For a Time Like This: Jacob's Well
A sermon by Jamie Howison on John 4:5-42
Tonight’s gospel story is marked by some very notable details. Jesus and his disciples are on the road, nearing a Samaritan city, and the disciples have gone into the city to buy food. “Jacob’s well was there,” John tells us, “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.’”
Pause. It was about noon, the sun at its highest point for the day, and here is this woman coming to draw water. This is not the time of day to get water; it is too hot. You go early in the morning or at the end of the day when the heat of the sun is off, but maybe she doesn’t want to go to the well at the same time as the other women. She has lived a complicated domestic life, we will soon be told, having had five husbands and now living with a sixth man to whom she’s not married. It is a life not likely to curry the favour of your neighbours, perhaps some of whom had lost a husband to you at some point along the way.
She arrives and Jesus asks for a drink of water, to which she responds, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” He’s transgressing social conventions, you see, first in speaking to a woman, secondly in speaking to a Samaritan, and third in asking for water from what would have been a ritually unclean drinking vessel for a Jew. As is so often the case in the gospels, Jesus doesn’t seem particularly troubled by such conventions, as again and again we see him relating to people who have been deemed the “other,” the unclean, the outsider by his cultural world.
And then off they go, this woman whom Reynolds Price characterizes as a “likably feisty reprobate” engaged with Jesus in a back and forth conversation, in which he plays with the imagery of water, speaks to her of worshipping God “in spirit and truth,” and looks deep in to her hidden self and tells her he knows about her string of failed marriages. He knows her.
That knowing is something that is characteristic of John’s portrayal of Jesus. It first appears when he calls Nathanael to be his disciple—Nathanael, who had snarled “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”, but then quickly turned around when he realized that Jesus could really see him. The same is there in the reading we had last week about Nicodemus the Pharisee, who comes to see Jesus under the cover of darkness, and attempts to politely engage him in conversation by saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God…” Of such niceties Jesus will have no part, for he can see what Nicodemus is most in need of, namely to be “born again” or “born from above;” to have a whole new beginning in God through the power of the Spirit. It will happen again in different discussions with various people, even in the very courts of Pontius Pilate, as the high priests call for his execution.
Why is this so dominant a theme in the Gospel according to John? Each of the four gospel writers filters his account through his own memory or through the memories of those eyewitnesses from whom the story was first received. Each is telling what they know to be most important—most true—about Jesus, which is why it is so good to have four different voices to which to attend. John’s account is the last of them to be written, with the final version we now have in our bibles dating to as late as the year 90, almost sixty years after Jesus’ ministry. John writes as an old man—an elder—and he writes with a long view of what Jesus has meant to him over those sixty years. He pulls on the threads that have spoken to him, shaped him and formed him, and one of those threads is very clearly that Jesus sees us and knows us. John’s long walk as a disciple—with Jesus in his earthly ministry, and then following Jesus in the resurrection light—has taught him the very thing that we so often pray in our liturgy: “to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hidden.” To know that is the beginning of freedom, and for John particularly, the end of all shame.
To again pick up on that teaching from Abba John the Little that I shared two Sundays ago, John the gospel writer knows that once seen by Jesus one needs always to pick up the light burden that is truthful self-criticism rather than trying to cling to the much heavier burden of self-justification.
Tell the truth about the shape your life. Tell it to your very heart and tell it to Jesus. That’s the path of life, as the Samaritan woman in this story discovered. And if we take seriously the contours of this story, we also need to see that such truth-telling is not then met with a list of Olympian moral requirements and legalistic directives. No. Again, from Reynolds Price:
What wins [the Samaritan woman’s] sudden unwarranted belief that Jesus is Messiah is his uncanny knowledge of her past. But when she calls her townsmen, and they prevail upon Jesus to stay for two days and explain himself further (an explanation we do not hear), they also accept his words. And with no further sign, these Samaritans, so long shunned by orthodox Jews, come to believe his one demand—“We trust since we’ve heard for ourselves that his man is truly the saviour of the world.” - Reynolds Price, “Three Gospels”
We tell our truth, we lay down that heavy burden of self-justification, we take up the lighter burden of being honest with ourselves, and we trust. In difficult days like the ones ahead, there may be nothing more crucial than that. Take good care of one another.