St. John’s United Church of Christ
February 24, 2008
A Sermon by the Rev. John Krueger
Reclaiming the Samaritan Woman John 4:5-42
When folk try to list the names of fallen women in the Bible, the disreputable characters, they usually include people like Queen Jezebel from the Old Testament and the Samaritan woman from the New Testament. Jezebel may have earned her way on this infamous list for her contests with God’s prophet, Elijah, but I would like to make a case on behalf of the Samaritan woman.
I have heard a number of sermons about this woman from Samaria, and even preached some myself with a much similar theme. The theme goes like this: Jesus encounters a woman at the public well while traveling through Samaria. The time is noon, the hottest time of the day. The reason she comes to the well at that time was to avoid the other women of the community. She is a loose-living woman of bad repute, one who has been married a number of times, the kind of woman you are warned about, to not associate with for your own good.
Jesus takes a huge risk in striking up a conversation with her. First, she is a woman, and men were not to talk with women, and secondly, she has this bad reputation. Jesus engages her in this theological discussion, and then he reveals himself to her as the Messiah. Her life is transformed because of this encounter and a fallen woman is redeemed for the Realm of God. She shares her testimony of faith with others in the village and they too come to see Jesus as the Savior of the world.
Well, that may actually be what happened on that day in Samaria as a fallen woman is welcomed into the arms of a redemptive God. But let me try another scenario for this encounter, one we can put along side this more traditional interpretation.
This woman is not a fallen woman at all. In fact, she is a respected matriarch of this community. She is an elderly woman who has been married five times, and each of her husbands has died. In that day it was crucially important for a woman to be married, for being married was usually her only means of support. Each of those marriages had ended in an untimely death, and she had no children born to any of those husbands. Five times she had grieved over the loss of a husband. Five times the joyous prospect of a life-long relationship had been crushed by a cruel death.
Now, in her waning years, she is living with a trusted neighbor but without the benefit of marriage. He too has experienced the disappointment of a spouse’s death, perhaps a number of marriages ending in death, for life expectancies were short in those days. Life was hard, and disease and sickness were a constant threat. They had shared their grieving with each other as each experienced the loss of those spouses, and they found support in each other’s company. Now, in the few remaining months or years of their lives, they decide to share that companionship. Instead of being shocked and repulsed, the community has rallied around these two elderly people. Instead of judging them they had granted them this unusual relationship as some solace for their multiple tragedies.
Now if you think I have been playing fast and loose with scripture, let me share why I think this is plausible. When the disciples who had been sent into the city to buy food returned to Jesus at the well, the woman leaves her water jar and goes back to the city. There she says to the townspeople, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” Hearing her, they go out to the well to see Jesus for themselves.
If this were a disgraced fallen woman, with no credibility, would they have acted on her strange story? If she were such a disreputable woman, would they have responded to her testimony and made their way to the well at the edge of town? I doubt it, unless she in fact was a believable witness.
Later in the story we are told, “Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I have ever done.’” And later, “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 Savior of the world.’”
I doubt if she would have had such a strong influence in the lives of those towns’ peoples if she had not been such a respected person. This was a society in which the testimony of women was not trusted, and unless a male verified a story told by a woman, it was not true. That is why although women were the first witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in each of the four Gospels, their story could not be believed until one of the male disciples verified what had happened.
This woman had two strikes against her: she was a woman and so not to be trusted, and she was a half-breed, a Samaritan. She didn’t need a third strike against her, being a disgraced and shunned woman.
Well, so what? What difference does all of this make? This woman was the first evangelist in John’s Gospel, the first to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, the Savior of the world. We met Nicodemus last week, deep into a heavy theological encounter with Jesus. He comes by night and leaves by night. He is not ready to be an evangelist. He gives a weak defense of Jesus in the 7th chapter and then doesn’t show up again until after the crucifixion.
This woman meets Jesus in the glare of the noon time sun. She is moved by this encounter and testifies to her new found faith to the toughest crowd of all, her friends. She is the first evangelist, and we can only wonder how her life was changed by this meeting at the well.
The Apostle Paul says we have this treasure, our lives in relation to God, in common clay pots that are useful but breakable, every day objects but uniquely made. This woman was such a common clay pot, a good woman but also a fallible woman, part saint and part sinner. Her life had been hard and demanding. Perhaps this latest life arrangement was irregular but understandable. In the midst of this life of disappointment, she met the Messiah doing the daily routine of fetching water. She is so filled with hope and new possibilities that she rushes to share her Good News with her friends, inviting them to meet the one who had changed her life.
There was something believable about her story, something in the transformation of her life that caught their attention. They see a dreary, sorrow-laden woman transformed into a bubbling, excited evangelist, and they are intrigued. Instead of just waiting for death and release from her burdens, she finds new meaning to the days she has left.
Could what had happened to her, happen to us? Is an encounter with the God of Jesus Christ possible for us, our routines turned upside down and our old life changed into new hope and promise?
A Bible story like this one is only a dusty old story until we see how it can speak to us in our time. Is there still time for us to be an evangelist, a Good News teller, a testifier to a God of grace and love that includes me, common clay pot though I may be?
We all live somewhat compromised lives, but is the Good News of Jesus Christ such Good News that we can become a convincing evangelist of how God in Christ has redeemed us? Do we tell the Good News, and live the Good News, so that others will come to know the Savior of this world? Well, there is still time, time enough, if we choose to use it.