WOULD YOU HAVE SPOKEN TO HER?

(Preached on Sunday, February 27, 2005)

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”                                                                                 -John 4:7

 

She slouched down onto the seat across from him on the subway.  Heavy boots patched with duct tape.  Military camouflage pants caked with dirt and four-letter words.  A ratty black leather jacket over a tattered sweat shirt — a deliberate raggedness that spoke more of anger than poverty.  A gray hood draped over her head and hiding her face.

She was young and female — that much he gathered from a slim, long fingered hand that held a ballpoint pen angrily scratching another obscenity among many others on her pants.  The retired editor of Christian books and former journalist, disliked her instantly.

And then, for one long moment, she raised her head and he could see her face.  She had a soft, pale, classically sculpted fine-featured face — one of the most beautiful he had ever seen.  Her eyes were especially amazing.  Deep, gray eyes — wonderfully beautiful eyes — eyes so full of sorrow and pain — so very sad and deeply, viscerally tired.

She looked in his direction, but she didn’t see him.

She didn’t see the look of astonishment on his face.

Her eyes didn’t focus on him or much of anything else.

The subway pulled into a station.  Head down, she slouched her way across the platform and was lost into the crowd.

 

He continued on, but could not get her pale and lovely face out of his mind.  And her eyes — which seemed to see everything and nothing. 

There was confusion in his mind — should he have done something — said something?  But what?  And what could be the story behind that sad and wondrous face — what was the pain, the terror, the confusion, the abuse that drove her into that unfocused, angry solitude? 

Several stops later he got off the subway, and there on the wall was an advertisement from a religious group.  It had big letters.  WWJD. 

He knew they stood for “What Would Jesus Do?”

 

What did Jesus do?

She had to go to the well in the middle of the day.

Maybe one of her children tipped over the storage jay she had filled with water that morning.

Maybe she never went out int he morning — so she could avoid the whispered comments and stern glares of the other women, who did not approve of her many marriages and current living arrangements.

Whatever the reason for a midday trip to the well, she was probably not happy about the chore.  Carrying water is hard enough, without having to do it in the blazing heat of the midday sun.

 

[Let’s pause the picture there for a moment.  The truth is, we really don’t know why the woman was at the well in the middle of the day.  For far too many years and far too often, it has been assumed by most interpreters that this woman is a hardened sinner.  A brazen marriage wrecker, sly, ruthless, exploiting male weakness.  Most sermons you read or have ever heard on this passage have tended to paint her as a sexually promiscuous woman.  Some see Jesus as exposing her sordid sex life.  To quote one world renowned preacher: “He lifted the lid off her personality.  Forced her to look down at the sickening sight of her own moral weakness and to smell the stench of her uncontrollable, lustful nature.”

 

But perhaps the truth is that the woman was more likely to be the one who was mistreated and demeaned.  She had been divorced five times and was now living with a sixth man outside of the bonds of marriage.

Remember, in Jesus’ day, men held almost all the rights to divorce.

A man could divorce his wife for almost any reason.  He only had to attest “something unseemly in her.”  This could be as trivial as the husband not liking the way his wife looked first thing in the morning, or the fact she boiled his egg too hard, or her singing voice sounded harsh, or if she answered back when he criticized her. 

All he had to do was call in a male witness, write out the dismissal notice, and it was a done deal.  A woman, on the other hand, could only divorce her husband for extreme measures; adultery, extreme abuse, failure to provide for her welfare.  And, she needed three witnesses to establish her case, which had to be presented to the elders of the community.  Either way, unless she was independently wealthy, a divorced woman lost all her status and value int he community. 

She was seen as damaged goods, a disgrace, often rejected as well by her family, and often unable to find work.

So, it seems highly likely that the woman of Samaria was a diminished person; devalued; a tattered remnant of what God created her to be; used and abused by the men in her life with her self-image probably bruised by her encounters with the women of the village.]

 

And then, as she approached the well, she saw a man, a stranger, seated next to it.  If she had not needed water so badly, she would have turned and gone home, rather than risk what promised to be a most awkward situation.

Imagine her great surprise when Jesus neither ignores her nor avoids her, but actually speaks to her.

He does not treat her as if she has some kind of disease.

Instead he does something very lovely.

He asks her to give him a drink.

 

Men in her society generally avoided speaking to women in public.

Plus, he was a Jew!  Jews did not deal with Samaritans, and for him to dare to drink from a jug of water she had drawn according to the laws of the Jews, would make him unclean.

But Jesus did not place himself above her, but beside her.

He was ready to gratefully allow her to help him.

 

That is what Jesus did.

But our subway rider realized that the tougher question was what should he do?  What could he possibly have done?

He is no Jesus and has neither the wit nor the courage to say the helpful thing — to say words that could be heard through the anger and the fear and the weariness.

But even so, he had learned something profound from that encounter.

He had learned that under the obscenities and behind the fear and anger, there is always a beauty and goodness.

There is always a soul made in the image of God.

 

Life is uncertain, and because we cannot say for sure what will happen, we have grown increasingly protective of ourselves, our space, and increasingly suspicious.  The real tragedy is becoming not that bad things happen to good people, but that because bad things can happen, we don’t always trust good people.

That is tragic because the truth is that we can’t, as individuals, take care of every one of our own needs.  We always need help — from God, from friends and family, from colleagues, even from strangers.

When we try to do everything by ourselves, in fact, we eventually burn out and miss much of the richness of life.  God did not intend for us to operate independently of one another.  The sum of all of us together is more magnificent, more wonderful, than any of the individual parts.

 

Theologian Leonard Sweet offers that “Our duty is not to see through one another, but to see one another.”

Jesus saw beauty shining through the lies and anger of that lonely Samaritan woman.