The woman at the well presents a unique challenge for us in a moment of anxiety, confusion, and distance. Which also makes it an opportunity.
Love and longing in the COVID era
Lent 3A | John 4:5-42
When we left Jesus, he was talking to Nicodemus in the dark. In the verses that follow, John the Baptist hears that Jesus is baptizing people. In a sense, offering living water to the thirsty.
But when this rumor gets to Jesus, at the start of chapter 4, right before this passage, the narrator pipes up and says in verse 2: “although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptized”.
This all might seem a bit semantic but take note. John’s disciples think their rabbi would be mad that Jesus is doing God’s work—like John has the copyright on baptism and Jesus is the brand knock-off. So John’s followers are all up in arms about a copycat, it’s a copyright infringement case. And why? Because they’re afraid their guy will lose market share. Like their church is dying.
And the narrator busts in to say, almost as a contrast, Jesus’s disciples are actually the ones doing the baptizing. It isn’t the one leader doing the work of Christ, but all of the people.
And that contrast bridges the river between a story of an elite Jewish leader seeking Jesus at night and one about a powerless woman coming across Jesus during the day.
Jesus is a traveler.
Dorothy Drummond would want us to bring out a big map and sketch out these very real places. She’d want us to really see them so we could better understand the people and what is happening here. But let us simply imagine for ourselves a piece of land, a territory, that your people usually try to avoid. For my people, that’s Ohio.
And while it’s surely the shorter distance, it is customary that you avoid it. Perhaps it exists as a custom somewhere between too many toll roads and windy, treacherous gravel roads. The point is that Hebrews could go through Samaria, but they almost never do.
Jesus does. And he considers it a mission field. So the easy expression of this in our world may be like a Jesuit renting an apartment in the most dangerous neighborhood in the country. A missionary from the city moving to a meth-addled Appalachian town. Or a friend braving an epidemic contagion, like a 2020 Mother Theresa.
The Spirit was leading him home. Just not right away. And not along the usual path.
The Usual Path
I think we’re used to reading this story as being about Jesus and the ministry. Which is pretty much how we’re supposed to do it. But maybe we take a break for two minutes to consider this story reads a bit like a Jane Austen novel.
It’s the story of a woman worth more to the world than her lowly station. Tradition would have us overlook her, or worse, demean her. She had so many husbands! Of course, she had little say in the matter. She was married, virtually without consent. And never for love. For safety and security, for the future; any future. Literal survival.
And when she meets Jesus, it’s all customs and propriety. Until he shoos it all away. Jesus isn’t like the men in her life. He doesn’t want to own her. Just know her. To see her. To free her.
Interrupted
And then, what may be the most alarming part of the story—the interruption.
“Just then his disciples came. 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?’”
Again, the narrator contrasts the disciples with our expectations. They did not attack the woman for daring to speak to Jesus. They were astonished. But it should be we who are astonished by their restraint.
We know they are not as wise as Jesus. But they know enough already that they are not to attack her. Even as they haven’t been with Jesus long enough to get tired of his constant harping on love and the least of these, they’re getting a sense of that already.
Almost Too Much
In the end, the miracle of the story becomes almost too grand. It makes the story feel like its theme is pure evangelism. The woman goes back, tells everybody about Jesus and the whole town returns with her.
But we get way more than that. This is a story of mixed identities, breaking social norms, and expanding community. Let us not miss this opportunity that fell right into our laps this morning.
Because it is those very conflicts over identity and community that resonate for us right now.
It would be easy to see Jesus’s boundary-breaking as an act of new norm-creating. Or too dwell only on its fruits.
But he is always drawing our attention back to God and what God is already doing in the world.
Jesus sees this woman for who she is. Not for what the world decides she is. And the disciples, for their part, choose to try to see it too—to see what Jesus sees. Rather than what they were taught.
And the woman? Well, she sees the face of God. What else can she do but praise and share and name the grace of the moment?
On Us
While we may feel hobbled by this novel coronavirus; our lives impaired by its inconvenience; it would be all the more tempting to cast our lot with the fearful and the hopeless. Or to read a story such as this as permission to walk into the lion’s den and expect to never get hurt.
Let us instead remember the first Sunday in Lent was about trial and temptation. Jesus has some words for the idea of putting God to the test.
So how does this image of true, proximal intimacy between Jesus and this woman translate to us in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic?
It is no small thing that we are being asked to protect our weakest neighbors by not being physically present with them. And in the literal and physical sense, we are being asked to do the opposite of Jesus. But only if we are so stuck in our literal understanding of intimacy.
I see, instead, opportunity.
Opportunity to care for our neighbors in new ways, showing restraint, quietness, and time for discernment. We are not bound by the limits of our proximity. We can gather, just as we are trying to do today. Everywhere at once.
Because the great power of this story is the truth it reveals about intimacy. It is about allowing ourselves to be vulnerable as much as it is about seeing a person for who she really is. It is about looking beyond cultural norms and trying our best to see the child of God in front of us (or through a computer screen) as beloved. As true. As part of us.
We are being called to create intimate distance. Virtual and spiritual proximity. Bringing our closest friends as close as we can beyond our touch. A kind of communal bravery that can’t be seen or felt, but is no less known. Just as we are lifted by all of the saints who came before, we lift one another in hope and prayer and love.
We are gathered here by all of these forms, in love, learning to love. Every day is a new opportunity. May God bless us with many, many more.