Jesus and the Samaritan Woman
The Third Sunday in Lent we have a long Gospel reading, namely John 4:5-42. Jesus and his disciples are going from a festival in Jerusalem of Judea (11) back home to Galilee and as the map shows he has to go through Samaria to get there. They stop at Sychar (12), a town enroute. The reading is the story of Jesus sitting at Jacob’s well while his disciples go off to town to buy food. A woman comes with her bucket to draw water. Jesus asks her to give him a drink and engages her in conversation, a major social blunder because Jews did not speak to Samaritans.
That Jewish snub of Samaritans goes back to when the Assyrian Empire conquered Israel, Samaria the northern kingdom about 721 B.C. The Assyrians deported much of the population of Israel to other conquered lands and imported conquered people from elsewhere to populate the land that had been Israel: bringing Gentile foreigners polluted the land God had given to Israel. Over time everyone intermarried, mongrelizing the population in the eyes of the Jews. And the Samaritans worshiped at their own shrine in Samaria instead of at the Jerusalem temple like proper Jews. Samaritans were held in contempt. Thus the snub.
Israel came to be called Samaria because the capital and the holy shrine were at the city Samaria (map Sebaste 12). In more poetic passages Israel is also sometimes called Jacob.
When the disciples return they are stunned to find Jesus in the scandalous impropriety of a conversation with a woman. More especially a Samaritan woman. Most especially a loose woman. Well, she was, read the story. The lectionary scholars could as well have ended the lesson when the disciples return and the story ends, but no they added the teaching about harvest time and so on and neglected to make it optional, so we have a long Gospel reading that actually could be two readings. Sometimes I find myself doing that when preaching: reach a perfect conclusion but go blithely on to preach another sermon or two.
This story of Jesus and The Samaritan Woman at Jacob’s Well is full of study opportunity. In a midweek Bible discussion about if we would wonder about several things and ask questions about the story --
Why did Jesus ask the Samaritan woman for water but then tell her that if she had his living water she would never thirst again? Why did the woman hurry off when the disciples returned? She was in such a hurry she forgot her water jug. What was the Evangelist’s purpose in reporting that?
The story -- especially when one reads the entire story, the rest of John chapter 4 -- the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman brings to mind Elijah and the Zarephath woman and Elisha and the Shunnamite woman. Is there any significance to that?.
After the disciples left it was only Jesus and the woman at the well, and when the disciples returned no one asked Jesus about it: so how did John the Evangelist (Gospel writer) know what all Jesus said well enough to quote the entire conversation verbatim? Every writer has a purpose: what’s the Evangelist’s purpose in reporting this conversation? The conversation is powerfully charged with theology and teaching for John’s audience, possibly a Gentile Christian church. Is John making a point of Jesus bringing his message to the Gentiles, worst case: even to amoral Samaritan mud blood scum, and showing their instant faith in him?
The Fourth Gospel was written a generation later than the Synoptic Gospels -- Mark probably just after 70 A.D., maybe John 90 to 110 A.D. -- at a time when the Jewish Christian movement was dying out and the Gentile Christian church was growing: did the Evangelist have an agenda because he had a situation to deal with in his Jewish Christian church?
What do many Bible scholars say about all the long verbatim quotes of Jesus’ words that we find in John’s gospel? The long discourse at John 15, 16, 17 for example.
Over against Mark, Matthew and Luke in which Jesus makes no show of being divine by doing miracles, the Gospel of John presents Jesus specifically doing signs that prove his divinity. For example before chapter 4 ends, right after the gospel that we are reading on Sunday, Jesus returns to Galilee, stopping in Cana (10) where earlier he had turned the water into wine and John had called it the First Sign that revealed his glory. This time there’s a royal official whose son is dying. Jesus does not go to the sick little boy as the prophets had before him: he heals the child from afar by word alone, and John points out that this is now the Second Sign.
What’s going on? Is there a significant difference in the Christology of John versus Mark thirty or forty years earlier: John seems much more developed. Why? What’s going on?
Fr. Tom+
Lenten soup supper at Holy Nativity tonight.
Don’t miss it!