Love Story

Exodus 17: 1-7; John 4: 4-42

FPC; 2-24-08

 

          At Noon, she arrives at the well with a water jug balanced on her head.  Sitting alongside the well is a stranger, a man tired from traveling, a man who obviously is not from around those parts.  Perhaps because of his physical features, she concludes he is a Jew. 

          With the words “give me something to drink”, Jesus, that stranger, begins a conversation with her that is the longest recorded conversation in the Gospels.  It is longer than any discussion Jesus had with any of his disciples, or his family or his accusers.  The fact that Jesus speaks to the woman longer than he speaks to anyone else is astonishing because she is an outsider.  She, in fact, is a triple outsider. 

As a Samaritan she is considered a half-breed and a pagan by those who strictly enforce the Jewish laws and regulations. 

          As a woman, she is denigrated and demeaned.   She is prohibited from public interaction with men.  Men are not permitted to interact with her, let alone look at her.  According to teacher and preacher Barbara Brown Taylor, there was a group of pious men “known as ‘the bruised and bleeding Pharisees’ because they closed their eyes when they saw a woman coming down the street, even if it meant walking into a wall and breaking their noses.”[1] 

          Not only is she a Samaritan woman, but she is a Samaritan woman with a suspicious past; suspicious enough to cause other women to ostracize her; so severe is the rejection that this woman comes to the well, that very public place, not at an hour of the day that other women come, but at Noon when she can come in isolation.   

          She knows the rules, the written and the unwritten rules, that prohibit a conversation with a Jewish man.  Jesus also knows the rules, but he refuses to be governed by them.  

I suppose Jesus, at any point of the long conversation, could have backed away.  He could have refused to cross the boundary line of race and gender.  He could have succumbed to the conventional patterns and left the woman at the well, holding her bucket of loneliness and rejection. 

          But remember the first verse.  “Jesus had to go through Samaria.”  It was not geographically but theologically necessary for him to go through that region.  “For God so loved the world”.  Jesus’ conversation with and his acceptance of the Samaritan woman are pure reflections of God’s boundless love. 

          Not only is the road weary Jesus thirsty for water, he thirsts to do the will of God.  The will of God is that she and all Samaritans might “come to belief and receive power to become children of God.”[2]  Jesus had to go through Samaria so that God’s love might be delivered universally and without geographical, economic or cultural limitations.  

          A couple of months ago, as my mother and I were reminiscing about my childhood years, she said: “I’m glad Marty and all of you children got to know Miss Lois.”  Marty is my oldest brother.  He has more vivid memories of Miss Lois than the rest of us.  Miss Lois was a member of Grace Presbyterian Church in Anderson South Carolina.  My Dad was her pastor for a few years in the early sixties.  If Marty were here, he could tell you more about Miss Lois than I can.  What I remember is that, when we went to her house for a visit, she would go to her closet and pull out cardboard boxes.  We would help her drag them to the middle of the living room floor.  We would turn them over and gleefully watch as toys came pouring out.  We would play.  Like sponges, we would absorb her hospitality and kindness.  That’s why my mother said: “I’m glad Marty and all you kids got to know Miss Lois.” 

          But there is another reason she said what she said.  Miss Lois would tell us stories about her years in China.  In the fifties and forties she was a missionary there. Those were the days when, politically and religiously speaking, there wasn’t much tolerance in China for professing Christians.  She would tell us stories-stories about the love of God, stories of faith and of faithfulness; like sponges, we absorbed the stories.

Miss Lois never had a husband; in that respect she is so different from this woman of Samaria.  I suppose you could say, “Miss Lois was married to the church or to the mission field.”  She’s not around any more to answer the question; she has long since departed this earth and joined the church triumphant.  I wish I had thought to ask her before she left, but I was only three or four and the question never entered my mind.  Maybe Marty asked her the question.  “Miss Lois, why did you go?”  I’m guessing that her answer was this one: “I had to go; I could not not go.”  “It was out of divine necessity that I went.”  “For God so loved the world…”  In that way, she and the Samaritan woman are very similar. 

After experiencing the love of God through her encounter with Jesus, she went; she went because of divine necessity, I think.  She went to others in the village and gave witness: “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did.” 

We don’t know all that she ever did.  Over the centuries, some in the church have claimed to know.  As Fred Craddock has suggested, “moralizers…have painted her dangerous: beware her seductive ways, her mincing walk, her eyes waiting in ambush….the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the converting word.”   The text says she has had five husbands.  But it speaks no words to us about the details.  “Did her husbands die?  Was she an abused spouse whose only option was divorce?  Or was she promiscuous?  We don’t know the particulars.[3]  But, as I said earlier there must be something about her past or about her present that causes her to come to the well at Noon, in isolation; not wanting to feel the cold shoulders and the judging stares, perhaps.  One thing is certain, she’s not perfect. 

Even her witness to others is flawed, containing a measure of doubt:  Come, see a man who told me all I ever did. “Can this be the Christ”?  Literally, “this cannot be the Christ, can it?”   But her witness is enough.  Craddock reminds us: “it is invitational, not judgmental; it is honest…it avoids triumphalism; [it has no] packaged answers to unasked questions, thinly veiled ultimatums and threats of hell.” 

She had to bear witness, as imperfect as it is.  She had to tell others about the love of God she had absorbed from this one who is living water.  She just had to go and tell others because “God so loved the world.” 

As scholar Robert Kysar observes, “Because of her the reader of this Gospel knows that no matter who you are-no matter what your status in society may be-the revelation of God in Christ is for you.”[4] 

As we worship we come to experience that revelation.  We come to drink from the well of God’s grace.  Here we encounter the One who is Living Water.  

Here, today, we also encounter a woman who is the most effective evangelist in the entire Gospel of John.[5]  She models for us Christian faith and Christian witness. 

Like her faith and witness, our faith and witness is not perfect; our faith, like hers, is in the process of maturing; our witness, like hers, sometimes quakes and shimmers.  But it is enough to be used by the Spirit to bring others to the well, enough to bring the world to this One who is Living Water, who knows all that we have ever done, this one who wraps the world in his wondrous grace. 

         

           

 

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