A sermon on John 4:5-42 for Third Sunday in Lent Year A
“So, I see you are something of a prophet. Well then, riddle me this. Where does God want us to worship? Here, on Mount Gerizim, where our ancestors have worshipped since the days of Jacob? Or Herod’s newfangled glitzy place in Jerusalem?”
It might sound like a pretty irrelevant question. Of course, there are still Samaritans worshipping on Mount Gerizim today, but the Temple in Jerusalem is long gone, and while I imagine Samaritans and Jews are still arguing about the Torah, you could be forgiven for thinking that it doesn’t have a lot to do with us.
Or does it?
Let’s start with the beef between the Jews and the Samaritans.
Bible quiz time! Who can tell me something about the Samaritans?
The Samaritan tradition is that they are the descendants of the Jews who were not taken into exile in Babylon. They still exist – there were 820 in 2019, about half in Israel proper and half in the West Bank, and they speak a version of Hebrew. Populations used to be much larger, but some pretty unwise revolts, and conversions to Christianity and Islam, and a strong reluctance to accept converts on their part, have left them a tiny minority.
Broadly, from the perspective of the Samaritans, they are the protectors of the Torah. They actively don’t call themselves “Jews.” Rather, they call themselves, firstly, “B’nai Israel”, which means “the children of Israel”, and then “Shamerin” which means something like keepers, watchers, or defenders of the Law. They don’t accept any Biblical material later than the Torah, of which they have their own version, which they think is the original. They claim that the Jewish version, and hence the Christian version, was corrupted, particularly by Ezra. And, of course, they still worship on Mount Gerizim, which is the only place where they can celebrate the Passover.
Their current high priest, head of the Samaritans is a man named Aabed-El ben Asher ben Matzliach, and, according to their tradition, is the 133rd High Priest since Aaron. He was consecrated in 2013 and, interestingly, prior to that ran a company that produces Tahini on Mount Gerizim.
Anyway, they are a fascinating group, and they are a serious ethno-religious movement with their own strongly held traditions, not just as generic outcasts.
Maybe the best way to think of them as being very, very, very traditional Jews, who do not approve of all these new-fangled ideas in the prophets. Maybe we could think of it as something like the relationship between the Plymouth Brethren on the one hand and mainline Protestantism on the other?
I wonder if the Jews saw them as annoying fundamentalists who refused to enter the modern age? They must have been especially vexing to the Pharisees, who were religious modernizers, calling on everyone to lift their game, intellectually, morally, and ritually to forge a nation fit for God’s purposes. They don’t feature much in this story, but it’s good to be reminded that the Pharisees, weren’t just generic bad guys, were the leading edge of the emerging Rabbinic Judaism which we still have today. And Jesus seemed to be part of that conversation as well of course – don’t forget last week when Nicodemus addressed him as “rabbi.”
At any rate, you can see why there was no love lost between the two groups, and hence why, as the woman said, they did not have things in common.
While we are doing some Biblical background, it is worth noting that we do not have the name of the Samaritan woman. The Orthodox tradition gives her the name Photini. She is usually portrayed in art as a young woman, but I don’t see any evidence about her age.
A lot of the commentaries assume that she was, to say the least, quite fast, having divorced five husbands and now living in sin with a new man to whom she was not married. But I don’t know that we need to automatically assume that. It seems entirely possible that she had been widowed a number of times and was now living with a male protector who could perfectly well have been a relative.
Certainly, Jesus doesn’t either to rebuke her or offer forgiveness like he does the woman taken in adultery.
In fact, given the way she so easily persuades the rest of the village to meet with Jesus, it seems pretty unlikely to me that she was seen as some sort of loose woman. That would suggest a sort of moral flexibility in Samaritan village life which seems a long way away from their ultra-traditionalism.
In all the images of the scene I have found she is portrayed as a young woman, but the text doesn’t say anything of the sort. If she had in fact been widowed five times, and was now living with a nephew, or even a son, then she would have to be a woman of a certain age.
For what it’s worth, my guess is that the most likely truth is that she was a respected town elder, related to half the village through her various marriages, who had suffered a lot, seen an awful lot of life, and whose word carried weight.
Anyway, whatever the details of her backstory, she is a great character. She reminds me of the Syrophoenician woman who persuaded Jesus to heal her child. Again, in some of the commentaries I have read, the feeling is that she didn’t show adequate respect to Jesus. But I think that’s a very boring read, and probably irrelevant.
I think that she and Jesus engage in some top-quality banter.
She keeps her cool very impressively when he produces his surprising insight about her personal life and takes the initiative. “So, you’re a prophet, are you? Riddle me this then my young friend. Resolve this question which has had Jews and Samaritans at each other’s throats for hundreds of years. Where should we worship God?”
When we ask “where should we worship God” we are not just asking a question about physical location. The different sanctuaries had different traditions, were responsible to different authorities, represented whole different ways of seeing God and how best to relate to God. It is kind of the like the difference between worshipping God in a synagogue or a mosque or a church. Each of them sums up an entirely different way of seeing the world.
So we could just as easily say: how should we worship God?
Even that probably doesn’t cut close enough to the bone for our culture where an activity we refer to as “worshipping God” is seen as very much a minority pursuit, on the same lines as a fondness for flower arranging or choral singing. There’s a long discussion to be had here, but “how do you worship God” in its fullest meaning is something like “what is at the absolute centre of your life? What do you serve?” Because, as Bob Dylan said, everybody has to serve someone. It is not optional. Even if you don’t know what it is you are serving, that just shows how deeply held in the unexamined centre of your life it is.
Who do you worship? Who do you serve? What is at the centre of your life?
That is what Jesus and the Samaritan woman were talking about, and that question is every bit as relevant today as it ever was. Perhaps even more so, because we live in a world where we have to choose for ourselves who, or what, we worship.
What Jesus says in reply is interesting. He neither says that Jews and Samaritans worship the same God and so, therefore, it doesn’t really matter. It is important that his point is not “inclusive” in the sort of way a modern-day liberal might understand, where we are tempted to underplay the differences between two viewpoints.
He begins by stating that salvation comes from the Jews.
This makes sense – Jesus is very much seen in Scripture as both the rightful King of the Jews, and the fulfilment of prophecy. Given that most of the prophecies in question comes from the various books of the prophets, and obviously the Samaritans would have had precisely zero time for them, conceptually, salvation really had to come from the Jews.
But it’s more than an argument about the relative importance of different religious texts.
To say that salvation comes from the Jews is to say that God’s salvation of the world works itself out not just through the triumphs of the covenant between Abraham and God, or through the Exodus story of God leading the Children of Israel out of Egypt and through the wilderness to the promised land. It also includes the terrible catastrophe of the fall of Jerusalem and the Exile to Babylon and the return to Israel and the frankly disappointing reality that led to. All that triumph and disaster, with God working out God’s promises.
It includes the irony of God working out God’s promises in the context of national and personal disaster, not through one glorious triumph after another. It means God reveals Godself through pain and suffering as much as through joy and success.
Perhaps even more so.
Or, as Luther put it, it is the difference between a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. A theology of glory thinks that God reveals Godself through splendid and impressive things – through meeting everyone’s material needs, or rule of the world, or astonishing acts of divine power. Through turning stones into bread, taking rule over the whole world, or throwing oneself off the roof of the temple in order for God’s angels to catch you as you fall. Sound familiar?
So, part of the Good News here is to do with a definite story, a particular history, starting very, very small, in the first step of faith of one family, of Abram and Sarai heeding God’s call to “go”, spreading through their children and their children’s children throughout history, broadening out into an offering for the whole world.
It isn’t something we could figure out from first premisses. It is not exactly a story of a gradually increasing understanding of God, such as we might hear from a scientist or some sorts of modernist philosophies – that, back in the olden days people used to believe all sorts of nonsense, but now, fortunately we have the solution to all problems through the power of scientism or scientific materialism or what have you.
The story of salvation requires a whole history of salvation is real and important and not something which could be figured out from first principles, because it is so unlikely, because God’s way of saving us is so strange and unlike what we would have expected, but it is the only possible way. Because it is not an idea that we can figure out, but a family into which we are adopted.
But that is to move away from Jesus’ metaphors here. It’s not that worshipping on Mount Gerizim is any better or worse than worshipping in the Temple at Jerusalem. Ultimately, both of them are secondary to this new thing that God is doing.
And that new thing is the coming of Jesus Christ, his life, death, resurrection, and glorious ascension. This sums up and fulfils all the law and the prophets. Through Jesus Christ, God comes to us, and the new life God offers is more like a fountain gushing up in the wilderness than it is like a well where we have to laboriously draw water every day.
The woman says: I know that when Messiah comes, he will explain all things to us, and Jesus says: I am he.
Jesus is the one all the promises, all the arguments, all the suffering has been leading up to. Everything that has come before Jesus reaches its critical point with and through him. The promise that the Father made to Abram and Sarai is going to be thrown open to everyone. The forms of worship and the details of liturgies and the ideas are all made completely secondary by Jesus to worshiping God in Spirit and in truth, which will lead to something a lot more like a spring of water to someone who is very thirsty than passing a systematic theology exam.
The Good News here is that, through Jesus, God offers this drink of water, this unending fountain of life, to all of us who ask Jesus. The woman at the well raced off to tell her friends back at the village, and they all came to believe.
So the question for us here is this: how are you drinking from the water of life? It is a living reality in your life? Or is it something of a fond memory? Perhaps Lent offers a chance to reacquaint yourself with the primary reality of God, beyond all the rosters that need filling, all the complexity around property and Presbyteries and so on. At the end of all this, the question is: have you drunk of the life-giving water that Jesus offers?
Because Jesus offers this new life to all of us. Jesus offers us to share our lives, to draw us into the three-personed dance of the life of God, the one loves each of us individually and by name, the one who is worthy of all trust, the one who will never forsake us.
To the holy, blessed and glorious Trinity,
three persons and one God,
be all glory and praise, dominion and power,
now and forever.
Amen.
Alister Pate 