?
In my birthland, we say something in the lines that the first impression always remains. You may have heard before that you predict future behavior by past behavior. What if we interpret past behaviors with assumptions of our headspace?
Thankfully, for the Lady from Sychar and us, God with us sees her for who she is, one of his beloved children, and He does not care. When she meets Jesus, she is clueless about the free gift that his Kingdom has brought to our existence. Yet Jesus, in broad daylight, tells her and anyone at ear distance that this Samaritan Lady, perceived by everybody else as a sinner and an outcast, that he is the Christ and that she belongs! Now she, like us, is born from above. Now she too is born again from water and spirit. Now she two has a new life, and people believe the good news because of her; for God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that anyone who believes in Him will never perish but have eternal life.
Return to the Lord your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. Amen.
Bridging Faith 