Sermon preached on the Third Sunday in Lent: John 5:19-24

Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11;
John 4:5-42

There’s something suspicious about a person who’s too quick to sign on to things.  I’m not talking about people who are quick to volunteer, or try something different, or make new friends.  I’m talking about serial committers: people who seem to make big life decisions the way other people decide which socks to wear.  We’ve all had to deliberate about whether to get married, whether to join a new church, or whether to leave a job, and most of us, even if we know what we’ll ultimately do, take our time, consult with others, go through the motions, etc, etc.  So when somebody runs off to Vegas with a girl they met yesterday, or quits her job one morning and enrolls in beauty school the next, we’re shocked, we’re confused, and we’re put off by the unstudied immediacy of the whole thing. 

When a group of us got together to talk about the Samaritan woman during our first Wednesday night Lenten program at the church, her immediacy was one of the things that stood out to everybody.  It shows up in two places.  First, Jesus tells her that she should have asked him for water, because what he has to give can quench thirst forever.  Without missing a beat, she responds, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty ….”  Their conversation continues, and when Jesus tells her things about her life that he shouldn’t know, she realizes that he’s a prophet.  She starts to ask questions, thinking, “Maybe this is the prophet, the Messiah we’ve all been waiting for.”  After Jesus confirms that he’s the guy, she’s off, running to gather her village in a second bold show of immediacy. 

Now you could look at this woman’s relationship history and make some supporting conclusions about her being quick to commit to things.  Jesus reveals it all: she’s had five husbands and is living with a man to whom she’s not married.  But there are some pretty valid historical-cultural reasons why she might have found herself in this situation – and reasons that were largely out of her control, because as a woman she was not a powerful person.  She needed protection, and she needed support.  Her dependency was a given, nothing that she could hide.  And that’s why this woman and other people who are quick to sign up for things, who are quick to say, “Give me this water,” can be so disturbing to us.  They’re emblematic of a basic fact about the human condition: we need.  We are dependent.  We’re creatures who won’t survive unless we have real water, unless we have food and shelter; but more than this, we’re creatures who won’t survive unless we have love, unless we can make meaning of our lives, unless we have purpose and relationships.  The Samaritan woman isn’t particularly fickle or promiscuous; neither is she particularly spiritually open or adept … she’s just particularly transparent; she’s very obviously looking for something; she’s frank in this whole exchange: “Yes.  Please.  I need a Messiah.”   

Which is the opposite of Jesus’ most recent conversation.  You may remember from last week the story of Nicodemus, a powerful person – a judge – living in a powerful place – Jerusalem – who came to Jesus by night and exhibited a sort of caution and confusion in speaking with him that’s so endearing, because it’s how a lot of us feel a lot of the time when it comes to Jesus.  Nicodemus is a responsible person, a newspaper reader, a taxpayer, who isn’t going to join Jesus’ ragtag band of disciples without some serious probing into this whole Messiah thing.  He stands to lose a lot if his friends and neighbors see him with Jesus (which is why he comes at night) and he can’t seem to get his brain around the things that Jesus says anyway: “How can I be born again?” is his famous question.  Nicodemus jumps to the same conclusion as the Samaritan woman, taking Jesus’ words solely at face value.  But his response is totally different.  Nicodemus puts his hand to his chin and mulls over this idea of being born again, while the Samaritan woman holds out her hand, and demands, “Give me the water.”

Whether he should take it literally or not, being born again is exactly the thing that Nicodemus needs.  He needs to be raw again, to see the world with brand new eyes.  He needs to be viscerally aware of what being a creature requires, and how fundamentally dependent he really is.  Instead, Nicodemus is in the same situation most of us end up in:   he’s been able to cover up his dependency with a sense of self-sufficiency.  Because his basic needs have been met, he’s been able to cover up his basic human neediness with responsibility, with mature adulthood, with obligations and allegiances.  He’s built a respectable and comfortable life, he’s become a good person, and he’s scooted far, far back from “the edge,” that place of precariousness and marginality where people do make quick decisions about their lives, and do act with a sort of stunning immediacy and urgency, and are aware of needing help and needing comfort, and needing salvation.  It’s a place that’s really hard for us to get to when we’re safe and healthy, and when things are going well.  But it’s where we end up when things go wrong – it’s where some people spend their whole lives – and it’s this edge that is the place of prayer, where we cry out for Jesus because we sense, suddenly, that we need him.  Because we know, desperately, that we can’t make it on our own.  And because we remember, without a doubt, that we are dust. 

Jesus has been walking the edge this whole Lenten season.  When he’s alone in the desert facing temptation; when he goes, today, to the center of an unfamiliar village and shoots straight with a Samaritan woman; and in the center of power, Jerusalem, with a powerful man, Nicodemus, it’s this edge that Jesus is trying to draw out of him, to make Nicodemus feel the sharpness, the immediacy, the urgency of his human need so that he can receive the gift of grace for the real gift that it is.  So that he can find the meaning, purpose, love, and peace that we all long for in Jesus – in this water that Jesus offers, the water of rebirth, the water of new life, the wellspring that each one of us carries within him or her whose source is Christ, alive in you and in me. 

The Samaritan woman and Nicodemus reflect us back to ourselves, and Jesus has a stake in all of it: our unvarnished, creaturely selves and the polished, self-sufficient selves we sometimes become.  What he really wants, though, are our true selves - or, rather, he knows who we truly are and wants us to discover the truth about ourselves, too … for that is where he lives.  And that is where we will find him. 

Sermon preached by the Rev. Danielle Thompson at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church in Chicago, IL on Sunday, March 27 at 8:00 AM and 11:00 AM. 

Looking ahead to the Third Sunday in Lent: John 4:5-42

Where’s Jesus?  We can answer that in a couple of ways this week.  Where he is geographically is important, and where this week’s story about the Samaritan woman and “living water” falls is important. 

John notes that Jesus had to go through Samaria to get back north (where he lived) after being in Jerusalem (where he was celebrating the Passover).  This could be a commentary on geography: the shortest, safest route between the south and the north was through this central patch of land called Samaria.  If you look at a map of ancient Palestine, there’s no reason to avoid it.  Unless, that is, you know something about ancient Palestine.  There was some pretty profound enmity between Jewish people and Samaritan people, which most of us are familiar with from the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke.  For one thing, “southerners” (the area called Judah, where Samaria is) and “northerners” (the area called Israel, where Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth is) had not been inviting one another to parties for some time before both regions were torn apart by war and exile.  When the dust had settled from both the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions and deportations, and the new, triumphant Persian king allowed Jewish people to go back to Israel and Judea, things did not always go smoothly between them and the people who had remained in the land – which appears to have included the Samaritans.  The returnees began to rebuild the temple and reestablish Jerusalem as the center of worship, but the Samaritans weren’t interested.  They didn’t really have any breakthrough ideas about God’s presence in the world and among us that kept them from getting excited about the new temple.  Rather, they had other notions about where the appropriate center of cultic activity was, and ended up building their own temple on Mt. Gerazim, north of Jerusalem.  During a brief period of Jewish rule in-between Greek and Roman occupation of the land, the temple at Gerazim was destroyed. 

When I think about Samaritans in the Bible, I’m quick to apply the label “insiders and outsiders” and assume that because we are reading along with Jesus’ largely Jewish audience, Samaritans always teach us a lesson about his attitude toward marginalized people.  That’s not entirely wrong, since from within any one of these two groups the other group would have been considered to be irritating, unimportant, even threatening.  If you know the other side of the story, though – not just how Jesus’ contemporaries felt about Samaritans, but how suspicious of Jewish people the Samaritans were – you realize that Jesus is doing something bigger and more complicated than reaching out to a person who is unlike him.  He is diving into enemy territory, taking on centuries of discord that has recently focused itself around the very important question of how to worship the one God that both Samaritans and Jews claim to know.  Jesus is sitting beside a well that could be in the middle of the Balkans, or the Middle East, or Chiapas, holding a summit with the other side … only it’s not a head-of-state or a rabbi with whom he is speaking.  It’s a woman. 

Which evokes the second answer to the question, “Where’s Jesus?”  Think about his most recent conversation: last week Jesus spoke with Nicodemus about being born again.  Jesus was in Jerusalem, discussing serious matters with an influential leader in the Jewish Sanhedrin (like a supreme court).  From the center of power with a powerful man, Jesus arrives in a center of conflict with a legally, socially powerless person (the Samaritan woman seems to have had some power to influence or persuade once she runs to tell her neighbors about the Messiah). 

Back to John’s phrase, then, “he had to go through Samaria” (John 4:4, my emphasis).  What do you think: a matter of geographical expediency only, or a trip that tells us something about who he is and what he’s here to do?  

(Danielle Thompson)