Lent 3
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 24th February, 2008
I wonder how many of us here have had the experience of being used by someone and then dumped or discarded? (I won´t ask for a show of hands!) You give your best, do what you can to help, but it is taken for granted. You feel like a kleenex tissue, used to soak someone´s tears, or meeting their momentary need, and then thrown away. Encounters like this diminish us as a person and they eat away at our sense of personal worth and well-being. And when we have to put up with a number of such negative experiences where our good nature has been exploited, then we not only feel diminished but we can become bitter, cautious and suspicious of human relationships. We may even become anti-social characters, outwardly abrasive o reven aggressive, while underneath we are afraid and still feel the pains o fold wounds. Those who love to be feared are often those who fear to be loved. We put up barriers. We don´t want to be ever used and then discarded again.
I believe the woman of Samaria was like this. She had endured five, maybe six, encounters of the hurtful kind and had taken to avoiding human company. She was collecting water at noon by herself and not with the other women in the morning. When she found Jesus at the well she was probably on her guard. It is far too generally assumed that this woman was a hardened sinner, a brazen marriage wrecker, sly, ruthless, getting through the men, sexually promiscuous. Some see Jesus in this story as exposing her sordid sex life. I quote from one 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”. (Well, whenever I hear a man speaking like that my warning lights come on – are you talking about her or you?)
I believe this woman is mor likely to be the one who was mistreated and demeaned. She had been divorced five time and was living with a sixth man. Remember, in Jesus´s day only men had all the rights to divorce and they could divorce a wife on the smallest pretext, he had only to attest ”something unseemly in her” – the way she looked in the morning, the way she sings, the fact that she can´ t cook? To make a divorce effective a male witness had to be there as the man simply wrote a dismissal notice.
Then, a divorced woman, unless she had independent means, lost all status and value in the community. She was seen as a reject, a disgrace. Her own family were loathe to receive her back and her existence became precarious, employment was limited to being a menial servant but high class women were unlikely to employ a divorcee and put temptation near their husbands. There were no unemployment benefits so the options were be a servant, marry again quickly, become a mistress or a prostitute or starve. Societies do not like people who are in such desperation. It is unnerving. We tend to scapegoat on them.
This woman of Samaria is like to have been a diminished person, a tattered remnant of what God created her to be. Her encounters with men were damaging, her self image had shrunk, the righteous women of the village kept their distance. And then, after the six men, she has a seventh encounter (the number of completeness and wholeness) and this time everything is different.
She comes to the well at the hottest time of the day thinking no-one will be out and she is surprised to meet a tired looking man. Jesus neither ignores her not avoids her. Her doesn´t treat her as diseased. Instead he does something rather beautiful. He asks her for s drink. The diminished woman is asked to help him. He doesn´t say what can I do for you, but, can you help me please? He comes alongside her, not above her. The woman is puzzled and asks what´s going on here. He talks of clear water bubbling up with life and you can hear her cry, Sir, I need that so badly: please give it to me. Jesus then opens up the sad story of her past, the talk about her husbands confronts the woman with the truth and with her pain. She tries to change the subject by talking about the difference between Jews and Samaritans. Forget about that, Jesus says, God is spirit and those who worship must worship in spirit and in truth. To get back her spirit she must recognise her truth. And the truth that she is a child of God still, loved and cherished, and full of potential that was being trapped.
The disciples arrive and are put out that Jesus is talking to a woman, and that sort of woman as well – a Samaritan half-breed, a village sinner. They still have a lot to learn about grace being our rule, not law. They, like us, can be grateful for the way we have been held in his arms but don´t like the fact that others are held there too.
The story ends with the woman going back into town and witnessing to what she had discovered in this man. Amazing – she now has the confidence to hold her head high and talk to those who despise her. Her self- respect seems to have returned. It can´t have been easy. You cam inagine – oh, she´s found another one!! But something must have showed, some change must have been plain. The village were impressed and intrigued and, again something unheard of, a Samaritan town invites a group of Jewish men to sit down and eat and talk with them. We sense that a new way of looking at things, a new way of being, is breaking in. It all started at a well.
I pray this this church, that all churches, are such wells of divine discovery. Meeting together with Christ by the water that bubbles up with life that is fresh and forever, and in that water learning to wash away the image of our self and others that we have accumulated and which demean, and to drink deeply, learning again to live up to the image of God that lies within us all so that we can relate to our neighbours with fellowship not fear. Sir, give me this water so that I may never be thirsty again.
