NewCreation

Homily for Third Sunday in Len, Year A

The Third Sunday in Lent Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the Third Sunday in Lent. This Sunday we begin readings from St John's Gospel. The last three Sundays of Lent will be readings from St John: dialogues between Jesus and different people, each of which makes manifest who Jesus is for those who are able to perceive it. So today, the woman by the well of Samaria; next Sunday, the man blind from birth; and the Sunday after, Mary and Martha and the raising of Lazarus. So just to fit us in with what's going on with today's story, which in a sense is the easiest and most pleasant one of those, because the self-manifestation of Jesus happens in such relatively easy and fertile territory. Jesus himself comments on this to the disciples. So Jesus has been in Jerusalem, he's been up for a feast, his disciples have been baptizing people, Nicodemus has come to visit him. So that's actually the first of these dialogues that we get in John's Gospel. And after that, pressure is coming up. The Pharisees are beginning to get annoyed with Jesus and his disciples. And so Jesus decides to move back to Galilee. And he steps back with his disciples, left Judea and started going back to Galilee. So he had to go through Samaria. Now, it's an important point that he was going that way, from Jerusalem back to Galilee through Samaria, because the Samaritans had a well-known tradition of being inhospitable to pilgrims going from Galilee or other Jewish territories through their territory towards Jerusalem in order to take part in the ceremonies and feasts in Jerusalem. They felt that they as Samaritans — it wasn't in their business to supply the usual rules of hospitality to people going to alien temple cults. On the other hand, on the way back there was no such concern, so the relations were generally friendlier on the way back. So here he has to go through Samaria. So he comes to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. So this well is attested in several passages of Scripture. The field that was given by Jacob to Joseph is well attested. This was part of the spiritual geography that everybody present would have shared in common. So in other words, it might be erudite to us, but it wasn't erudite to them. This was local folklore that everybody would have shared in. So Jesus is sitting by the well, and it was about noon — says the sixth hour in the Greek, meaning six hours after 6 a.m., when the day started. And so there Jesus is, sitting by the well by himself. And famously, a Samaritan woman comes to draw water. Now, noon is not the time that anyone would normally like to go and draw water. You would like to draw water either much earlier in the day or much later in the day, but anyhow when there's some shade. So the kind of person who comes out to draw water from the well at midday is the kind of person who doesn't want to see other people around. And later we found out something about why this was a woman who may have had a certain reputation at home. None of that is clear yet, but that she has come to the well at a time when other people wouldn't be there already says something about her. Here the Gospel is quite gentle, and it says his disciples — Jesus's disciples — had gone to the city to buy food, so they were going to do something of buying in the city. But here Jesus opens a conversation with her, and the first thing he does is he puts himself in a position of dependence on this woman: he asks her to give him something to drink. She of course had the capacity to do that, so he started by inverting the usual power relationship, with the man having the means and the woman being dependent. He has treated her as the person who can help him, and says, "Give me a drink." The disciples are going to buy; he's asking to be given. All those parallels are supposed to be noticed. And the Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" In other words, she's bringing out not her, if you like, precarious position within Samaritan society, but simply the fact that she's a Samaritan. There is a certain impurity attaching to that, and a Jewish person wouldn't normally ask something that might be shared, that might cause impurity. But it's at this stage the thing that she's making different is not her current status but simply the fact of being Samaritan, and not understanding why a Jew would be asking her for something. And Jesus' response to her is much more interesting than it sounds, or seems at first reading, because of course it's not obvious — as is always the case in Jesus' dialogues. Jesus answered 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." Now of course she didn't know who she was talking to, and so he's saying to her — instead of answering, "Well, I'm a Jew and I just happen to need a drink" — he's taking the whole matter back and saying, "If you knew the gift of God." Now this word, gift — dorean — it's the only time this word appears in this Gospel, in fact in any of the Gospels. The only other times this word appears in the New Testament it's in the Acts of the Apostles and in some of Paul's epistles. And there it almost invariably means the gift of the Holy Spirit. In other words, he's not talking about a passive gift at the same level as a drink of water might be, or a slice of wedding cake for that matter, where you just give someone something. He's talking about the gift of God, which of course she could not possibly have known about. And the gift of God is the self-giving of us — that which turns us into people who are capable of giving ourselves away, which is how we receive who we really are. And it's that which is this making utterly alive of us, which is then brought out in the discussion about the well. But it's the notion that the gift of God is something which turns us into gifts — that's what the gift of God is about. I think it's really quite important to remember that one of the moments when the gift of God becomes, if you like, a matter of controversy is in the Acts of the Apostles, precisely when Simon — not Simon Peter, but Simon the magician, the Magi — tries to buy the gift of God. And it's understood that really that is the ultimate way that you cannot have it. The gift of God is that which by nature turns you into giving yourself away, which is the richest thing you could possibly have, because as you give yourself away you're on the inside of God's self-giving, which means that you're held by the Creator and turned into an endless source of generosity for others. And this is what Jesus is attempting to offer her. "If you knew the gift of God" — in other words, what it's like to be turned into this self-giving — "and who it is who's asking you for this gift," precisely giving you the chance to get involved in the self-giving of yourself away, "you would have asked him and he would have given you living water." In other words, I'm inducting you into a conversation which is going to end in you being able to give yourself away with living water. So the woman says to him, "Sir, you have no bucket and the well is deep — where do you get that living water?" Reasonably enough, she's staying at the practical level and wants to know how this giving of water is going to happen. "Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" So we're being set up for Jesus being more than Israel. Jacob, Israel, the founder of all the peoples, of all the tribes of Israel, including obviously Joseph, to whom Jacob had bequeathed this field. And Jesus says to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water" — the practical water, the one for which you need a bucket — "will be thirsty again. But those who drink of the water that I shall give them will never be thirsty." In other words, once you get onto the inside of being able to give yourself away — because that's what the Spirit does, turns you into givers of yourself away — you'll never be thirsty. You will be held in being by the one who's turning you into… This show of generosity: "the water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." In other words, I'll be turning them into fountains of this. And the woman then says, reasonably, "So give me of this water so that I may never be thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." So she's partially understood it. Give me all this water. She's asked for it so she may never be thirsty. But also she's got good practical considerations: I have to keep coming here to draw water. As you know, this is a boring, tedious task, and anyone who can save her from that task before the advent of bottled water is doing her a favor. So now Jesus, it sounds as though he's not answering her question — "give me the water." But in fact, this is how he answers her. I think it's very important to see that he is answering her positively here, and he is giving her that water. He says to her, "Go, call your husband and come back." And the woman answered him, "I have no husband." So he's asking her to go and do something for him as a way of getting her into the outflow of goodness and generosity. And Jesus says 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." So Jesus knew she had no husband. He wanted to get her into the position of getting used to asking him for things so that she could give things away. And the woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet." Now, why did she say that? Well, the easy answer is to say he's detected that she had — let's say — an interesting matrimonial history. But one or two scholars are making reference to the fact that Samaria was considered a place that had been under the rule of five idolatrous kings, and was now under the rule of someone who was also an idolatrous king. So he's referring to Samaria's prophetic history — the history which, again, would have been well known — and this would be a Jewish way of referring to Samaria and its past under the rule of these idolatrous kings. That's part of the history which you get in the Hebrew Scriptures. But it appears to be a mixture of the two. So he's referring to her marital status, which — let's remember — almost certainly means that she is a greatly mistreated woman. If she is a person of unstable marital life, it's almost certainly because she has been passed amongst people for their own advantage. So the notion that she's a particularly bad person makes no sense at all. She's a particularly vulnerable person, which is why he's able to speak with her. He's speaking to a vulnerable bearer of her city's idolatry. As has been pointed out, this makes her rather like the Gerasene demoniac, who was clearly living out in himself the violences of his entirely pagan city. But here the woman is rational. She knows what's going on, she understands why she has to live in this precarious and humiliated situation, but she also understands that Jesus is not trying to get at her — he's talking about her town as well. "Sir, I see that you're a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." So she's still trying to keep alive the prophetic exchange, the exchange about theological principles, rather than getting on the inside of what Jesus is actually offering her. He's asking her to do something so that she can then enter into the inside of this self-giving. And Jesus says to her: "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You, the Samaritans, worship what you do not know. We worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews." And here he's probably referring to the Davidic line, the Davidic promises that he is in fact to fulfill in Jerusalem, along with the definitive sacrifice of the atonement. So he knows where all this is coming from, and he knows that there is the possibility of learning who God really is through that. In other words, all the Johannine irony that is going to come about concerning the Temple, the sacrifice, all of that could only have happened in a place where there was something to be ironic about. You need to turn that on its head, to make available that here is the man, here is the shepherd, here is the king. So the passage of God's revelation through knowledge comes from that subversion from within of the priestly and prophetic tradition associated with Jerusalem. So he says: yes, salvation is from the Jews, "but the hour is coming, and is now here" — in other words, I can anticipate this for you — "when true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him." So just as Jesus had sought her out, he was seeking her, and is going to turn her into just such a worshiper. "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." So it's going to be this strange relationship between people, in which we are enabled to turn each other into gifts by bearing witness to the gift that we are receiving, that is going to make all the difference from here on out. The woman says to him: "I know that Messiah is coming," and it says in brackets "who is called Christ." It's interesting, because it suggests that she doesn't really know. She assumes it's a name, or just a name of a person. "I know that Messiah is coming." She doesn't say "the Messiah." "I know that Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." So she picks up that something is coming through the line of the Jews, and this person called Messiah – Masías, the anointed one, who is called Christ – "When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us." So she's got enough of her Samaritan tradition, and enough of the sense of what the Jews thought, to be aware of this strange figure called Messiah. And then Jesus says to her, "I am the one who is speaking to you" – "I am he, the one who is speaking to you." So he discloses himself in his giving himself away at this point. Their discussion is interrupted. And this is a beautiful interruption: literally at the moment of Jesus disclosing that he is the one giving her this water, that he is this fulfillment. So we get no sense of her response yet. But then the disciples come, and they're astonished that he was speaking with a woman. They would have thought that that would be a non-proper or prophetic thing for him to do, though he had spoken with his mother at the wedding at Cana in Galilee, and they would be astonished at a woman being there at that time, and probably suspected that something might not be quite right. But they didn't – obviously – understand what it was about. No one said, "What do you want?" or "Why are you speaking with her?" And at that point the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. So she left the jar with which she was going to be drawing water from the well, and went back to the city. Curiously, in doing this, she had responded to Jesus's request: "Go and find your husband and bring him back." "I have no husband." And then Jesus is indicating that she and the life of the city have lived in the same idolatry. So she goes back and she says to the people, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done. He can't be the Messiah, can he?" They left the city and were on their way to him. So something about how she has felt spoken to – that didn't shame her, and that put her in the same place as the inhabitants of the city – enabled her to talk to people without shame. And because of that she develops quite a power of invitation; she convokes other people. The Spirit, the gift, has started to work itself out in her. She's been able to give herself away in the midst of others. So they left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat something." But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do not know about." So he now tries to explain to them what he's trying to explain to her: that it's actually in doing things like this that he gets nourished. "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work." So he's attempting to get across to them that the gift which he's just given to that Samaritan woman is the gift that he's going to be trying to give to them. "I tell you, look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting." There are all sorts of people who are ready even now to be invited in, people who live in places less complicated than Jerusalem, less full of religious ups and downs and constrictions and restrictions and all of that stuff. And those are the people — they're ready for harvesting. Anyone who takes them out of their shame is bringing them to life. "But I tell you, look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together." So he's saying this is what's actually been going on with the Samaritan woman: she, the Samaritan woman, is already receiving the wages, and he's gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. She's a model for what's going to happen with you. "For here the saying holds true: one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor; others have labored and you have entered into their labor." So he's trying to give to them that she's an example. "Many Samaritans from the city believed in him because of the woman's testimony." She had been told the truth. She'd been able to live it. She'd been able to share it. And then they came and listened to him. "He told me everything I have ever done." So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days — so not the three days, which would be in Jerusalem. The three days was always the time given before a theophany in a chosen holy place, so the two days is a not-quite theophany. "And many more believed because of his word." So as he spoke, they began to understand what he was saying. They said to the woman, "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 Saviour of the world." Her witness — she's been able to give herself away, she's not in control of it, she's been able to give herself away, and because of that it's become a multiplied and a fruitful thing. The gift which Jesus is bearing witness to, enabling others to bear witness to, and which is able to spread especially amongst the humiliated, the apparent heretics, those who are not caught up in bizarre discussions about laws and things like that — that is where it flows easy. And the disciples need to be shown this, to be able to learn that this is the way that the Lord enjoys sharing the harvest with reapers and laborers. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.