At this year’s Extravaganza, a youth ministry conference hosted by the ELCA Youth Ministry Network, I participated in a day and half workshop titled “The Lay Preacher’s Primer: How to Craft a Faithful Sermon, led by Karoline Lewis, professor of Biblical Preaching at Luther Seminary. This passage, the story of the Samarian woman encountering Jesus at the well, is one we returned to throughout the workshop.
The story is a familiar to many Christians. This year, the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) places it the week after the story of Nicodemus visiting Jesus in the dark of night to ask his questions. The two stories are commonly compared and contrasted for their dark and light imagery and one person’s failed understanding of who Jesus is while the other readily accepts who he is. One holds a position of power, the other does not. Assumptions are made of both individuals to fill in the gaps of the stories.
Generally, such assumptions tend to not be positive when it comes to many of the women in the biblical stories. Like so many, the woman in this week’s story is simply known by some descriptive name, not her actual name. In this case, she is known as the woman at the well or the Samaritan woman. She is nameless to us. Like so many women in the Bible.
A common understanding, or assumed story, of this woman who comes to fetch water at noon, is that she’s a sinner, a person of ill repute due to having had five husbands and currently living with a man who is not her husband. Another assumption which feeds this narrative focuses on the time of day she fetches water. In that region, the early, cooler morning hours would have been a better time to fetch water for the day. So, this is often taken to mean that no one wants to be seen with her, she has been ostracized. That is a lot of extra “story” pushed into these verses:
6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (NRSVUE)
During their conversation we learn a tiny bit about her life:
16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” (NRSVUE)
16 He said to her, “Go call your husband and come back here.” 17 The woman replied, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “Right you are when you said, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the man you are living with now is not your husband. This you said truthfully!” (NET)
The Greek word used in v18 for “husband”, can also mean “man”, note the two versions of the same verses above. This conversation begs some questions, not just simply and quick assumptions. In Jesus’ day, more often than not, women literally belonged to their fathers first, and then to their husbands. If a husband died and had a brother, the brother was to marry the woman. This conversation raises some questions:
- What happened to her five husbands? Did they die and she remarried? Did any divorce her (a possibility if she was barren)?
- Who is the “man” she is living with now? If a widow or divorced woman several times over, could she be the property of her father again or of a brother?
Maybe we need to come to this story, and others, with a bit more imagination. Whatever has happened to these other men in her life, this woman seems to have experienced a bit of chaos and difficult times. If she’s been married five times, what happened to those marriages? Why? Is she young or older? Who is this other man she is living with, a relative perhaps? What if we considered the possibility that she has returned to live with her father who may now be elderly and in need of care? Could that explain a late trip to fetch water?
The story doesn’t answer any of these questions. And most of the time we don’t ask more questions to know more about her story, or the story of others. In this case, assumptions are made that she has been living in sin and pushed to the edges of her community. To be fair, we really do not and cannot know at this point, what her story is. Yet, we do this to people all the time. We get a tiny glimpse of their lives and extrapolate stories about who and what they are based on a sliver of time with them.
And yet, if we go back to the beginning of this chapter, to the verse right before the appointed passage for today:
4 But he had to go through Samaria.
Except as Lewis pointed out during the workshop and in commentaries, Jesus did not “have” to go through Samaria to go back to Galilee, other routes were available. Jews did avoid going through Samaria and avoided the people of that region due to a number of differences. Maybe the “had to” was a sense of urgency, a calling that he needed to be there. The story doesn’t tell us up front why he believed they had to go that way.
What if he needed to be at that well to “see” this lone woman coming in the heat of the day to fetch water? What if what she needed was to be “seen” for who she was, really seen? What if there was some purpose?
As their conversation continues, she moves from seeing Jesus as a prophet to hearing him affirm that he is the Messiah she says she knows is coming and “will proclaim all things to us”. Jesus has just told her that he knows her story and has life-giving water that will never leave her thirsty. She accepts this. She accepts who he tells her he is.
The other assumed layers which are implicitly placed on this story is that the woman has repented for her sins and Jesus has forgiven her. But there is no language of her confessing her sins or Jesus saying “Your sins have been forgiven” as he does in other stories. The result of this encounter is the making of a disciple and apostle, of an evangelist, of a person Jesus should not have been talking with two strikes…a woman (unaccompanied to boot) and not Jewish.
Jesus “had to go to Samaria”, “had to” talk to this woman who in turn, “had to” go back to her community and to tell people:
29 “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” 30 They left the city and were on their way to him.
39 Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” (NRSVUE)
Can you hear the excitement? Twice she tells her community that Jesus told her, her life story! And she’s excited about that! This is not the reaction of someone who has just been shamed and pushed to the margins, but rather the reaction of someone who has been seen, really seen, maybe for the first time! And it is okay, it is good to be who she is! She didn’t even take her water jar back with her. She left it at the well, as though leaving a heavy burden there.
Karoline Lewis also pointed out that she convinces quite a number of people with the story of her encounter. A woman who had been living on the margins of society as one to avoid would really have convinced her neighbors so quickly to “come and see” this stranger at the well? Maybe we cannot see who she really is, or was, but Jesus saw her and released her of her burdens, possibly burdens only she had placed upon herself and not someone else’s doing. We don’t know and that would be another assumption. It appears that Jesus saw her as a child of God and that should be enough for us.
Who needs to be seen in our society and in our daily lives? Whose story needs to be known? Known…not assumed, not rumored, not summarized in juicy tidbits. This woman doing the hard work of getting water in the heat of the day becomes an evangelist, a bringer of good news.
Jesus did not throw shame and condemnation at her. That is not the way to make disciples. Trust me on that one, I had friends in high school who tried that approach. They failed. Being seen, accepted, and offered patience with the questions is a better approach.
What if we approached one another with a bit of curiosity instead of assumptions made on a couple bits of information? What would that look like?
What kind of community, what kind of world, would that create?
At one point in the workshop, we worked in small groups to come up with a summarizing sentence for our assigned story. My group had this story. We focused on this “had to” which took Jesus and his friends into Samaria. Why might he have “had to” go that route?
Because love is the destination. Because God so loves the world, Jesus will go to Samaria to find the woman at the well…and to find you.
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and then there’s this…..how might this woman at the well have met the needs of Jesus? We always assume Jesus didn’t need anything from his encounters, but is that true?
was this encounter at all subversive? – Jesus having transformative conversation here, not in the land of the chosen…..