Scripture text: Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42
There’s an old saying in theatre and creative writing: Show, don’t tell. It’s a nice summary of a simple truth: story is more effective when you see the action as opposed to just hearing about it second-hand. This applies not just to the narratives we see on stage and screen, but also to real life. It’s one thing to say you love someone, but quite another to show them how much. It’s one thing to hear about a tragic event, but quite another to watch unfold on your TV in front of you. The latter always has more impact, more power. It’s more real to us.
Jesus, it seems, understands this as well as any quality scriptwriter in Hollywood. We heard last Sunday through him of God’s unlimited and constant love for the “kosmos” in his explanations to Nicodemus. We saw how this conversation Jesus has in John 3 is tied into the width and breadth of the Scriptures, Old Testament and New, showing that this is not some new idea of God’s, but rather the culmination of a plan he’s been working on since the beginning of human history.
But it’s one thing for Jesus to say he’s come to save the whole world. It’s another thing entirely to see it in action, but that is what happens in our Gospel lesson today. Jesus granting a tremendous gift on one of the least likely individuals you can imagine.
This is another remarkable text from the Gospel of John, and I want to break it down a bit to show you just how truly remarkable it is. It begins, as these tales often do, innocently enough. Jesus is traveling from Point A to Point B and makes a stop in a Samaritan village. Jesus does a lot of travel and Samaria is kind of the border-country between his two favorite destinations, his home villages around the Sea of Galilee (Nazareth, Capernaum, and their like) and the holy city of Jerusalem in the south. So Jesus is in Samaria a lot as he moves back and forth between these two destinations. It’s a bit like, for me growing up, La Vale, MD. We would always stop at La Vale for lunch when we were traveling from Charleston to my grandparents outside Philadelphia.
While Jesus is in this border town, he runs into...oh, how do we put this politely? The town wild woman, I suppose (There are far more uncomplimentary phrases I could use, but this is church after all.) Where do we start with this person?
We’ll start with the obvious: her race. She’s Samaritan and I think most of us have been part of church long enough to have heard more than a few times how much the Jews of ancient Palestine looked down on the Samaritans. Half-breed mongrels, impure, tainted, an inferior people by dint of their blood. Racism is not a new thing; it’s existed for a very long time. If you wanted to transport her into a modern context, we’d make her black or Latina or Arab or any number of other dark skinned non-English-speaking “unAmerican” peoples that we white folk have come down on hard either historically or presently.
No good Jew would ever have a conversation with a Samaritan. And yet, Jesus does.
And then there’s her gender. We tend not to think about that as a negative, although sexism is probably as large a problem in our society today as racism is. Women still, on average, only make 77 cents for every dollar a man makes in the workplace. It was worse then in an era of patriarchy and male-dominance. Women were not people, they were property. They were valued only as far as they could be used to birth children and create alliances between your family and another.
No man would ever have a conversation about such deep topics as theology with a woman. And yet, Jesus does.
Lastly, there’s her moral behavior or lack thereof. In many ways, you can’t talk about this without tying it in with her gender because this double-standard still exists today. Perhaps to the great shame of our society is that women are still held to a much harsher standard when it comes to sexuality than men are. Women who are raped or are in some other way sexually harassed or assaulted are routinely blamed for what happened to them, as if they asked for it. A man with multiple sex partners is looked upon as some sort of virile demigod, often admired and envied, while a woman with the same is called a “slut” and is torn down and rejected.
This too is not a new thing. After all, Jesus himself even dealt with it. There is that story later in John’s Gospel where a woman is brought to Jesus, “caught in the very act of adultery.” If she was caught in the act, why isn’t the man dragged before Jesus also? Oh, yeah...he doesn’t count. He’s anatomically immune from prosecution for adultery.
But here is this woman with her five husbands and (presumably) other lovers. Like so many today, she is shamed and rejected by her society and we know that because she comes to the well in the heat of the day, not in the cool of the morning or evening when everyone else comes. She avoids the others of her village and they avoid her.
No holy man, no rabbi, no priest would ever have a conversation with this morally impure individual. And yet, Jesus does.
And not only does he talk to her, not only does he treat her like the precious child of God that she is, he reveals to her a mystery of the kingdom that not even his disciples have yet received.
Her response to his outpouring of respect and love is immediate. She rushes into the village, to all the people who have looked down on her and rejected her, and insists that they come to see this Jesus character. No shame. No fear. Nothing about her and her reputation stops her. She is empowered by that unlimited and embracing love of Jesus, a love the rest of the Samaritans receive themselves when they too come out to meet him.
We keep trying to put limits where God will have no limits. We say to ourselves that we cannot be loved as we are, only as what we might be if just do...something. But Jesus makes no such demand of this woman in order for him to love her. In the synoptic Gospels, no such demand is made of Matthew the tax collector; he is simply called to be a disciple with two words “follow me.” No such demand is made of us, for we are loved by God as we are, not as we should be.
That’s what St. Paul is saying when he writes “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” We didn’t stop being sinners in order that God would love us. He loves us in spite of our sin.
Jesus’ response to this woman is proof of that. All the social rules say he should avoid her like the plague, just as a holy God should have nothing to do with such flawed unholy creatures as ourselves. But that’s not what happens. Jesus embraces this woman just as God embraces all his creation. Remember, he so loved the whole cosmos that he gave his son. You, me, this woman, and everyone else.
God is not a liar. When he says he loves you, he means it. When he says he’ll save you, he means it. When he told Abraham that he would make of him a blessing for the whole world, he did it. When Jesus said to Nicodemus that God loves the whole world enough to send his son, he was thinking of you and me and he meant every word.
You need look no further than this woman, flawed and rejected as she is, to see that. He meant it for her. He meant it for me. And he means it for you. Amen.
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