The gospels for this week and last offer stark contrasts. Last week, a male, Nicodemus, part of the Jewish power elite, approached Jesus in the darkness of night. 

This week’s gospel, (John 4:5-42) features an adulterous Samaritan woman, a virtual outcast from her own community, and it takes place at mid-day. The contrasts provide a lesson. 

This morning’s gospel opens, 

(Jesus) 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 from 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, asks for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

By speaking to the Samaritan woman Jesus violated two codes of behavior. First, Samaritans understood that Moses had ordered them to protect Mount Gerizim as a sacred mountain and worship there (Deut 11:29 and Deut 27:12), but Jews focused on Jerusalem. She referred to that when she said, in surprise, a few verses later, Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. Samaritans believed that they represented the true religion of the ancient Israelites and regard Judaism as a closely related but altered religion and there was constant cultural strife between the two groups. Nonetheless, Jesus asked her for water.

The second code violation was that a single man and an unrelated single woman, being alone together, was considered fraught with temptation of illicit relations. One gets the sense of this particular rule-breaking later when his disciples… were astonished that he was speaking with a woman…

An anthropological reading of the gospel further highlights how unusual Jesus’ encounter with this woman was. We learn from their dialogue that, 

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 speculation is that the woman came to the well at mid-day, rather than the morning, when others would have come to get water, because she was being shunned as a home-wrecker by others in the community. She came alone either to avoid harassment or because other women would not associate with her. (Women typically fetched the water.)

The lesson of these back-to-back gospels seems to be that Jesus came to engage, benefit and save everyone: the sophisticated, pious, Jewish leader, Nicodemus, and the adulterous Samaritan woman. 

Nor did he accept barriers to his mission to save everyone, which he articulated in last week’s gospel: God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn it, but that the world might be saved through him.(John 3:16-17)

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Despite the contrasts, there are also similar threads. Water plays a supporting role in both gospels. Jesus told Nicodemus that, ‘Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. In that gospel, Jesus equates water and the Spirit as the powers of rebirth.

This week’s gospel takes place at Jacob’s well, which tradition identified it as the site where Jacob pitched his tent. There he set up an altar and called it El Elohe, Israel. (Gen 33:19-20) The well was revered as a gift from God, as well as a source of daily water. The Samaritan woman articulated this tradition when she asked Jesus, 

Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well …?’  

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…?’

Jesus 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.’ 

Jesus used the life-giving reality of water as a metaphor for something immensely greater, gushing up to eternal life. (The Greek, eis ton aiona, that is translated as eternal life, is closer in meaning to ‘a fullness of life, beginning now’, emphasizing the immediate nature of the gift, rather than the future.)

Jesus’ referred to water in a mystical way as sustaining never-ending life. He sacramentalized it. While water retains its physical properties it is also instrumental in marking us ‘God’s own’ at baptism, for all time. In this sense, those who ‘drink’ the water … will never be thirsty.

Simultaneously, we need water virtually every day. We should repeatedly ‘drink in’ Jesus. We mix water with wine at the Eucharist and it becomes spiritually sustaining when it is consecrated. All forms of Christian spirituality urge us to turn to Jesus repeatedly for grace and instruction. As with water in our daily lives, the soul must also be constantly replenished.  

Water is both a natural gift of God and sacramental. It is instrumental in being born again to eternal life, yet a daily necessity for sustaining natural life and spiritual life.  

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A second thread running through both last week’s and this week’s gospels is that people misunderstand Jesus or don’t know what to make of him. Nicodemus could not get his mind around the idea of being reborn. This week, the Samaritan woman hears Jesus’ words as indicating that she would not have to come and haul water each day, 

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.’

Even his disciples were puzzled and confused when they found him speaking to a Samaritan woman. They would later reject the idea that he would be killed…and raised. (Matt 16:21-23). 

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The gospel continues (vs 28-41) with the woman calling other townspeople to meet Jesus and they say, we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.

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  • Was Jesus’ was so alien or transcendent in his view that people couldn’t grasp him, or did he, intentionally, speak in riddles so that people would reflect on his words? He must have known that he would confuse the woman (as he did Nicodemus). Did he use living water which permits one to never thirst, as a way of engaging her about his true meaning? If you had been an interlocutor for the discussion how would you have explained Jesus’ references to the woman? 
  • Is the fact that water appears throughout the early chapters of John’s gospel (baptism in the Jordan river (John 1), changing water into wine (John 2), telling Nicodemus that one must be born of water and the Spirit (John 3)) incidental… or does it carry a deeper significance? Does it symbolize an essential ingredient of life? Is it ‘sacred’ in some way? Does it hint at how we should regard water as a gift, as Jacob purportedly did, or is it only a collateral fact? 
  • Jews would have seen the Samaritan woman as alien and an adulterer. Yet Jesus spoke openly to her. Do we know ‘alien-adulterers’ to whom Jesus’ would speak? What would he say to them? 

Peace
Michael