Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
February 27, 2005

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Jesus met the woman at the well. I suppose we all know the story, at least the part about him telling her about her five husbands and how she’s not married to the man she lives with now. It’s the stuff of folk songs, or at least a Peter Paul and Mary song that many of us know. It’s No. 53 in the little songbook in the pews. The story seems to capture the popular imagination. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because we empathize with the woman and what must have been her feelings when this prophetic stranger suddenly confronted her with her, by the standards of the time, checkered past. Maybe we’re all afraid we may be confronted with an account of everything we’ve done, of our own checkered pasts. Whatever the reason, the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well has become one of the better known of the long stories-long by Biblical standards at least-that characterize the Gospel of John.

At least parts of this story are well known, yet this is one of the great many Bible stories about Jesus that isn’t necessarily all that easy to understand. One of the fundamental meanings of this story probably isn’t apparent to most of us. It’s not that we’re dense. Rather, the meaning of the story isn’t apparent to us because we aren’t the first century, predominantly Jewish audience for which John originally told the story. No one had to explain the Jewish purity code to them. They knew it by heart. They recognized a story about the purity code without having to be told that the story was in fact about the purity code. We don’t, and that’s why we miss one of the most profound meanings of this story. So, for those of you who didn’t see it when you heard the story read, the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well is, among other things, a story about the Jewish purity code.

I’ve preached about the purity code here many times before, largely because understanding it and Jesus’ rejection of it is so important for understanding our stance as an Open and Affirming congregation. The Bible’s principal anti-homosexual texts-or the ones at least that are usually given an anti-homosexual meaning today-are in that purity code, which, as we’ll see, Jesus rejects in the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. First century Judaism, especially as represented by the Pharisees, was largely about the purity code. Following the faith meant obeying the purity code, most of which is found in the book of Leviticus. It means, among other things, avoiding all interaction with people who were unclean according to that code.

Under the purity code, Jesus should have had nothing to do with the Samaritan woman at the well. She was unclean; and, according to all the social and religious norms of his day, Jesus should have shunned her. She was unclean for several different reasons. First of all, she was a woman. A woman is not technically unclean per se under the purity code except during the time of her menstrual period. Still, under the cultural standards of the day, a man did not talk to a woman in public, unless perhaps the woman was his wife. Maybe that’s because there was no way to tell whether she was having her period, or maybe it was simply the patriarchy and misogyny of the day. In any event, Jesus had no business talking to a woman to whom he was not married in public.

Even worse, this particular woman was a Samaritan. Samaritans weren’t Jews, or at least the Jews didn’t consider them to be sufficiently Jewish. They claimed descent from Jacob, one of the Jewish patriarchs, as the story tells us. Their religion, however, wasn’t pure Judaism, and the Jews rejected it and the people who practiced it. Jews did not speak to Samaritans.

Even worse, she was by the standards of the time an adulteress, a sinner. Her multiple marriages could be lawful if she had been widowed that many times, but she probably wasn’t. In any event, she was living with a man to whom she was not married, and that made her completely unclean.

His religion and his culture told Jesus that he should have no contact whatsoever with this woman, but Jesus didn’t care. To him she wasn’t a sinful, unclean Samaritan woman. She was a person, a fellow human being, a child of God. That’s how he treated her, as a person entitled to be accorded the human dignity due to any child of God. Jesus knew that love transcends all the limitations that culture and religion are forever trying to put on it. He acted accordingly, and he calls us to act that way too.

In treating her simply as a child of God, Jesus did something miraculous for this woman; and one way to get at what Jesus did for her is to look at the interchange between them early in the story about living water. The woman didn’t expect Jesus to talk to her. She knew how a religious Jew as supposed to treat her, and she didn’t expect any better from this Jewish stranger. When Jesus nonetheless talked to her, she responded in surprise if not in actual shock: "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" Jesus’ response is unexpected and even enigmatic. In John, Jesus’ responses to questions are almost always unexpected and enigmatic. He said: "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." There’s a play on words here in the Greek that can’t be replicated in English. In Greek the same word can mean both living water and running water. In any event, the woman thought he meant running water, as shown by her response about Jesus having no bucket. She thought he was talking about actual water, H2O.

Jesus, however, quickly made it clear that that isn’t what he’s talking about. He said: "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but 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." Clearly Jesus’ living water is not H2O. It is the Spirit of God that gives eternal life, which by the way in John does not mean an afterlife in heaven when we die. It means the abundant, fully human life available to us here and now when we know God and live in the Spirit.

Now, the way John tells the story you get the idea that Jesus has not in fact given the Samaritan woman his living water. He says: "You would have asked, and he would have given you the living water." Grammatically, that says she didn’t ask and he didn’t give. The ironic thing about the story, however, is that Jesus actually did give the woman living water. He gave it to her in the very act of talking to her. He gave her living water in the very act of treating her with dignity as a child of God and not as someone unclean, someone beneath him, someone without worth. That seemingly simple act set the Samaritan woman on the road to eternal life.

Look at what she did in response. First, she found the courage to be honest with and about herself. When Jesus, somewhat disingenuously I must say, refers to her husband, she confesses that she has no husband. She was living with a man, and she could have pretended that they were married. She could have tried to live a lie. Jesus’ living water gave her the strength not to do it.

Beyond that, she found the self-confidence and the courage to go back to the village, tell what had happened, and call on the people to come to Jesus. She had no reason to expect that the people would listen to her. She surely was a sinner in their eyes. She, however, had been touched by Jesus’ living water. She had glimpsed the abundant life, the wholeness of life that he offers; and she had to tell the story. She told it with such confidence, indeed probably with such passion, that the people listened and followed her back to the well, to Jesus, the source of that water of eternal life.

Jesus treated the Samaritan woman at the well as a fully human, dignified, child of God, and he transformed her life. Note that that doesn’t mean that he condemned her or required her to change anything. He didn’t transform her life by giving her a list of rules she had to follow. He transformed her life simply by treating her with dignity, by accepting her just as she was as worthy and loved. Jesus did that for the Samaritan woman, and he can do it for us too. At the beginning of this sermon I said something about our checkered pasts. We’ve all got them in one way or another. There’s something about all of us-I sure know there is about me-that falls short of the glory of God, as Paul puts it. Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus offers each one of us his living water that gushes up for eternal life. The Samaritan woman didn’t have to change to receive it, and neither do we. God loves each and every one of us just as we are. Once we finally grasp that truly unbelievable truth, we may be moved to change some things in our lives, the things that truly need transformation. I trust that we will be; but our transformation comes as a result of God’s free gift of grace in Jesus Christ, not as a precondition to it. That’s how it was with Jesus and the woman at the well, and it is how it is with God and us.

Jesus gave the woman at the well living water simply by treating her with consideration, by affording her the dignity due to all God’s children. We can do the same thing for those whom our culture and indeed most forms of our religion say are unworthy. Who are the Samaritan women of our time and place? It’s a long list. The homeless, the mentally ill, sexual minorities, illegal immigrants (and for some of our people today even legal ones), prisoners and ex-convicts, etc. etc. Jesus shows us how to treat them. We are to treat them the way he treated the Samaritan woman at the well, not by condemning them, blaming them, requiring them to change, but by accepting them as equals, as fellow children of God. We can transform their lives in that simple act the way Jesus transformed the life of the Samaritan woman. And when we do, we’ll transform our own lives too. We will transform ourselves into more faithful disciples of the one who gives all of God’s people the living water of eternal life. Amen.