A Sermon for the Third Sunday in Lent
Linda M. Maloney
Exodus 17:1-7
Psalm 81
Romans 5:1-11
John 4:5-42
It's amazing how some people can make a mess of the best stories: they don t get the point, or they forget the punch line, or they put something into the story that just doesn t belong there. Here, in today's readings, we have two perfectly good love stories: somebody took the first one and made it an accusation, and as for the second, interpreters have taken a tremendous, sexy romance and made it a banal bit of pornography, tut-tutting about this shameful woman with her five husbands. Maybe we can do better than that.
The original of the first story is part of the tale of Israel's nuptial journey from Egypt to Sinai. Lack of water is a recurrent and familiar problem along that route. In the course of the journey, Israel moves from the Nile through the Sea of Reeds to the wilderness of Shur, where they find bitter water at Marah and cry out to God. God not only gives them water, but promises to keep them free of all sickness. That story, and this one about the rock at Rephidim, frame the great feeding story of the manna. The whole sequence involves a battle (at the sea), water, food, water, and another battle (against Amalek), and then Israel arrives at Sinai. On this bridal journey, God has provided everything Israel needs: food, water, and protection from their enemies. God asks nothing in return but their love and fidelity. The covenant nuptials will be celebrated at Sinai. There is a song about all this in Psalm 81: "I hear a voice I had not known: [says Israel]
I relieved your shoulder of the burden;The second story is also about a wooing and a wedding. We are in the context of the Cana-to-Cana section of the Fourth Gospel (John 2, 3, and 4), and so we are already alerted to bridal imagery, not only from the wedding scene at Cana, but from the words of John the Baptizer just before this: "He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice" (3:29).
your hands were freed from the basket.
In distress you called, and I rescued you;
I answered you in the secret place of thunder;
O that my people would listen to me,
that Israel would walk in my ways!
Then I would quickly subdue their enemies,
and turn my hand against their foes
I would feed you with the finest of the wheat,
and with honey from the rock I would satisfy you.
Almost immediately, then, the bride appears. Like the other great symbolic figures in this gospel, she is nameless --but we know she is the bride because we are thrust into the world of the patriarchs by the detailed location of the story at Jacob's well, "near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph." At the well-- that is where Israel's patriarchs found their brides. So Isaac's servant found Rebekah, asking her for water. There Jacob met Rachel. And at a well in Midian, Moses found his wife, Zipporah.
So the new Lord of Israel comes courting Samaria at Jacob's well. But Samaria is quite startled, for the hatred between Jews and Samaritans ran bitter as the waters of Marah. (Like warring groups of Christians, they worshiped the same God, but had quarreled many centuries earlier about where and how to worship, and about who got to make the decisions.) Jews were as reluctant to share dishes with Samaritans as Christian denominations are to exchange the communion cup. (We always get this from the Jewish point of view, as if the Samaritans were the outsiders waiting around to be let in, but I suspect the Samaritans had a different view of the matter.)
The revealer of Israel and the woman of Samaria embark on a theological dialogue. She tests him on his relationship to the patriarch Jacob, because Samaria's theology was Mosaic and patriarchal, rather than Davidic and royal. She acknowledges that her relationship with her divine husband is irregular, for Samaria had five sets of gods in its shady past, and is now bereft of its true husband because Judea and Samaria, which should be one Israel, are divided making the God of Israel a polygamist. To turn the image another way, we could say that the Jews are God's true bride, and Samaria is nothing but a concubine. The woman's recognition that Jesus is a prophet is close to acknowledging him as Messiah, for Samaria expected a prophet like Moses who would reveal all things and restore true worship. So the dialogue passes on, logically, to the question of worship and culminates in Jesus's self-revelation as "I am," the very name by which God was known to Samaria.
With this, the wooing of Samaria is accomplished: the woman leaves her water jar, just as other disciples left their boats and nets, and goes to evangelize the town. Jesus explains to the bewildered Jewish disciples that the time of harvest is at hand, and immediately the fruits of the woman's reaping appear, as the people of the town come out to meet him. Jesus dwells with them, becomes central to their lives, and just like the disciples before and after them, they come to know Jesus through his own words: something that could never have happened without the woman's "come and see!"
Because we are on the nuptial journey of Lent, being led to the bridal night of Easter, the readings are full of baptismal imagery, of water images. This is not just water for drinking or washing. These waters are birth-waters. It is the union of the royal bridegroom and the rescued bride that makes fecund the waters of the baptismal font, the water that brings forth Christians. This is the water that gushes forth from the rock in the desert, and this is the living water welling up within [cf. 4:14 with 7:38]. This is the cradle of new life.
(When the full liturgy for the Easter Vigil is carried out, part of the blessing of the font involves the threefold immersion of the Easter candle into the waters with a sung prayer that the "virtus" of the Holy Spirit might descend into "this fruitful font." We don't see that being done very often: probably somebody caught on to the fact that these were pretty sexy goings-on to be doing right out there in front of the children and God and everybody, so you rarely see it nowadays. But it remains part of the Church's faith that the baptismal font is the spiritual womb from which Christians are reborn by the power of the Holy Spirit.)
The disciples do not understand what Jesus can be "seeking" of this woman. They do not understand the bridegroom's wooing. What Jesus "seeks" of the woman is that her acceptance of him as her lover will make her fecund of new believers. He is fed and satisfied by her response to his invitation. Before the wedding banquet can begin, the harvest must be gathered, and in a twining of metaphors this remarkable bride brings forth a harvest of new believers. So successful is her mission that the effect is universal: at the end, Jesus is acclaimed not only as Israel's Messiah, but a "the savior of the world."
It would be too bad if we were to rush ahead to the missionary task pointed out for us in Jesus speech to the disciples--the job that is assigned to us, the already-baptized--without entering again, this Lent and every Lent, into the experience of being wooed and courted and gifted. To Israel, and to the renewed Israel that is the Church, to the woman of Samaria and to those who are blind and deaf and speechless, and to some who are stone-cold dead, God comes courting again every spring, saying: "I will allure you, and bring you into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to you. There you shall respond as in the days of your youth, as at the time when you came out of the land of Egypt. I will take you to me in faithfulness, and you shall know your God" (Hos. 2:14, 15, 20).
The Word of God says: God cares for you: you are forgiven. God comes seeking you: you are desired. God loves you.
Do you want to make something of that?
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