3 Lent, Year A

Exodus 17: 1 – 7
Psalm 95
Romans 5: 1 – 11
John 4: 5 – 42
A homily by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at St. Mary’s Church, Robinson, Illinois on Sunday, March 27, 2011 by Mr. R. J. Rains, licensed Lay Worship Leader.

“WHO’S IN AND WHO’S OUT?”
(Homily text: John 4: 5 – 42)

Today’s gospel text, the very familiar account of Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well in Samaria, presents us with a question: “Who’s ‘in’ and who’s ‘out’?”

This very question often figures prominently in the events in Jesus’ life.
The question of who’s “in” and who’s “out” has to do with who is “clean”, or “unclean”. This question has to do with who is accepted by God, and who isn’t.

Now, hold that in your mind for a moment, and let’s look at the background and the setting of this encounter.

First of all, we need to remember where Samaria is, and who the Samaritans were.

Samaria is an area which is north of Jerusalem, and south of Galilee, and which is located on the west bank of the Jordan River. Today, it is the area, generally speaking, that is known as the West Bank. To travel from Jerusalem, where Jesus was, to Galilee, to the north, the direct route would have taken a person right through Samaria.

In order to understand who the Samaritans were, we need to step back into history some eight centuries. In 722 BC, the Assyrian army swept into the Northern Kingdom of Israel, and the ten tribes that formed the Northern Kingdom were swept away into captivity, and into oblivion. However, not everyone there was taken away. Some remained. The Assyrians resettled other peoples into the region of Samaria (this was a common practice in those days). Eventually, these people married and intermingled. Thus, from a Jewish perspective the Samaritans were half-breeds, or worse. Furthermore, the Samaritans also possessed a version of the five books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy), but the Samaritan version was quite different in some respects from the Jewish version. Finally, the Samaritans worshipped on another mountain, Mt. Gerizim, and not on the holy mountain in Jerusalem, Mt. Zion. And to add to the tensions between the two groups, the Samaritans remembered that a Jewish army destroyed their sanctuary on the top of Mt. Gerizim in 128 BC. (Notice that the matter of where a person ought to worship figures prominently in the conversation between the Samaritan woman and Jesus.)

From a Jewish perspective, there were plenty of reasons to look down on Samaritans:

1. they were racially impure,
2. they had a corrupted version of Moses’ writings, and
3. they worshipped in the wrong place.

So, as John reminds us, Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans.

In fact, in order to travel from Jerusalem to Galilee, a devout Jew would try to avoid Samaria entirely, going either down to the Jordan valley to take an eastern route, or going out toward the Mediterranean Sea, to the west.

But John tells us that Jesus “had to go” through Samaria. The Greek here suggests that Jesus had a specific purpose in mind, in order to take the direct route through Samaria. Put another way, Jesus is deliberately going into “enemy” territory, into an area which is populated by “unclean” people who are “outside” of God’s favor.

With this background in mind, let’s return now to the matter of who’s “in” and who’s “out”, who’s “clean” and who’s “unclean”.

Jesus had plenty of reasons to avoid the woman who had come to the well to draw water at noonday that day.

For all the reasons that Jews had nothing to do with Samaritans, He could have avoided her.

In fact, the woman names one of them, saying to Jesus, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan?”

The conversation could have ended right there. But it didn’t.

Not only in Jesus bridging the gap between Jew and Samaritan, He’s also bridging the gap between men and women. For, you see, in biblical times, men didn’t speak to women in public, nor would a Jewish man initiate a conversation with an unknown woman. (Such manners seem odd to us today, don’t they?). But here Jesus is, at a public place (a well) talking with a woman. Jesus’ disciples notice this breach of common manners as they return, for John tells us that they were astonished that He was speaking with her.

Jesus is also bridging the gap between the “clean” and the “unclean”, between those who are “in” and those who are “out” in another way. Here, I must engage in a bit of speculation: John tells us that Jesus asks the woman to go and bring her husband back with her. To this request, the woman says, “I have no husband.” In response, Jesus says, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband, for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly’.”

Though John doesn’t tell us why the woman has had five husbands, it’s possible that because she had had so many, others in the city of Sychar may have shunned her. It may be that her marital past had made her an outcast. Maybe that’s why it was necessary for her to come and get water at midday, which was an unusual time to come to the city’s well.

Again, I note that this is speculation on my part. Biblical scholars down through the ages have speculated about the woman’s status within her community. At the very least, we can surmise that the woman’s life history was unusual, and that alone may have made her the object of suspicion within the community.

But Jesus bridges the gaps, breaking down the dividing lines which formed those gaps. They all disappear.

The Lord bridges the gaps of race, culture, religion, gender and social acceptability.

No longer will it matter:

• What our race is
• What our cultural background is
• What our religious background is
• What our gender is
• What our social status is

In Jesus Christ, all of these barriers are removed.

And what will remain?

What remains is a new people, who are one in Christ, and who worship the Father “in spirit and in truth”, for such a people are the ones that the “Father seeks to worship Him”.

Wherever we are when we begin our journey with God, God will take us. But God will never leave us where He finds us. Change and growth are inevitable when we walk with God.

God will take what is valuable in us and work with what is valuable in us. Notice how the Lord works with the Samaritan woman’s realization that the Messiah, the Christ, was to come. Jesus, the Christ, is able to expand on her understanding and proceed from there. The Lord will do the same with us.

But what will fade away are all the non-essential parts of our beings, things like the racial, cultural and other aspects of who we are. They will be less and less important as we become children of God, followers of Jesus Christ, and worshippers of the Father in spirit and in truth.

And so, the events that took place at the well should prompt us to ask ourselves, “Am I ‘in’ or am I ‘out’?” We could also ask ourselves, “In what ways has my old identity faded away, in order that my new identity in Christ may take its place?”

AMEN.