March 30, 2021 John 4: 7-9
6Jacob’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’. 8(His disciples had gone to the city to buy
food.) 9The 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.) 10Jesus 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.’ 11The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no
bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who
gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’ 13Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this
water will be thirsty again, 14but 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.’ 15The 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.’
It
was about noon. In the heat of the day,
a Samaritan woman is coming out to draw water.
Why would she come out at this time of day? Because she was not coming out when the usual
‘water drawing’ time was going on, in the early morning-before the heat of the
day. Why not? From the details that unfold, the assumption
is that she is not a “respectable woman” and is judged harshly by the rest of
the female population of Sychar.
Fetching
the water, that is a chore that falls to the women of that time. It is not like us, who can turn on a tap. The water they want for the day, they have to
get from the well and haul home. It is a
communal time and one where this woman-unnamed-is assumed to be unwelcome to
join. So what does Jesus do? He breaks not only the protocols of ‘shaming’
that brings this woman out at this time of day, but he breaks the protocols of ‘proper
behavior’
All
he did was ask for a drink of water.
And SHE
challenges him. What are you doing, a Jew,
asking me, a woman of Samaria, for a drink of water? It is a double barrel breach of protocol,
religious and gender based. Jews and
Samaritans do not mix (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans-the
sidenote) and because of the misogyny of the era, unaccompanied women, especially
strangers, were not addressed. There was
not a single disciple around, all dispatched into the “Samaritan” market to buy
food.
I have
taken pains to set up why, in fact, Jesus should NOT be speaking to this woman,
and yet he does so anyway. One of the
reasons I do this is because I think this story continues to track with the transition
from the last. Jesus was challenged for
overtaking John in the ‘making believers’ category. So what does he do? Jesus withdraws from the ‘field of baptism’,
up into Samaria, and settles in to speak to this woman (ticks me off they did
not bother with her name), when, if such a conversation was witnessed by the
people his disciples had just been baptizing, they would have dumped Jesus like
a rock.
This
is NOT how Jewish men are supposed to behave.
Samaritans are ‘heretics’, and, as we will see, setting himself up with
a woman ‘of ill repute’, in the backward attitudes of the time, would ‘taint’
Jesus as well.
This
is the overlay of the gospel of John, comparing and contrasting the Plan of God
as it is fulfilled in Jesus. John may be
decreasing so that Jesus may increase, but Jesus is NOT going to kick him to
the curb. Instead, Jesus will take the
message to places that any ‘good Jew’ would not go. She was surprised that Jesus addressed
her? The Jewish leadership back on the
Jordan would have been livid at what he was doing.
Pastor Pete
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