I had lived in Rochester for quite some time before I really encountered the story of Susan B. Anthony and the women’s rights struggle. It’s not that it wasn’t right in front of me, it’s just that I didn’t pursue it or pay much attention to it. It was only in 2004, when an organization that I was part of was having an event here, that I dug deeper into the history and discovered how significant the story actually was.
Struggles for women’s rights required bold, tenacious women (as well as male allies like Frederick Douglass) in order to help make women visible in ways that they had not been previously.
And we have one of those women and one of those men in today’s gospel reading.
This passage from John 4 is referred to as the “Woman at the Well.” Jesus is crossing through Samaria (the land of the Samaritans who are the sworn enemies of the Israelites due to longstanding religious and cultural divisions) and stops at a well to get water. At the well, he encounters a woman also fetching water and they engage in a public theological dialogue (one of the longest in the gospels) which floors the disciples. When it is over, she goes back to her town and urges her kinfolk to “Come and see” this person whom she has met.
There are so many nuances about this story that deserve our attention and could be the focus of further reflection:
- Both Jesus and the woman cross barriers. Jesus, as a Jew, a man and a rabbi, addresses the woman as an equal – crossing religious, gender and power boundaries that existed in his time. The woman, as a Samaritan and a woman, engages him directly – even challenging him – herself crossing gender and power barriers. And he asks her for water – meaning she will need to touch both the cup and the water she gives him and he will need to touch it also – both crossing purity codes of their day.
- We come to learn that she has had five husbands and is currently with a man who is not her husband. Whatever has happened in her past has left her socially marginalized. In the time of Jesus, women could not initiate divorce, so we’re not sure what her backstory is. She could have outlived her husbands, been abandoned by them or had to leave due to violence. We do not know. What we do know, hoever, is that she would face tremendous shame and social exclusion in her community. Some scholars suggest that’s why she’s at the well alone – because no one will associate with her. Yet Jesus – knowing this – engages her anyway. And she – knowing her own history – does not hold her head low or cower to someone of greater social power. She holds her ground and agency.
- They have a brief conversation about the mountain that they are on. The well was located on Mt. Gerizim – a holy place for the Samaritans. For the Jews, the holy place is Jerusalem. But instead of arguing the point of where God is found, they BOTH agree that God is not bound to any one place or people. God can be encountered anywhere – and especially outside of sanctioned spaces and religious insiders.
- Finally the woman goes on to become an “evangelist “ (meaning bringing the good news) to her village. A woman who is marginalized and an outsider becomes the mouthpiece for God’s good news in the world.
What is coming up for you right now? What do you feel as you hear more about this story?
What I have written above is just a partial list of what’s going on in this reading, and so many scholars have offered so much theological animation around this story! I hope you’re seeing why it is so significant.
Given the histories of patriarchy, it is always surprising that stories like this even survived and got passed down to us – stories that affirm the dignity of women, the authority of women, the theology of women, the intellectual capabilities of women and the power that women have in this world.
But this is also a story of what it looks like for men to be allies and treat women as equals in this world. This is not heroic. It is what should be happening that often does not happen.
The story also challenges us to think about who gets to speak for God. In this passage, God’s messenger is one of the most marginalized voices in society – one that the power structures and authorities would never recognize. Jesus is not concerned about her Samaritan status, her complicated history, or her gender status and neither is she. As I have heard it said, “God does not call the qualified, God qualifies the called!”
Our world has its own divisions and barriers, and we have our own categories of marginalized and excluded peoples. And just like in the reading today, these are the very divisions and barriers that Jesus and the woman cross in order to move God’s work forward. And just like in the reading today, the voices of the marginalized and outsiders are still speaking “good news” to us if we’re willing to hear it.
We might reflect on what barriers and divisions we are being called to cross these days? Whose voices are we being invited to listen to?
In our first reading today from Exodus 17, the Israelites have left Egypt and are wandering through the desert. They have run out of water and complain to Moses about the hardship. God provides water through a stone for them and that place becomes known as Massah and Meribah. These names mean “testing” or “arguing” (because the people tested God there) but they also try to capture the sentiment, “Is God here or not?”
And I love this phrase, “Is God here or not?”
I imagine Jesus asking this about the place where he encountered the Samaritan women, “Is God here or not? And he discovers that, “Yes, God is here.”
The woman also asks, “Is God here or not?” in this encounter. And she discovers, “Yes, God is here.”
We, too, can ask similar questions related to any situation that we are in, “Is God here or not?”
And the answer will always be, “Yes, God is here.” The real question is will we be able to recognize, see, taste, hear and feel it.
One Comment
Courtney Davis
You’ve offered up an amazing opportunity for folks to better understand the significance of today’s Gospel passage. I think when many people hear Samaritan woman or Good Samaritan, the word Samaritan holds no particular meaning or weight. It’s benign. But you make clear, whether used as an adjective or noun, the word is anything but benign. The intense enmity between Samaritans and Jews was no small thing. For Jesus to be in communion, engaging in a meaningful exchange with a Samaritan, would have been a seismic event.
Beyond being Samaritan and a Samaritan woman at that, it also matters that the exchange at the well takes place with a particular kind of woman. It’s unlikely that, without her lived experience, the conversation would have gone the same way or would have happened at all. Jesus is just another man to her and the fact that he is a Jew, for whom she likely has absolutely no regard, emboldens her to speak to him in the manner she does. A woman of good social standing wouldn’t have been caught dead on her own at the well with any man, who wasn’t family.
That one is Samaritan is a sign that points to Jesus’ instruction to love and pray for our enemies, real or perceived. What credit is merited by praying solely for loved ones? When asked, Jesus tells the story of the Good Samaritan to elucidate who is and what it means to be one’s neighbor. Is it a rabbi, who casually sidesteps a victim of violent assault lying on the side of a path, or is it a Samaritan, despised other, who stops to selflessly render aid? The story compels me to think about the weight given to certain words we habitually apply to people – Jew/Samaritan, wo/man – that often stops one person from moving beyond the superficial identity to the soul of another. The enemy just might not be an enemy after all, but rather a neighbor. The disciples receive this lesson watching the conversation between Jesus and the Samaritan woman unfold at the well, and the Samaritan woman does, too.
At the point, Mike, where you ask about what’s coming up while reading your reflection, Hagar was coming up. Like the Samaritan woman, we don’t have the full story about Hagar’s lived experience, but understood to be an Egyptian servant handed over by Sarai to Abram as a concubine, she was clearly a woman in profound distress when she found herself in communion with God beside the well in Shur.
It’s no coincidence that Hagar and the Samaritan woman, both marginalized and debased, share a mirror experience of finding unexpected salvation when seemingly all alone at a well. Not only is God revealed and rightly named (Hagar, the first person to name God, calls Him “the God who sees me” or El Roi while God later tells Moses He is “I am,” which Jesus repeats to the Samaritan woman), the divine encounters also reveal the true dignity and identity of the two women to others and perhaps most profoundly to themselves.