Mary Gordon’s Homily, March 19, 2017

Sermon: Woman at the Well

I am always relieved when I look at the Gospel for the day I must give a sermon and find it’s one of the ones when Jesus is Lovable. He isn’t always. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to speak on the parts of the Gospel that make me want to turn away from him: when he curses the fig tree, tells the man not to bury his father, says divorce is out of the question. But today I was lucky, because I get to speak about one of my favorite Gospel passages: The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman.

Because I have devoted my life to storytelling and the creation of characters, particularly women characters, through story, I am particularly fond of this Gospel episode. Not only does it demonstrate Jesus’ respect and value for women, it also underscores his insistence upon encountering and valorizing the despised and the outcast. It would have been unusual for a man to address any woman as Jesus addresses this woman at the well, but to speak to a Samaritan woman was unheard of. I hope that those of you who are well acquainted with the position of the Samaritans in the Jewish world of Jesus time will forgive me, but I was fascinated to learn the details of their marginality from the Council of Catholic bishops, no less.
“The Samaritans were a racially mixed society with Jewish and pagan ancestry. Although they worshiped Yahweh as did the Jews, their religion was not mainstream Judaism. They accepted only the first five books of the Bible as canonical, and their temple was on Mount Gerazim instead of on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. One of their priests was banished from the temple in Jerusalem for having married a non Jew.

Because of their imperfect adherence to Judaism and their partly pagan ancestry, the Samaritans were despised by ordinary Jews. Rather than contaminate themselves by passing through Samaritan territory, Jews who were traveling from Judea to Galilee or vice versa would cross over the river Jordan, bypass Samaria by going through Transjordan, and cross over the river again as they neared their destination. The Samaritans also harbored antipathy toward the Jews.

 

It isn’t difficult to find resonances in our contemporary racial unease in this description. The antipathy towards the racially impure, the sexual outlaw…the avoidance of the abode of the other as dangerous and threatening: all these Jesus is challenging in his encounter with the Samaritan woman. What is interesting is that she challenges him back. When he asks for water, a Jewish man, by gender and ethnicity understood to be the woman’s enemy and her superior, she doesn’t say, yes sir, right away sir, please don’t hurt me. She says, ineffect: Look I know what’s what, what are you doing here? She asserts her own identity unapologetically, and insists upon understanding what she has been asked. Their exchange is an exchange between equals: there is give and take, one might almost say banter.  Jesus says to 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 isn’t ready for the claims Jesus is making. She questions his right to make such large assertions.   “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, ” Jesus said to her, “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.”  The woman is still not ready to understand him on more than a literal level; she’s thinking he’s presenting her with the possibility of some well that will never go dry, like something on an infomercial at three o’clock in the morning.  But Jesus is determined to accomplish with this woman what he set out to accomplish: to reveal himself to her, to send her out to the world as witness to his coming. How does he do this? Not by domination, but by letting her know that he is with her in the secrets of her heart. Almost playfully he tells her to bring her husband back.  When she tells him she doesn’t have a 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.”

 

This, I think is my favorite moment of the story. Jesus doesn’t say: shape up, move out, make a respectable woman of yourself. He meets her where she is, not where she might be one day in the future. She is the one, the unique she, whom he has chosen to spread the word of his coming among her people.

 

But before she acts, she requires understanding. Who is he, who is she, in the light of their different religious traditions.   “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

 

Jesus response stresses both the continuity of his message with the covenant of God with the Jews, and the direction in which he will take it, a direction that will give primacy not to place but to spirit.

Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship God in spirit and truth, for God seeks such as these as worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.”

 

The woman asserts her familiarity with Jewish/ law and tradition.

“I know that the Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” It is only after this declaration of understanding that Jesus reveals himself to her.

 

 

The tone of the discourse lowers to a baffled comedy, as it often does when the disciples arrive on the scene.  They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”

 

The next detail is one which gives me a particular pleasure. The woman leaves her water jug behind. She gives up the traditional female task of water gathering for the customary male one of witness. Yet her tone, when she encounters her kinsmen is markedly free of insistence: it invites them to be with her in this astonishing possibility: the Messiah is here; how are we to understand this. She shares with them the moment of intimacy that she as the stranger shared: he told me everything I have ever done. Jesus has revealed himself as Messiah not by the creation of a raging storm, or even by the curing of the sick or giving sight to the blind. The miracle she has experienced is the miracle of being known.

 

Meanwhile, the apostles are trying to make sure Jesus got lunch…maybe they’re surprise that the woman didn’t provide food, taking over their job of proclamation instead. Jesus insists that he has been sufficiently nourished, and lets them in on one of the most difficult aspects of discipleship. It’s not a quid pro quo.  Others may reap what you have sowed. It’s the way it is.

 

The woman’s testimony induced some of the Samaritan men to invite Jesus to stay for a few days.

But they are happy to tell her   “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” You can just here their relief “Thank God we didn’t have to rely on a woman’s word for it.”

 

 

‘I feel a responsibility to at least make a glancing mention of the two more difficult readings today  because I always feel ripped off when a homilist doesn’t throw out a life line to make sense of a passage from scripture that seems at best confounding, at worst repellent.’

 

The passage from Exodus is one of the troubling ones. No one looks good. The Israelites are potentially violent, Moses seems incompetent, and Yaweh is asleep at the switch, or in this case the faucet.  I sympathize with the Israelites, it’s difficult to be patient and hopeful when you’re afraid of dying of thirst. And why didn’t Moses think of asking God for water before he was threatened with stoning. Perhaps what can be got out of it is a lesson for activists: prod your sluggish leaders in the strongest possible terms. Maybe the stones of words rather than literal stones, hoping that the childish chant “sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” doesn’t apply in a democracy however tattered. Or perhaps it is a reminder that we cannot always have what we want, or even need, exactly when we want it. Moses has been successful at proving quail and manna (even though the Israelites complained about the limited menu). He and Yaweh are both tired of the Israelites failure to acknowledge that they have been provided for in the past..  Which should give them hope for the future.

 

Hope. Today’s Epistle offers particular challenges for me because I am not naturally a hopeful person and I realize fully the crucial importance of maintaining hope.  The theologian Henri Nouwen described hope as “humming in the darkness.” He makes the distinction between hope and optimism: optimism is the belief that things will turn out for the best in predictable ways. Hope is larger, vaguer, a product of the unseen, a gift of the unseen God. Its effects are not ours to predict; nor is there a timetable we can look to with any assurance. “I have found it very important in my own life to try to let go of my wishes and instead to live in hope” Nouwen  says.

The very very great Poet  Emily Dickinson compares hope to a small bird

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.

Dickinson’s point is that despite its apparent fragility, hope survives and endures. And yet it is without words, especially words that would demand, or even request anything at all from the possessor of the soul. It is beyond language, therefore beyond rational thought, and absolutely apart from anything that the living person could do for it. It cannot, therefore be nourished by the soul: it nourishes itself.

 

But despite my hunger for wisdom on the subject of hope, I was turned off by the language of our translation of Paul.

“We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

The King James translation seems to me, in this instance, infinitely preferable.

But we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; ⁴And patience, experience; and experience, hope: ⁵And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.

I’m not crazy about glorying in tribulations but it’s much better than the obnoxiously masochistic to “boast in suffering.”

I was struck this time by the difference between the word “disappoint” in the modern version and the word and “ashamed” in the older one.  Suddenly, I realized why I am so often afraid to hope. When my hopes—which are often the wishes of which Nouwen speaks of having ha to renounce—are dashed, I am ashamed, even in front of myself. Calling myself a fool. But if one has hope in the love of God, rather than wishes for the fulfillment of one’s own will, there is no need for shame, or even of disappointment.

 

And experience, seems much more desirable than endurance.  Experience can be pleasurable; one can learn from it. Endurance is just a big drag. And how infinitely preferable is patience to character, how much better the notion that experience produces patience than that endurance produces character. I was reminded of an episode of the Mary Tyler Moore show in which Lou Grant says to Mary, you’ve got spunk.  I hate spunk.” I feel the same way about character. But Patience. Patience is to me, infinitely beautiful, infinitely valuable.  If I am not a hopeful person, even less am I a patient one.  This image of patience by the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has always seemed particularly precious to me.

Natural heart’s ivy, Patience masks
Our ruins of wrecked past purpose. There she basks
Purple eyes and seas of liquid leaves all day.
And where is he who more and more distils
Delicious kindness?–He is patient. Patience fills
His crisp combs, and that comes those ways we know.
How marvelous to think of patience in terms of purple eyes, liquid leaves, and crisp combs, rather than the plodding joyless housewife that she most often brings to mind. How right and how difficult that there should be an important relationship between patience and hope/ And how much more compatible with the idea of the Spirit who pours hope into our hearts—the living water of which Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John.