Scripture: Exodus 17:1-7; John 4: 1-15

“‘Sir,’ said the woman, ‘give me some of this water, so that I may never get thirsty and never have to come here again to draw water.’”

-- John 4:15

We hear several things in this response of the woman at the well; we hear  the weariness of women who have to walk long distances balancing water pots, as I have frequently seen in Africa, the misunderstanding that takes Jesus literally when he is speaking symbolically, and the narrow selfishness of a person who bears water for herself alone and would not do it if she herself did not thirst. So we need to be nimble to take advantage of the symbolic riches of this Gospel.

The central symbol last week was transformation, presented in terms of the changing of water into wine. It conveyed the idea that faith in Jesus transforms our lives, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from simple life to eternal life. The central symbol this week is water alone, untransformed but nevertheless life giving. It makes basically the same point as last week’s symbol, that faith in Jesus gives eternal life. Water is simply essential to life and Jesus is simply essential to eternal life. Jesus is to the soul as water is to the body; without him the soul dies of thirst, with him, there is in the believer, “…a spring welling up to eternal life.” The believer is not only the recipient of spiritual water but also the source of it for others, like a spring whose water bubbles up and flows out. There can be no argument about the material side of this comparison; water is essential for the body. There is a lot of argument about the spiritual side; Jesus might not be essential to the life of the soul. This is the point of Christian faith.

To further our understanding we must frame our interpretation with historical information. Who were the Samaritans? In an apocryphal book that occurs in the Catholic Bible but not in ours, named The Wisdom of Ben Sirach (50: 25-26), a Jewish writer of the 2nd century BC says of the Samaritans, “There are two nations that my soul detests, and the third is not a nation at all: the inhabitants of Mount Seir, and the Philistines, and the stupid people living at Shechem.” The Samaritan woman was one of these stupid people and the well where Jesus met her was at Shechem. The Samaritans as a group were thought by the Jews to be the descendants of the five nations that the king of Assyria settled in the region after the deportation of the Israelites. In 2 Kings 17:24 we read, “The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim, and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites; they took possession of Samaria and lived in its towns.” You recall from our study of the 8^th century OT prophets that Samaria was the capital of the northern Kingdom and was destroyed by the Assyrians in 721BC.

Some interpreters think that Jesus’ reference to the woman’s five husbands is a coded indictment of the Samaritans for worshiping the five idols of their five original groups. This is plausible especially since the discussion of the husbands leads directly to the woman’s question, “I see you are a prophet Sir… Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, while you say that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship. Jesus said: ‘Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…God is spirit and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth (4:20-24 passim).”

So there is a religious and ethnic division in the historical context. Jews did not regard the Samaritans as equals. Indeed, their reserve was the more intense because the Samaritans were not simply no member of the family at all, but half-siblings, and so provoked the hostility characteristic of situations where the other is just similar enough to be not fully other.

Then the interlocutor was a woman, and alone at the well at midday. Commentators remark that she must have been a social outcast to come alone at such an unusual hour. I heard recently in South Africa of a local government agency that canceled a project to bring water in pipes into a village because the women argued that the pipes would destroy their culture. What would happen to their way of life if they could not parade to and from the riverside, and gather there to gossip? How would the young men know that their daughters were ready if the daughters could no longer put on the proper dress and jewelry and saunter invitingly with the water pot on high? The Samaritan woman was not part of that parade, perhaps five husbands, and now a sixth she didn’t bother to marry was too much for the village. However, she did not have to be disreputable to make this conversation socially remarkable, just female. It was against the code for men to engage women in conversation in public, especially holy men, rabbis and the kind. The point is clear: Jesus is oblivious of the ethnic, religious, social and gender hang-ups of his time and that place.

As I read of the transfer of population groups into Samaria by the Assyrian king I thought of the fact that Shechem today is the populous Palestinian city of Nablus. I’m sure many Jerusalem Jews refer to the Palestinians as Ben Sirach did, “the stupid people living in Shechem,” and much worse. I remember that all the water of the occupied territories is completely controlled by the State of Israel, that the Samaritans cannot drink their own water without Zionist permission, that if Jesus wanted to draw water from Jacob’s well today he would have to get a Zionist permit.  What do you think would happen to Jesus if he were found today speaking alone to a Palestinian woman? Both of them would probably be killed by both sides.

So we have looked at some of the historical context then and now in order to enrich our interpretation of the symbol of water as the sign of life overflowing all the cultural barriers we erect to justify our scandalous cruelty and rapacity. What other context is there that might enrich our reading of the symbol? There is the literary history of this book, that is, the process by which it came to be written as it is. This chapter 4 tells of the conversion of Samaritans to Jesus. At another level it tells of the entry of Samaritans into the community of the Beloved Disciple in which this book was written. The first layer of material in the book comes from the circles around John the Baptist, whose disciples left him to follow Jesus, as the last part of the first chapter tells us. The second layer comes from these Samaritans, and chapter 4 is a symbolic account of their entry into the community. A group of Samaritan Christians is giving us a coded account of its conversion, telling us that it was the obliviousness of Jesus to social difference that enabled them to hear the word. “Many Samaritans of that town had believed in him on the strength of the woman’s testimony when she said, ‘He told me all I had ever done,’ so when the Samaritans came up to him, they begged him to stay with them. He stayed for two days, and when he spoke to them many more came to believe; and they said to the woman, ‘Now we no longer believe because of what you told us; we have heard him ourselves and we know that he really is the savior of the world (4:39-42).” This is the state that the Gospel wants all of us who read it to attain, to taste for ourselves the water of life.

The Samaritans brought with them the intense focus of their traditional theology on Moses. Their messiah was not to be Son of David (the first layer of the Gospel) but rather the Taheb, the second Moses, (Deut 18:18-19 – “I will raise up a prophet like yourself (Moses) for them from their own brothers; I will put my words into his mouth and he shall tell them all I command him. The man who does not listen to my words that he speaks in my name, shall be held answerable to me for it.”  Chapter 6 is an extended piece on Jesus the one greater than Moses, because he not only gave them bread from heaven and water from the rock,  but is himself that divine bread and that life giving water.

The Samaritans probably also gave us the high theology of the pre-existent divine word, which is the foundation of the orthodox Christian faith in the Trinity. If Jesus is greater than Moses because he does not merely give the heavenly bread and the living water, but is the living bread and water, then his status is equal with God.