By Reverend Laurie DeMott

She came to the well at the sixth hour of the day, at noon, long after the other women had come and gone. For many in the small Samaritan village, fetching water from the well was a time to be sociable, to renew ties with one another and catch up on the news, and so the daily water runs were a pleasant way to start and end each day. First thing in the morning and last thing before the sun began its evening decline, women would pick up their jars to make the hike to the well and share a few minutes with one another in conversation. The only woman who would choose to go to the well in the heat of the noonday sun was a woman who wanted to ensure that she would be at that well alone.

The Samaritan woman was a lonely woman. Her relationships with the others in town were so strained that she chose to go out of her way to isolate herself rather than cope with the uneasiness she felt in the presence of her neighbors. It wasn’t that she was shy – there were shy women who hung back a bit from the rest of the crowd or dawdled on the caution so that they would arrive at the well as the rest were beginning to disperse, but shyness wasn’t enough to drive a person to wait four hours to fetch her water. Nor was she simply seeking quiet solitude: life in the first century wasn’t filled with the kind of frenetic activity and whirlwind of meetings that causes us to yearn for a minute alone. Meditations could be accomplished while grinding the barley for the evening meal. No, this woman’s choice to draw water at noon was a calculated avoidance of the others in her village. Something in her soul was so frightened by the thought of being around her neighbors that she deliberately constructed her life to avoid all unnecessary interactions. What could make a woman prefer loneliness to relationship? What creates such a profound wariness in a human heart that a person would sever ties with her fellow human beings rather than experience the possibilities of friendship, warmth, and community?

When I think of this woman and her distrust of relationship, I think of the embittered elderly man alone in his apartment who rejects all offers of assistance because his pride will not allow him to admit his need for help. I think of the abused child who has learned the sad lesson that the only one she can trust to care for her is herself. I think of the young Black man who tries to believe in a color-blind society but whose faith is tested constantly by the everyday bigotry of people too quick to make judgments on the basis of skin color. I think of the young woman who reveals her struggle with her sexuality to her youth minister only to have him condemn her and cast her out of the congregation. I am sure that you can think of many people as well who have been hurt, betrayed, disappointed, or judged too many times in their lives and so have decided that it is safer to build strong walls around their hearts and live in their loneliness rather than invite the possibility of relationship with its risk of even more pain.

The Samaritan woman came to the well to wrap herself in her armor of loneliness and the last thing she expected -- or wanted -- was for Jesus to be there.

Last night at the youth overnight, I showed the kids the same slides that I showed you today and we talked about the reaction of the woman at the well to Jesus’ presence. They noticed that in nearly every artist’s depiction of this scene, Jesus looked straight into the eyes of the woman, while the woman looked at the ground, or the sky, or her feet – anywhere but at Jesus. “She’s afraid to look him in the eye,” they said. There was one painting that did show the woman casually lounging against the well, seemingly more at ease than the figures in the other artist’s depictions, but the kids saw through that immediately and laughed at her ‘Hey, I’m cool,’ look. They recognized in her posture an attempt to disguise her underlying fear of scrutiny by pretending disinterest, a fear and a pretense every adolescent is all too familiar with.

As we discussed the woman’s fear and her obvious expectation of rejection, I explained the assumptions and culture of the first century. First of all, the woman was a Samaritan and Jesus was a Jew. The two groups didn't have much to do with one another, their disdain having a healthy legacy of over 500 years behind it. The Jews had not been able to get over the fact that while they were in exile in Babylon, some of the Jews from Samaria were not exported but stayed behind and married colonists from Babylon producing a nation of “half-breeds”. And the Samaritans couldn't get over the audacity of the Jews who came back from Exile and rebuilt Jerusalem without a by-your-leave from the Samaritans as if the Samaritans hadn't been taking care of the land for all those years of their absence. Their feud had grown to include charges of impurity on both sides and theological squabbles and arguments over rituals but at its base the Samaritans and Jews hated each other for the same reason people have been hating each other in the Middle East forever-- they hated sharing the same piece of land. Our youth grasped the situation right away – “It’s like the Sunni’s and the Shi’ites,” they said. Our world has unfortunately never lacked for analogies to ethnic hatreds.

“But even if she hadn’t been a Samaritan,” I continued, “she was something just as bad in the first century mind: she was a woman. Jewish men weren’t supposed to talk to women and in fact, later on Jewish men were taught to recite a daily prayer that said, ‘Thank God I was not born a woman, a dog, or a Gentile.’” The girls rolled their eyes at this and snorted in disgust.

“So, how do you think she felt when Jesus spoke to her?” I asked.

“Shocked,” they said immediately. They recognized the audacity of what Jesus had done, flaunting social convention to talk to a female “half-breed”.

“Would you have talked to her?” I pursued and the kids again just rolled their eyes but this time their disgust was directed at the stupidity of such a question.

“Of course,” they replied, and when I pressed them on this question, they couldn’t come up with a single category that would make them judge a person as unworthy of their attention – not gender, color, sexuality, political persuasion, or even – and this one is a big one for teenagers – not even their coolness factor.

“You’d even talk to the uncool kids at school?” I persisted.

“I am an uncool kid!” one laughed with absolute honesty. No one could come up with a single category that would prevent them from trying to bridge the chasm of another person’s isolation.

And so the beginning of this story in John depicts a very familiar Jesus who has for the most part gotten into the heads and hearts of this congregation. Here is a Jesus who refuses to judge people by conventional standards but pushes aside every objection to communion. Samaritan or Jew, man or woman, white or Black, gay or straight, red-state or blue-state, rich or poor, able-bodied or physically challenged, liberal or conservative, slave or free, on and on our categories go and on and on Jesus strides right through them, ignoring the human desire to give some people greater accessibility to God simply because of a trick of birth. If this is where the story ended, it would be a familiar one, difficult perhaps in its challenge but a challenge that we in this church have accepted and tried to embrace.

But the story doesn’t end here. Jesus does push through the barriers and does reach across the woman’s isolation, but even Jesus can only go so far. There is one barrier that he will not smash, one door that ultimately has to opened from the other side.

“Go get your husband,” Jesus says in a seemingly abrupt change of conversation but this is no idle non-sequitor. Jesus knows the woman’s sin -- he knows her strange string of marriages and he knows that she is now living in adultery. Whatever liberal views we may have today about relationships, her history is excessive even by our standards, and there is something inherently damaging about the way she is choosing to live her life. Perhaps her isolation is caused in part by society’s prejudice against things over which she has no control – her gender or ethnic background – but much of her isolation is due also to behavior of her own choosing. To be healed of her loneliness will require not only the willingness of Jesus to reach across the divisions of society but also that she admit her own unhealthy behaviors. Jesus doesn’t reject her out of hand as so many of us would, but neither will he entirely absolve her of responsibility. Instead, he looks her straight in the eye and challenges her to confront her own sin with absolute honesty.

Absolute honesty about ourselves and a willingness to change the behaviors that are damaging ourselves, our loved ones, and the quality of our future is never easy and in today’s society with its culture of victimization and dogma of self-esteem, admitting our responsibility for our own unhappiness is not easy. Bill Waterson characterizes our unwillingness to look ourselves honestly in the mirror in a “Calvin and Hobbes” cartoon from 1995. Calvin sits at his desk in school scowling at a paper, and complains to his teacher, “This grade is lowering my self-esteem.” She shrugs and says, “Then you should work harder so you don’t get bad grades.” Calvin mulls this over for a second and then frowns at her again, “Your denial of my victimhood is lowering my self-esteem!”

Jesus challenges the woman to look in the mirror and confess her responsibility for the struggle and isolation she is experiencing. “Go get your husband,” he tells her, and dares her to lie, dares her to make excuses, dares her to deny that she has any control over her own choices, dares her to look him in the eye and say, “It's not my fault. I'm just too weak. I'm going to leave him any day now, I'm just waiting for the right time. It's really nothing, I've got it under control. Don't blame me.”

In Wayne Forte's painting of the Woman at the Well, we see the woman caught in that moment when she must decide. Jesus has gone as far as he can. He has pushed through all of the barriers that people have constructed before this woman, and has held out a promise of new and abundant life, but he can go no further without her help. It is up to the woman ultimately to turn away from the shadow and into the light.

We worship the Christ who has the courage to challenge every prejudice of society, who dares to tell the truth to power, who refuses to judge any of us by the circumstances of our birth, who will defend to the death our place in the heart of God, but there are some doors even Christ cannot open because they need to be opened from the inside. Would the Samaritan woman have the courage to face herself with absolute honesty and accept not only the new life that Christ offered but the changes that it would require of her? Will you?

John 4:28 “Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.” What need did she have of the old water jug when she had decided to drink of the living water of Christ?