Sermon delivered remotely by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of First Reformed Church of New Brunswick, NJ, on March 12, 2023 drawing from John 4:5-28a and Romans 5:1-11.
There’s a certain vulnerability that comes in asking a stranger for a drink.
This isn’t something I expect everyone here to have experienced, of course. In our modern, comfortable, American society even at it’s worst, we have never really known times in our lives where something as fundamental as water might be uncertain, where we might find ourselves in need of water, but have no access to it on our own.
And water is fundamental, isn’t it? The human body can only go three days without it, unlike our ability to go up to a week or more without food - some of us perhaps longer than others! We can’t live without it, at least not for very long, so we’ve built our entire world around the idea of quick, ready, and easy access to clean, drinkable water. The avoidance of thirst is so central to our shared, human experience that we even use thirst as a shorthand for death itself. Consider John 19:28, at the very end, “…when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), “I am thirsty.”
Take a moment, by the way, and imagine that fearful, desperate thirst of Jesus, in those last minutes on the cross. That draining, dry, desperate thirst, each rasping breath telling you that every minute you go without a drink means another organ shutting down, just to keep you alive long enough for the life to literally evaporate from your body.
That moment of fear, pain, and suffering? That’s what Jesus experienced on our behalf, and that’s what humans have tried to avoid since the very beginning. And since we’re so understandably desperate to avoid this terrible, gasping form of death, humankind has made it a point to build our societies around the availability of water. Cities, especially in desert climates, were always built around wells and oases, and that central source of water quickly became the original community center, a place where people would gather and share in the experience of living together in unity, knowing that separation from water is the same thing as separation from community; a lonely, desiccated, and painful death.
So when we turn our eyes to today’s passage, and find Jesus coming to Sychar in the bright, hot mid-day, we know immediately that something is up. In a desert community in ancient Samaria it would be unusual enough for anyone to be moving around in the middle of the day, when the sun is at its highest and hottest. But for visitors - especially male visitors - to come into town, rock up to the well in the noonday sun looking for a drink, and expect to find anything other than an empty town square, well…that’s just ridiculous.
Typically, in villages like this, all the women of the community - yes, I know it's crazy sexist, but so was the ancient middle east - would gather together first thing in the morning, before the cool of the night had entirely faded, to pull up water from the well for the rest of the day. And this time spent together with the other women of the village was a social, even religious time. These women - mothers, wives, and daughters all together - would have the opportunity to socialize, to pray, and to sing while doing the days water gathering, typically free from male interference. With the more oppressive men still sleeping, or going about their morning routine separately, this time of communal water gathering was the safest space for women in this society to be themselves, to feel welcomed and accepted by their peers without the patriarchal pressures and oppressions that surrounded them everywhere else in their lives.
Even today, I bet there's more than a few women here grinning wistfully at the idea of a dedicated time in the day where they can speak freely and not hear the phrase, "Well, actually…"
So not only is it an extremely odd choice for Jesus to turn up mid-day looking for water, it's doubly unusual in that he actually found a woman there meaning to draw water at all.
Now of course Jesus knows what's up here. Setting divine knowledge aside for a moment - knowledge he demonstrates later on in verse 18 when he lays out her entire relationship history without her ever telling him - Jesus was born and raised in this time and place and, while he might present as male, he knows how the world he lives in works. He knows that the women typically draw their water together at the start of the day, so he knows that if a woman is turning up looking for water in the middle of the day it’s probably not because she's forgetful, or because her family used too much water or something;
She's out there because the other women don't want her around.
We're given no reason for her ostracisation of course, but we can make an educated guess. First, in a society that prized a ritual sort of purity, and which had a rigid sexual behavior code specifically aimed at women but with a seemingly unending list of exceptions for men (something totally foreign to us in the modern world…right?), the fact that this woman had already gone through five husbands, absent other factors, probably didn’t make her especially popular with the other ladies of the community.
And on top of that, the man she was currently with wasn't her husband at all!
Now that's interesting right there - probably the most interesting thing about her - but not perhaps for the reasons you might think. When we read this, we often tend to think that perhaps this woman had committed herself to a life of infidelity, or simply valued herself so low that she'd keep bouncing from man to man like they were obstacles in the most futile ninja warrior course ever invented. But what makes this the most interesting detail about this woman isn’t that she’s committing some sort of carnal sin.
It's interesting because it's an example of her demonstrating, perhaps even seizing agency in a culture that presented not a single option of the kind to women. Ever.
Think of it; in those days, women were considered little more than property. A marriage didn't happen when a women fell in love with a man, and they decided of their own agency and accord to build a lasting relationship of mutual respect, trust, and abiding affection. No! Marriage happened when it was politically convenient to the woman's father, and when the husband-to-be had put up enough money to buy himself somebody’s daughter for a life of servitude.
Yes, even that kind of servitude.
So the fact that this woman was with a man to whom she wasn't married by choice, that's a massively significant piece of information, a violation of the typical social rules that absolutely dwarfs any other detail we've heard so far. The five husbands can be explained away easily enough; Jewish and Samaritan law (since they were both very similar) had any number of allowances for divorce or annulment, particularly if the woman in question demonstrated what might be considered an unseemly degree of agency. And of course, the average lifespan in those days wasn’t anything like what it is today; so her having had five husbands is perhaps a little bit weird, but it might be explicable.
Her choosing to be with a man to whom she hadn't been sold….that's much less explicable.
Suddenly we see her isolation in a new light, don't we? Here we have a woman who we can see as iconoclastic, determined to be her own person in a world that doesn't even consider women to be people in the first place, pushed out of society on the basis of her gender, then pushed out of the society formed by all the other women because she took hold of her God-given agency, drawing warm water from a drying well in the blistering mid-day heat when out of nowhere, some guy, and a Jewish rabbi at that, rocks up and asks her for a drink.
Is it any wonder, the shock of her reaction? "Why," she asks him with words carefully chosen, "would someone like you say anything to someone like me, let alone ask for a kindness? What reason would I ever have to do anything but hate you, and fear you?"
Why indeed?
I've often heard it said that this passage is an example of the divine and perfect Jesus Christ encountering a deeply sinful woman where she is in her life, just to uplift her and help place her on the true and righteous path. But if that were the case, where is the condescension of his teaching? Where is the condemnation for her infidelity, the admonition of her bucking of social norms, or the moralistic finger-wagging over her breaking of fellowship with the other women? If Jesus’ intent here were to separate this woman from the sinful life she leads, wouldn't he maybe say something about that sin to her?
But, as much as we love to read into this passage looking to find a way to bend, twist, and re-shape the words of Jesus Christ into a condemnation of this woman as any manner of sinful, we don't get that from him at all.
Instead, Jesus opens by witnessing her suffering, as she comes to draw the midday water, and exposing his own thirst, his own vulnerability to her without any expectation of instruction or ulterior motive. At no point does Jesus say, "change your ways, marry the guy you're with now in a big church wedding with the blessing of the priests, have yourself precisely 2.5 kids and make sure to draw your water with the rest of the women in submission and obedience, and then you shall drink of the living waters."
Nope.
There are no conditions. Only solidarity.
You see, we're 4 chapters in to the gospel of John now, and Jesus has already had plenty of opportunity to share that living water with others, with the various men who surround him, with priests, scribes, fellow Pharisees, Sadducees, Acenes, and even his own parents and siblings, but we never get so much as a mention of any of that. He's also had many opportunities to identify himself as the Messiah, but he's rejected them all outright, holding that piece of information, that fragment of his identity, as a closely guarded secret for as long as he possibly can. At one point, so important is this secret to Jesus that when Peter suggests that Jesus make known his Messiahship to the world at large, Jesus straight-up calls Peter Satan!
Jesus never demonstrates this kind of personal vulnerability and openness with the masses. Never, until he finds this woman, shares his thirst with her, and offers what he has in order to uplift her in her struggle to be understood as a full and completely realized human being in the world.
I think the most of us are, or at least consider ourselves to be, a fairly progressive group of Christians. We're invested in justice, determined to do the work of supporting our friends and siblings in oppressed communities around the world, and we stand ready to do whatever we can to take action, boldly, to see that justice, kindness, and mercy are done to those most in need. We're eager, ready to defend the weak and the vulnerable, to tear down the mighty from their thrones and see the rich sent away empty.
We may not be part of oppressed communities ourselves, we may not make our home in those liminal spaces, but we're within driving distance, and happy to turn up whenever there's work to de done.
But when we do come to do the work…how, precisely, do we go about doing it? How do we make ourselves present in communities that are hurting, struggling, and suffering? Do we show up, ready to bring the fight, ready to share our own knowledge and experience, full and secure in that unearned belief that we, above all, know how to fight this fight? Do we turn up ready to raise our voices the loudest, screaming for justice so powerfully and so strongly that the voices of the oppressed never manage to be heard over the racket coming out of our well-intentioned mouths?
Or do we come in a place of vulnerability, of openness, and of submission as Jesus did. Jesus never told the woman to lead him into town that he might preach, never called upon her to serve him, to follow him, or to wash his feet. He just shared with her in her suffering. He sat and listened to her as she explained the religion and worship of her ancestors. Let me say that again; he sat and listened as she lectured Jesus Actual Christ on the religious practices of the ancient middle-east. And he didn’t insist upon his own way, insist that he knew better (even though, in this case, he did); he just listened to her, talked with her, and revealed his full self to her, allowing God's grace, mercy, and Spirit work through her so that she could do greater things in that community than he ever could.
Jesus could have used her to set up a preaching engagement, and tried to pastor the Samaritans in Sychar much as Jonah had in Nineveh, but all they would have heard from him was another Jewish Rabbi, come to lecture them on how to live their lives. And given how Samaritans felt about their Jewish neighbors…that probably wouldn’t have accomplished anything, honestly.
But instead, Jesus found that one most truly oppressed, lonely, and isolated person - the lost sheep of Sychar - and shared his love with her in open, honest, vulnerability.
That kind of vulnerability isn't easy, of course. Setting aside our desire to be the center of attention, to be the savior of the oppressed, to be the main character can be a frighteningly difficult thing to do, and it opens us up to the very real possibility of getting hurt ourselves. How often do we remind ourself that suffering is part of the great Christian mission, yet expect for ourselves only mild inconvenience as the price we pay for the freedom of the oppressed, the defense of the innocent, and bending of the universe's moral arc towards justice?
Do we really expect justice to come about that cheaply?
No, it comes with risk, and struggle, and pain. Risk that people will say terrible things about us for standing with oppressed people, and we will become known as a troublemaker by our friends and families. Struggles that all those who are oppressed live in every day, but which may be new to us, and all the more hurtful for it. And the pain of loss, when our friends, families, communities, and all those people who we’ve gathered water with for years turn us out into the noonday sun.
But when we turn our eyes upon Jesus, and set ourselves to following where he leads we find that these risks we need to take, these struggles we’re called to share, and these impossible things we never thought we could endure; they become somewhat more bearable. We can cope with the slings and arrows of angry folk online, the threats made against us, the fury of those who mistake the rage that erupts from their own wounded pride for the righteous force of God's justice in holy and benevolent action; each time we sacrifice our vulnerability and allow ourselves to be persecuted alongside the suffering and the oppressed fin Christ's name, we learn a little more about what it means not to profit from the service of God, but what it truly means to be beloved of God.
We gain character.
"We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us."
Since this may well be the last sermon I get to bring to you for a while, if I can leave you with one lasting idea it would be this; justice doesn't come at the tip of the sword, and peace can never be delivered by force. Pointed rhetoric and a commanding understanding of all the necessary issues will never be the thing that empowers us to bring justice, just as springs of love can never erupt from a ground un-watered by our own vulnerability and willingness to listen.
When we are ready to speak justice into the world, may it come not with angry name-calling and derision of the oppressor, and never with pulpit-thumping rage - justified as it may ever feel. May it never come with yielding and compromise either; peace exchanged for silence rather than bought with justice. Instead, it is my deepest hope that we may speak God’s peace into the world with words like these, penned by Japanese theologian Toyohiko Kagawa in 1929, after having been arrested twice for speaking in defense of poor laborers, and before spending much of the next two decades in prison for speaking against Japanese imperialism, the oppression of the Chinese, speaking in favor of women's suffrage, and helping to organize labor movements and form unions:
I stand against all learning, all institutions, all governments, all arts, all religions, which reject love. I protest against every so-called church which preaches faith and fails to love. I oppose the politicians who rely on force and know nothing about Love. If I have to be arrested for saying this, let me be handcuffed, for I had rather die quickly by the sword than die of thirst in a loveless desert.
My friends, let us all go and do likewise.
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