Sermon preached at St. Alban's, Spirit Lake, on February 24, 2008
(Third Sunday in Lent, Year A, BCP Lectionary)
by the Rev. Carl D. Mann

Texts:   Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 95 or 95:6-11
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-26(27-38)39-42

What a contrast from last week! No, not the weather but rather the Gospel. Last week we had Nicodemus; a male, Jewish Pharisee, who comes to talk with Jesus in the middle of the night. He recognizes that Jesus comes from God but in the end we don’t know how he responded to their conversation.

This week we have a female Samaritan who is possibly immoral and an idolater who comes and talks with Jesus at the peak of the day. She recognizes that Jesus is Jewish, a prophet, and possibly the Messiah, and in turn she becomes an effective witness.

Today Jesus and his disciples are on their way back to Galilee from Jerusalem. Now normally, they would have taken the long road back in order to avoid Samaria. They would have gone east and crossed the Jordon, traveling north, and then crossing back over after they had gone by Samaria. But in the verse before today’s Gospel, we are told Jesus had to go to go through Samaria. Since there was an alternative route then we can deduce that he had to go through Samaria because it was God’s will for him to go that way in order to accomplish some particular task.

So why did the Jews and the Samaritans not get along? Please forgive me a short history, which is very important to the story. The land of Israel in Jesus’ day was divided into three areas; Galilee to the north, Judea to the south and Samaria in the middle. Long before, Samaria and Galilee were part of the northern kingdom called Israel, and Judea was the southern kingdom. In 720 B.C. when the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, and had transported most of the people out of the area, "The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath, and Sepharvaim, and placed them in the cities of Samaria in place of the people of Israel; they took possession of Samaria, and settled in its cities." (2 Kings 17:24) The people who had not been transported away eventually intermarried with these foreigners, which in Judaism was an unforgivable crime because of the loss of racial purity. By intermarrying, they lost their identity as Jews. We are also told that, "every nation still made gods of its own and put them in the shrines of the high places that the people of Samaria had made, every nation in the cities they lived". (2 Kings 17:29) Consequently, the Samaritans began to worship the idols of the occupying people.

122 (598 B.C.) years later, Judea was conquered by Nebuchadnezzer, and the cream of the crop of the population were hauled off to Babylon. However, they did not intermarry and remained “stubbornly and unalterably Jewish.”

When the king of Persia conquered Babylon 60 years later (538 B.C.), he allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple which had been destroyed. When they arrived back in Jerusalem, the Samaritans came and offered to help with the rebuilding but they were told in no uncertain terms that they were not needed because they had forfeited their heritage and therefore had no right to help. About 488 B.C., a renegade Jew named Manassah married a Samaritan woman and proceeded to build a temple on Mt. Gerizim as a rival place of worship to Jerusalem, which really irritated the Jews. In 129 B.C., the Jews destroyed the temple on Mt. Gerizim. Additionally, the Samaritans only believed in the first five books of the Hebrew Scripture. So as you can see, there was no love-loss between the Jews and the Samaritans, which makes this Gospel passage all the more interesting.

Meanwhile, back at the well, Jesus has been having a discussion with this woman. Here we find some more interesting details. First, it wasn’t proper for a man to be speaking with a woman in public. Second, she was a Samaritan woman, and they were to have nothing to with Samaritans at all. Third, she was at the well at the hottest time of the day. Normally, women fetched water in the cool of the morning or the evening. So this leads us to believe that she was there at that time in order to avoid the other women, which tells us that she was doing something in her life that made their tongues wag causing her to be shunned. After a bit of conversation regarding the history of the well and water in general, Jesus tells her to go back to the city and return with her husband to which she replies that she has no husband. And here is the reason why she is at the well at noon. She has had five husbands and is currently living with a sixth man out of wedlock.

Now scripture doesn’t tell why this is so. And I incorrectly said at Bible study that it’s possible that it was due to the Levirate marriage laws where a woman marries the brother of her deceased husband in order to produce heirs for him. If this were true then there would have been no scandal with the other women. So chances are, she had been divorced or cast aside by five successive husbands for whatever reason and was now living with a man in sin. Regardless of the details, the fact remains that she was seen by her own people in the same light as the Samaritans were seen by the Jews.

And that’s the clue to this Gospel passage. Jesus, who had to relate this incident to his disciples later on since he was alone during this conversation, uses the raw and scandalous details of a woman’s life to illustrate a similar situation on a larger scale; how the Jews treated the Samaritans. And the solution is that Jesus came to save Jews, Samaritans, and Gentile alike.

Let’s go back a bit in the story. The five husbands can be seen symbolically as the people from the five foreign countries that Assyria placed in Samaria. Her relationship with her husbands was not unlike the Samaritans’ relationship with the gods of these foreign people; lacking substance and unfulfilling, and when the gritty realities of life hit, there were no answers and suddenly they realize that instead of worshipping God, they have only been worshipping dumb idols. Because these foreign idols had no emotional or spiritual impact on their lives, and had eroded any trust they might have had in supernatural beings, they were a little skitterish about embracing another god, even the true God. And when the True God was reintroduced, they created imitations of true worship by building another temple on a different mountain, sort of playing religion, just as the woman wouldn’t marry the man she was currently living with because she had no faith in marriage, and was therefore playing house.

But look at Jesus’ response to her and to the Samaritans. He did not pass judgment but opened his embracing arms of salvation to her and to them. Instead of continuing to wallow in stale and stagnant water that had pooled in a well, he offered forgiveness and purity from living water from a constant, running stream. Instead of continuing to pay homage to dumb, lifeless gods, he offered a transformed life in a relationship with the living God, the complete source upon whom they are dependent, and the intended focus of their worship. He had already sent his disciples into a Samaritan town in search of food. And now he was sending a fallen Samaritan soul into town to invite others to come out and partake in God’s salvation plan.

This Gospel passage is very a propos to Lent. Lent is a time when we have an opportunity to walk away from everybody and everything and have a talk with Jesus. It is a time when we should reflect upon our lives and identify the idols that have caused us to lose focus upon Almighty God. It is a time in which we can crawl out of the hole that has been dug by our ancestors or ourselves to be forgiven and transformed in the living waters of our Lord, either by baptism or by the renewal of our baptismal vows. It is a time in which we can pick up our own cross, and follow Jesus’ example of obedience to God the Father. It is a time in which we can be reintroduced to our Creator, being renewed and rededicated to living our lives according to His will.

And when all of this has happened, then we should return to the world and invite everyone to come and discover for themselves what we have experienced.

Our thirst is quenched by the living waters of the Son; our appetites are sated by doing the will of the Father, and our lives have a purpose by the power of the Holy Spirit as we gather in the harvest of mission.

Gloria Patri