Back To The Well: Woman At The Well

"Back To The Well: Woman At The Well"

John 4:4-42 Samaritan Woman in BACK TO THE WELL Series
July 18. 2010

But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near
the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and
Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan
woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had
gone to the city to buy food.) The 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.) Jesus 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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is
deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob,
who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her,
“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.” The 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.” Jesus
said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I
have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for
you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you
have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our
ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must
worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming
when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You
worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.
But 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. God is
spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to
him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will
proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
Just 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?”
Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people,
“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the
Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the
disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to
eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one
has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him
who sent me and to complete his work. Do 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. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life,
so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One
sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others
have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” Many Samaritans from that city
believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever
done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he
stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They 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.”

This week we are almost at the end of our series entitled “Back To The Well,” which
explores women’s powerful encounters with Jesus in the Gospels.   One more week to
go, but this week and the next week provide some of the most familiar stories we have
about Jesus, some of the most touching, and, oddly enough, powerfully enough, also
some of the most challenging that we’ll encounter in this series, probably because they
have to do with sex and sexuality, and the untangling of assumptions, which may or
may not be actually present in the texts before us. I’ll get to that issue later, in next
week’s sermon, but I wanted to begin this week’s sermon on Jesus’ encounter with the
woman at the well on a slightly different foot, a more contemporary foot that I am going
to tie in with the larger issues surrounding this important text, this transformative
encounter that Jesus has with a unnamed Samaritan woman.

I know people probably don’t remember something I shared in a sermon from last
December, but I’m going to ask those of you were here to recall my mention of the
situation in Uganda, the one involving a particularly draconian anti-gay bill that was
winding its way through the Parliament of that country. The bill called for the death
penalty for “aggravated homosexuality,” that is, it would, amidst other things, call for the
death of those who showed a consistent pattern of having homosexual sex. Obviously,
this caught the eye of many in this country, and certainly it terrified the lesbian and gay
community in Uganda, but one of the missing pieces concerning WHY this bill came
about is something that happened months earlier, and that was the infusion of America’
s culture war around homosexuality into the Ugandan ethos. If you’ve been following
the clash of viewpoints in this country over the acceptability or unacceptability of gay
and lesbian people, you know how nasty it has gotten over the past few years. Well,
since those who oppose the acceptance of gay and lesbian people are losing the battle
here in this country—you only have to look at the polling of younger people, almost all
who seemed stunned that it is such a big issue for older folks, and you can see where
the tide is going—since they have been losing here, the new strategy seems to go
spread their intolerant poison overseas, and Uganda seems ripe for the picking.

In 2009, an anti-gay conference was held in Uganda, and most of the speakers were
some of the virulently homophobic cultural warriors from this country, folks, ironically
enough, that are even on the fringes of this country’s homophobic cultural warriors.
People like Scott Lively, who argues that Nazism and homosexuality are closely linked—
that the rise of Nazism is to be laid at the feet of gay people—an argument that has
been laughed at by real scholars, and incredibly ironic, considering that at least 10,000
gay men were killed in the Nazi death camps, along with all the “social undesirables”
that became the obsession of the Nazis—the Gypsies, the Jews, the mentally ill, on and
on. As a probable result of this conference in Uganda, the bill around homosexuality
was introduced by a Parliament member who attended the conference. And so the
world-wide criticism started coming against Uganda and this bill, from the places you
would expect it, from Europe and the United States, including governments of those
countries.

What was interesting was the response of the Ugandan pastors and religious leaders
who had put on the conference—and this is really the focus of this whole excurses—
who said that to criticize this approach their approach to homosexuality in their country
was yet another form of colonialism, yet another manifestation of European arrogance
and yet another attempt by former colonialists to dictate how Ugandans should handle
what they saw as a problem in their own country. It was an incredibly ironic rebuke,
because it had been theological liberals, those who usually support gay and lesbian
equality and acceptance, that have often offered that critique of the missionary impulse
in European and American Christianity. We were the ones who pointed out that
missionaries and colonialists often walked into countries hand in hand, each preparing
the other for their work—give them the white man’s religion and they will succumb to the
white man’s control, a formula that seemed to work for Europeans for a long time,
though it often devastated the native cultures of those they came to colonize and
convert.   Of course, the other irony is that the conservative evangelicals who many of
these Ugandan Christians are now embracing were often the ones doing the work of
Christian conversion at the end of a gun barrel and a bulldozer, and who even now see
their work as converting all to Christianity, one way or another.

You know me by now, and you know that this whole issue started me thinking, this back
and forth about the Ugandan anti-gay death bill, had me thinking about the often sad
legacy of Christian missions, especially missions that were focused on the conversion
of people from their native religion to another, and the unintended consequences of
that work. For Uganda, who never had a particularly virulent hatred of gay people in its
past, the introduction of Christianity was the beginning of a nightmare for lesbian and
gay people in that country, some of which is only now being grasped. But that issue
and this example is just one small example of how the missional impulse has been such
mixed bag for us Christians, this desire on our part to tell the good news of Jesus
Christ, because of what it has wrought on the lives of those non-Christians we sought
to convert. You just have to ask Native People in this country about how our impulse to
convert them to Christ has caused unintended wreckage on their culture and their
traditions. So often that desire to share the good news we’ve experienced has been
wrapped up in American and European triumphalism, this belief that our culture is best,
our religion is superior, and our way of life should be practiced by all, something, again,
ironically enough, those Ugandan anti-gay activists were tapping into when they
complained that we Westerners shouldn’t tell them not to execute and murder gay and
lesbian people just for being who they are. The irony of this, and the history of
Christianity, has haunted me lately, and brought to fore a question something that the
writer Christopher Hitchens gets to in the title in his anti-religion book, God is Not Great:
How Religion Poisons Everything and that question is this: does religion, and for me
Christianity especially, really poison everything it touches? I have certainly seen it
dumb down the brightest of people, and make cruel and intolerant those who were not
naturally so, at least not before they became Christians, something that has always
saddened me, that what has melted my heart, this journey with the Christ, has so often
done the opposite to many, somehow hardening their hearts and minds, making them
less compassionate, and more judgmental of others.

Now, obviously, there is right and wrong in this world, and I think this is clearly a wrong
thing, this execution of gay people, and it doesn’t matter whether it comes from a
European to an African or an African to a European. Still, my point in giving you the
background of this horrible series of events today is meant to show us how complicated
these sorts of issues are, all of which come up when we go into foreign lands, and
share our faith with others, and we add in our cultural assumptions, some of which are
not actually in our faith, though, of course, some of those assumptions are there as
well. Jesus, in this text, does something that echoes some of which has bothered me
and other Christians—he goes into a foreign land, to Samaria, those people
considered the enemy of Jewish people, and he shares with this woman his truth about
being the Savior of the world. It is the first Christian missionary trip, a trip to a foreign
land, and it is as fraught with challenges and ambiguities as anything you would have
found in Christians missions in the last two thousand years.

First of all, Jesus enters into a foreign land and he clearly has a point of view that
conflicts with the Samaritan understanding of God—you can see that in the back and
forth between Jesus and the woman about the proper place of worship, which was a
real point of difference between Jews and Samaritans, who were in many ways
theological cousins. The real main differences were around this disagreement on the
proper place to worship God, and the fact that Samaritans had intermarried with non-
Jews hundreds of years earlier. Now, Jesus crosses that boundary between us and
them, something he seems to be always doing, as evidenced in the story of the Good
Samaritan we touched on in last week’s sermon. He certainly could have avoided
Samaria, as most Jews did, but the writer of John has him going right through the place,
perhaps wanting to use the event as a way of touching on the issues that were dividing
the writer’s own community in the late 90’s, many years after Jesus’ own death and
resurrection. And Jesus crosses another boundary in this text, the one between men
and women, because he is speaking to her without the presence of a male relative and
he is speaking to her alone. Again, these are things that all of us probably value, these
border crossings in our culture, but consider for a second how they could be used to
justify Christian missionary activity: perhaps it is OK to ignore the religion of another,
the cultural practices of another, the beliefs of another, since Jesus seems to be doing
that here.

Musa W. Dube, an African scholar from the country of Botswana, has said that this text
is a perfect example of imperial domination, since “the story authorizes the Christian
disciples/readers/believers to travel, to enter, to educate, and to harvest other foreign
lands for the Christians nations in a literary fashion that is openly modeled on
imperialist values.” To illustrate this point, she observes that “imperialism as an
ideology of expansion involves superior travelers who represent the superiority of their
origin…and that it expounds an ideology of inferior knowledge and invalid religious faith
of those who must be colonized.” (Gench 131) I know that this is probably a bit of a
head spin, but I do think it’s important enough to mention, and, frankly, when you see it
in practice, it’s a horrible thing.

For example, many of you remember the story I told in 2008 about a trip to a church
Douglas and I went to worship at on one Sunday morning, in Evanston, Illinois, which
we quietly and respectfully walked out of, but I didn’t mentioned why I felt so absolutely
turned off by it, why I couldn’t stand to be there any longer. At that worship service, the
church was sending off two young people to be missionaries, and this young couple
were doing the children’s moment, the object lesson for the kids, and they used a jar
filled with white rice, with a few pieces of colored rice in the mix, to explain that the
country they were going to only had a few Christians in it, and they were going to
convert more people from white rice to colored rice, I suppose. Of course, that country
was Japan, and, ironically enough, the Christian church has been there since the 16th
century, though we have had very little success in converting the Japanese since only
one 1% of the population is Christian. Unlike Jesus with this Samaritan woman in this
story, we haven’t been very good at convincing 99% of the Japanese for four hundred
years that Jesus is the Savior the world.

This, of course, brings up the difference between an imperialist approach to missions,
and, I think, a genuinely Christian way of sharing the good news of Jesus Christ. What’
s so interesting about this story is how Jesus shares with this woman, and the fact that
he does something very different than what has been typically the way we Christians
have approached others with the Good News. Jesus actually engages this woman in
dialogue, he listens and is listened to; she listens and is listened to. This is not a one
way conversation, and, unlike the other moments in the Gospel of John, where Jesus’
encounters with others are usually no more than a set up for a long monologue he is
about to give, this conversation between him and this woman is an actual, real, give
and take dialogue between human beings. Jesus crosses the boundaries of gender
and culture and religion, not so that he can deliver her the truth from on high—in fact,
he himself is that truth, as is often the case in the Gospel of John—no, he crosses
those boundaries to talk with her, respectfully, and he engages her views, not
dismissively, not with a “I’ve got the truth and you don’t attitude” but as a strangely
equal partner, something you see rarely in the history of Christian missions. We must
not forget that this, in fact, the only true dialogue, the only back and forth that Jesus
ever has in the Gospel of John, and that dialogue takes place with a woman and a
foreign woman, and a woman of a different religion, at that. And she is more than up to
the task, she knows what divides and unites Jews and Samaritans, she knows what
might separate them and end the conversation, and she knows something good when
she stumbles upon it. In response, of course, she becomes a missionary, a teller of
good news herself, and she does it the way it should be done, as Fred Craddock, who
taught in my seminary many years ago, points in his commentary on her response:

Her witness…is invitational (come and see), not judgmental; it is within the range
permitted by her experience; it is honest with its own uncertainty; it is for everyone who
will hear. How refreshing. Her witness avoids triumphalism, hawking someone else’s
conclusions, packaged answers to unasked questions, thinly veiled ultimatums and
threats of hell, and assumptions of certainty on theological matters. She does convey,
however, her willingness to let her hearers arrive at their own affirmations about Jesus,
and they do: “This is indeed the Savior of the world.” (Gench 129).

Again, I think it says something that this encounter was with a foreign woman of a
different religion, a moment that transgressed three different boundaries: gender and
nationality and religion. And it says something that this first missionary trip by Jesus
produced the first missionary, the first real missionary, who was a woman, who
exemplified what it means to share the truth of your experience in a way that is
respectful of others, in way that simply tells the story of one’s truth, and yet still
respects the experience of others, knowing that truth is always something that is
experienced. The path forward in missions, not only “over there” but right down the
street here in North Berrien County, is not with a spirit of boldness but humility, knowing
that we know what we know and we really don’t know what we don’t know, and that all
we can do is to share what has happened to us when following after the way of the
Christ. That doesn’t mean that we can’t speak out about practices that are clearly
wrong—for example, in some cultures, female circumcision is crouched in the context
of culture and religion, but no one can humanly condone the mutilation of women’s
bodies and sexuality. Nor can we condone the slaughter of lesbian and gay people,
even if it had actually been rooted in ancient Ugandan culture and religion, instead of
a Christian import by American cultural warriors.   However, those moments are the
exceptions, the prophetic exceptions, the important exceptions, because most of the
time we ought to do more listening than talking when we share the good news of God’s
love—we ought to do more of what this first missionary did, this first bearer of the good
news did, this Samaritan woman did, and that was to be with each other, to listen and
talk with each other, knowing that conversion and the changing of minds and hearts, is
something that, well, in the end, really is God’s work, and, in the end, not our work.
Amen.