Psalm 95
Exodus 17:1-7
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42

It's a hot, dry day in Palestine. Jesus and the disciples have decided to walk north from Judea to Galilee. Think for a moment of Palestine as a big town, and if you're going to walk from the south end to the north end, you have to go through the middle, where the town is run down and the people are looked-down on. The part of town where some people advise you to make sure your car doors are locked and you keep your foot on the accelerator when you stop for a red light.

This place betwen Judea and Galilee is called Samaria, and there's bad blood, literally, between Samaria and the rest of Palestine. 750 years before there had been two kingdoms, the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. In 722 BC the Assyrians under King Sargon II had conquered Israel and to make sure Israel never made trouble again, they deported more than half the people and brought in foreigners to fill the place that was left. The destruction of Israel must have been a terrible event, with conquering soldiers killing the men, raping the women, burning the cities, taking away into slavery many of those who were left, and bringing in foreigners to fill the empty space. And when the soldiers had gone and some semblance of normal life re-emerged, the people who filled the land were Samaritans. Samaritans still held on to their traditional Scriptures, the first 5 books of the Bible. Samaritans kept up the ancient traditions of Israel including the well that Jacob had first dug. And Samaritans were despised and hated by the people of Judah and Galilee -- because out of that experience 750 years before they were of mixed race.

Can you imagine hanging on to bigotry for 750 years? For us, 750 years ago would be the year 1250. That was about the time of King John and the Magna Carta, the Spanish Inquisition, theMongols invading Poland and Hungary, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo in China, and the Mali Empire in Africa. And where were your ancestors or mine 750 years ago? Well, as an exercise in mathematics, figure 4 generations to a century, that's about 28 generations ago, and let's see, one of you, two of your parents, four of your grandparents, eight of your great grandparents, it keeps doubling each generation for about 28 generations, in 1250 you had 134,217,728 great great great whatevers, and that is approximately the population of the whole world at that time. Now, can you imagine turning to the person on your right or your left and saying, "you know, I don't like what happened to your ancestors 750 years ago, and I'm going to look down on you because of it." Well, it doesn't make sense to me and I don't think it does to you, but it seemed to make perfect sense to the Jews and Samaritans at the time Jesus lived.

In 30 AD, Jews hate Samaritans and the Samaritans hate them back. When Jews travel from Galilee in the north, to Judea in the South, on a pilgrimage to a festival, they keep close to their group. If you're Jewish, you don't want to be alone in Samaria. Stragglers have been attacked in this part of town.

Jesus sends the disciples off to the convenience store to find some lunch and sits down, alone, in the middle of Samaria. Does this man not value his life? Is he just too tired to join the others who have gone off to find food? Perhaps Jesus really does have the future all planned out and the script doesn't call for him to die until Calvary so he can be foolhardy in between. All we know is if he had asked us, we would have told him, "this is not a good place for someone of your kind to be sitting, alone."

It's noon time and the sun is terribly hot. Before too long, a Samaritan woman shows up to get water. Jesus asks her for a drink.

Immediately we discover the first thing about this woman. She is not the shy, retiring, subservient woman much admired in traditional cultures.

"Can't you see this fountain says 'colored'? ", she asks. "You white folks slap your signs all over YOUR fountains and then you think you can just walk up to a fountain that says colored on it and get a drink? What's got into you? What are you doing in our part of town anyway? Haven't you got better places to be?"

Well, John didn't write it quite like that. What John wrote was "How is that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria." But have I changed the meaning that much?

Jesus is on the spot. It's not customary for a man to be challenged by a woman or for a Jew to be challenged by a Samaritan, and this woman has done both. And the bigotries of ages are normally observed in silence and not talked about, but this woman has put it right out on the table where you have to deal with it.

How to respond to the Samaritan woman? A human impulse might be to say, "How dare you talk to me like that, you disgusting creature!" But Jesus doesn't choose that course. Another human impulse might be to get drawn in to the issues the woman presents, justifying or explaining or even apologizing for the bad feelings between Samaritans and Jews. Perhaps Jesus sensed that doing that would simply feed her anger. At any rate, Jesus doesn't choose that course either.

There's a humorous saying that when you're up to your neck in alligators, it's hard to remember that you came to drain the swamp. Jesus at this moment is up to his neck in alligators and he stays focused on what he came to do. He is on this earth to extend the reach of the Kingdom of Heaven, to make a difference in the lives of the human beings he encountes. He shifts the conversation to "living water", which literally means spring water which is constantly replenished, as opposed to well water.

The Samaritan woman continues to argue. Living water? How can you give me living water,you have no bucket and the well is deep. Besides, do you think your Jewish living water is superior to our well water that Jacob gave us so long ago?

Jesus continues to avoid talking race and continues talking about living water. If you drink of it, you will never be thirsty. It will become like a spring inside you. It will gush up to eternal life.

Finally, the Samaritan woman decides she wants this living water. She doesn't understand it, imagining it will exempt her from these hot, midday trips to the well. "Sir, give me this water," she tells Jesus.

At this moment, we have a transition. The woman is moving from being an argumentative stranger to making a serious inquiry. In a traditional culture, a serious discussion with a woman means that the woman's husband or father or son must become involved. So Jesus says, "Go, call your husband and come back." But the woman responds, "I have no husband."

Jesus then gives the well known answer: 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."

How did Jesus know? Some would say it was by revelation; others that there was nothing secret about the woman's life and anyone he had met on the road might have mentioned her story to Jesus.

When I first approached this story, I approached it like somebody who knew something about it. I had heard the story of the woman at the well before. I knew that this woman had had several husbands and was currently "living in sin". So I started out with this picture of a fallen woman -- a bad but exciting creature -- sort of a sexual butterfly who has gone from man to man -- what fantasies that could create in a man's mind. Here this Samaritan woman might join all the women whose misdeeds have been the subject of what has recently been called Puritan pornography -- revelling in prurient details supposedly for the purpose of punishing the wicked, or redeeming the fallen. And so, how much Jesus himself, being human, must have enjoyed the chance to forgive such a woman!

But re-read this passage: there's nothing anywhere about Jesus forgiving the Samaritan woman. Here is a man whose ministry is bringing people closer to God, for whom forgiveness is a vital part of that ministry in a large number of cases, who is willing to stand in the place of God and speak forgiveness on behalf of God when that seems appropriate --and in this story he doesn't forgive. Either the woman is beyond forgiveness and he is just toying with her, which I don't think any of us would believe -- or else it doesn't occur to Jesus that this woman needs forgiveness, perhaps because she hasn't done anything that requires forgiveness.

The woman is astonished by Jesus' knowledge. She calls him a prophet and tries once more to shift the conversation to Samaritans vs. Jews, this time about how to worship. Jesus says neither the Samaritan Mr. Gerizim or the Jewish Jerusalem is the ultimate place of worship, for God is Spirit and those who worship God must worship God in spirit and in truth.

Then the disciples arrive and the woman leaves. She leaves with such excitement that the story tells us, having come to draw water, she leaves her water jar and goes back to the city to tell her fellow Samaritans, "come and see a man who told me everythign I have ever done. He cannot be the Messiah, can he?"

What made her so ecstatic, if not forgiveness? What made this angry, argumentative woman so happy? Most of us would have mixed feelings about someone who "told us everything we had ever done."

I think the many husbands themselves are the clue. Think of traditional cultures. How many of them allow a woman the opportunity to seek a divorce? If there's a divorce, it's because the man got tired of the woman, or her dowry ran out, or she didn't bear him a child, or because the children she did bear him were the wrong sex.

We have seen that this is an intelligent, assertive woman. Where is there a place for such a person in Palestine in 30 AD? With her brightness and disposition, had she been born a different sex, a different race, a different place, she might have been anything from a rabbi to a warrior. But she was a woman, and a Samaritan at that. So she remained at Sychar in Samaria, at the mercy of men who made her their wife and then, for whatever reason, perhaps even because of her intelligence and assertiveness, cast her out.

I think this Samaritan woman has lived a difficult life, and the divorces are proof not of sin but of suffering. This is not a woman with great sins or great secrets, but rather a great sadness. There is no evidence here that she lived a bad life; but rather a hard life.

I think she ran back to the city to tell everyone about this man Jesus because his words, far from words of accusation, were words of understanding.

I think she ran back because she had finally met someone who knew the pain that she had carried all through her life, someone who understood what it was that made her angry and argumentative.

I think she ran back to tell her town because in Jesus she had met the One who sent him, and therefore if Jesus understood, then God understood! She who had felt herself a prisoner in Sychar, bound by the chains of being a woman, bound by the chains of being a Samaritan--but if God understood, then she was free.

Jesus talked to the woman about bringing her living water. Are we who listen to the story today still waiting, saying, come on, Jesus, you talked about it, when are you going to show up with it? Could it possibly be that while we were distracted by arguments about Jews and Samaritans and missing husbands, while we weren't looking, Jesus gave the Samaritan woman something that quenched her thirst? Could it be that in the very act of telling her everything she ever did, in the very act of understanding on behalf of himself and God, he gave her that living water?