When my eldest was a baby he was remarkably good at telling the difference between what was food and what was not food. If anything in his reach was not food, it would go straight in his mouth. No matter what it was. Paper, dirt, shampoo, the toilet brush… anything. But if it was food, it would be thrown across the room, squashed into the creases of his high chair, or rubbed into his scalp – anywhere other than his mouth.
Somehow, he survived. But I still wonder what was going on in his little head. What comfort did he get from munching on inedible things? What discomfort was he avoiding by avoiding real food?
Why do any of us crave what we crave, and avoid what we avoid?
Our reading from John 4 this morning plays with this theme of eating and drinking; of hunger and thirst. It asks, What is the food that really satisfies our hunger? What is the drink that really keeps us alive?
The passage begins with Jesus experiencing fatigue, hunger and thirst. Jesus knew the universal human experience of being in urgent need of life-sustaining water. His thirst takes him to a well outside a small town in Samaria.
He asks a Samaritan woman for a drink. Of course there are all sorts of cultural taboos he is breaking as he does that. The woman identifies one of them. Most Jew wouldn’t drink out of the same cup as a Samaritan. But that isn’t the most shocking taboo he broke.
Verse 27 says that when the disciples returned they were astonished that Jesus was speaking with a woman, but they were too polite to question him about it.
Perhaps the disciples are used to Jesus ignoring racial boundaries, but the boundaries that protect good, righteous men from the dangers of sexual temptation – well, surely a man of God like Jesus would maintain those! In his culture, men and women were not supposed to speak to each other at all unless they were related.
Even in our culture… Have you ever heard of the Billy Graham rule? You probably know the name. He was a hugely influential evangelist. He would speak to packed stadiums and hundreds of people at a time would turn to Christ. Billy Graham was afraid that scandal might damage his ministry, so he made it a rule that he would never be alone with a woman who was not his wife – the Billy Graham Rule. The women who supported his ministry and the women who came to him for help – he would not talk to them unless there was someone else present. Many men in Christian ministry have followed his example in the years since then. It is hard not to avoid the conclusion that women are not as important to them as their reputations.
Not so with Jesus.
In the middle of nowhere, alone with a woman, Jesus asks for a drink of water. Because he is thirsty, and because she is thirsty.
He says to her in effect, “You think it’s strange that I asked you for a drink? If you knew who I was, you would be asking me for a drink and I would give you living water.”
This woman knows what it is to be thirsty. Her physical thirst demands that she come to the well every day to collect water. But Jesus identifies a thirst that is more than just physical.
He asks her to get her husband and she says she has no husband. This would have made her life difficult. This was a subsistence culture and for everyone but the top 5% life was very labour intensive. It was extremely difficult for anyone on their own to manage all the tasks required to just barely get by.
Being an adult woman without a husband would also have made her an object of pity at best and scorn at worst. Women achieved status in this culture by marrying well and producing sons. This woman has failed in the eyes of such a society. This may be why she is collecting water on her own. For most women, going to the well was a social activity – a chance to enjoy some female companionship. They would do this in the early morning or late evening to avoid the heat of midday. But she is there, alone, at noon.
John’s brilliant story-telling turns her shame around by comparing her with Nicodemus from the previous chapter. He came to Jesus by night, whereas she meets him in the full light of day. He is a person of darkness who will, over the course of the Gospel, eventually come to the light. This woman is a person of the light from the start.
But it turns out that she has been married. She has had five husbands. Does that make her some sort of femme fatale? She is sometimes seen that way by people who don’t bother to look into the realities of life in her time and place.
Marriages ended then, as they do now, in either death or divorce, but divorces were much harder for women to initiate than for men. There are some records of women divorcing their husbands, but these were very wealthy women.
If this woman had been wealthy she would have had a slave or servant to collect water for her. She is very unlikely to have been in a position to initiate a divorce – let alone five.
So, she has been married five times and has had five husbands leave her: either by dying or by divorcing her. We can imagine the grief she had experienced; the disappointment, the anger, the injustice. This woman certainly knew what it meant to be deeply thirsty and to be constantly unsatisfied by what life presented her with.
The man she is with now is not her husband. It seems that she is living under the protection of, and presumably is in a sexual relationship with, a man she is not married to. In her culture this would have been a degrading and insecure position for a woman.
So, when Jesus speaks of giving her water to satisfy her thirst, it is clear that he is speaking with a woman who knows what it is to be thirsty. Life has taken so much from her, leaving her nothing but thirst:
Thirst for a world where women are not judged according to their relationship history.
Thirst for a world in which it is possible for a woman without a husband to manage her own life.
Thirst for a world where male religious leaders treat women as intellectual and spiritual equals – rather than as dangerous temptresses.
Simply by entering that conversation in that place, Jesus gave her reason to believe that he carried the living water that would meet that very thirst.
And so, she asks him about the worship practices that have kept their peoples divided.
For centuries, the Samaritans, as a people, had also been abused and abandoned again and again by a succession of superpowers. And the people of Judea and Galilee, who had fared only slightly better in the history of conquest and abandonment, looked down on the Samaritans as unclean and impure.
This woman is, therefore, an appropriate representative of her people because her life has followed a similar trajectory to that of her people. This conversation could be seen as a meeting of envoys to negotiate peace between the two people groups.
And that’s where we need to think again about the significance of a well as the place of meeting. In the book of Genesis, Rebecca and Rachel were found at wells and recognised as suitable wives for the son and grandson of Abraham. For some reason, in the age of the patriarchs, wells were the place to be to find a marriage partner.
So here Jesus is at a well wooing this woman – not to form an ordinary marriage but to form a spiritual family between his people and hers.
This woman, representing her rejected people, is called by Jesus to be an evangelist to her people – to be the symbolic bride in the symbolic marriage that Jesus is seeking with the Samaritans.
She is an evangelist, and she is a herald of healing.
Many of the prophets had spoken of the healing of the old breach between Judea and Israel, between the Southern and Northern kingdoms. Ezekiel 37:22, for example, says that one king shall rule over them all again, which hadn’t happened since Solomon.
Jesus calls this woman to be the emissary of peace and healing. When her people proclaim him Saviour of the World, they are giving him a title used of Roman emperors. Remnant representatives of the tattered and traumatised Northern Kingdom have acknowledged Jesus as King. Now we just need Judea to do the same and the prophesy will be fulfilled. One king will rule over them. That will happen at the cross, in Jesus’ day of humiliation and coronation, when the sign above his head will read “King of the Jews”.
The woman is not given a name. In that she is in good and honourable company in John’s Gospel. The disciple who Jesus loved, the assumed author of the Gospel, is not given a name. The mother of Jesus is not given a name, though her role is central.
By choosing not to name important characters, John invites readers to stand in their place and ask, Am I the woman at the well? Are you?
Are you a reject from a reject people? Have you been abandoned and bereaved? Have you been exploited for your vulnerability? Meet Jesus at the well. Ask him for living water. Then hear him tell you that You are called. You are chosen.
Then take news of Jesus to all your fellow rejects. Proclaim the healing of all those ancient feuds that have made enemies out of sisters and brothers:
· Feuds between people groups
· Feuds between nations
· Feuds between men and women, between straight and gay and trans.
· Feuds between evangelicals, progressives and Anglo-Catholics.
Let everyone know that we are all invited to the wedding banquet of God’s Son. And there will be more than enough to drink!
Amen.
With Love from Rev Margaret