The Challenge of Religion (John 4:1-26)
“An excellent plumber is infinitely more admirable than an incompetent philosopher. The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy.” These are the words of American novelist John Gardner in his excellent essay “Excellence, Can We be Equal and Excellent Too?”
Indeed, we who take indoor plumbing for granted do not easily appreciate the miracle it is until our plumbing gives way, as I recently rediscovered. And because we take indoor plumbing for granted, scenes in the bible that involve wells come across as episodes from some fantastical land. However, I remember going to visit relatives in the South Indian state of Kerala during the peak of Summer. While there were many wells that were pretty much dry as a bone, one of my relatives’ wells always had fresh water. In a place where one’s access to drinking water was restricted to wells, you can well imagine how much of a blessing a well that never dried would have been.
The well that Jacob had dug many centuries earlier had been a constant source of fresh water for the people of Sychar. Of course, its location outside the town meant that people had to make quite a long journey to draw water and bring it back to their homes. This is a factor in the story we just heard.
This is one of my favourite passages in the whole bible. A couple of weeks back, when we were at the Wesley House, Lou asked us which episode from the bible we would like to be transported to so that we could witness or participate in it. Without hesitation, I said that I would like to be transported to the time when Jesus met the woman at the well. With every reading, every study, new light gets thrown on the passage. New meanings emerge, like waves at a beach, each carrying the previous meaning a little further.
But before we proceed let us understand the scene and the geography, for only then will we be in a position to understand the nature of this encounter. John tells us in v. 4 that it was necessary for Jesus to go through Samaria.
Actually, the practice of many Jews was to cross the Jordan eastward near Jericho, incidentally where Jesus probably was conducting the baptisms mentioned in this passage, then go north along the eastern bank of the Jordan in the province of Perea, and then cross over to the west near the confluence of the River Jabbok and the Jordan, thereby avoiding any contact with the Samaritans. So if John tells us it was necessary, it cannot mean that this encounter was necessary in a geographical sense. Rather, we must conclude that the encounter in this passage was a crucial one in God’s plan, not just a happy happenstance.
In today’s passage we find Jesus at the well near Sychar. The road from Jericho to Jerusalem and then north to Nazareth in Galilee did run through Sychar. But the well was about half a mile away from the road, toward the east of the city. So Jesus actually would have gone through Sychar, and then walked another half mile east to rest near the well. Why?
Was there no inn or tavern where he could have gotten a decent midday meal and rested his feet? And then he must have sent his disciples back to the city to get food. Does this not seem like simply an excuse to get rid of the disciples for a while? It was necessary for him to be at this well, but it was also necessary that the disciples were not there!
Now the well itself is an important symbol in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament, scenes at wells have immense significance. Abraham’s servant, sent to find a bride for Isaac, finds Rebecca at a well. Jacob, fleeing from Esau, and looking for a place to settle, finds Rachel at a well. Moses, fleeing from Egypt, finds Zipporah at a well. The Samaritans, whose faith centred around the patriarchs and Moses, knew these ‘well scenes’ well. The well was where the towering figures of their faith found their brides.
Further, we also need to take a close look at some of John’s comments because they are quite revealing. Our passage is sandwiched between Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus and his encounter with the nobleman. At the end of the encounter with the nobleman, John tells us that healing the nobleman’s son was the second sign that Jesus did. The first sign was when he changed water to wine at Cana. What this specifically means is that the encounter with the woman involved no sign. This is important, so hold on to that thought.
Another comment John makes is in v. 9. After the woman asks Jesus how he asks her for water, John tells us, “For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.” Yet, when the disciples return, John tells us they were surprised to find him talking with a woman. Why does John bother with these two bits of information? Why should we know whom the Jews did not associate with? Why should we know what the disciples were thinking?
Now, John has had a good 60 years in which to ponder what he will write in his Gospel. If he has written something, it must be for a good reason. John is telling us not to be like the disciples. John is telling us, this is primarily an encounter between a Jew and a Samaritan, their respective genders are incidental to the encounter. John is telling us that the entire exchange between Jesus and the woman should be understood as being between a Jew and a Samaritan.
Now let us see what happens in this exchange. Jesus asks the woman for a drink. She asks him how he, being a Jew, asks a Samaritan for water. Jesus then introduces the concept of living water. The woman accurately observes that Jesus has no implements with which to draw water from this well. So she concludes that there must be more to this man than meets the eye.
“Surely you are not greater than our patriarch Jacob who first dug this well so that centuries later we still can draw from it.”
You see Jacob, the patriarch, did not simply draw water from this well. By digging the well, he had provided generations of Samaritans with water. Indeed the Empress Helena had built a church over the well, providing a small passage down to it. The well was found to be 35 feet deep and even in the seventeenth century there was 5 feet of water in it. Of course, human propensity to throw garbage just about anywhere has killed the well.
Jesus realizes that the woman is catching on. So he extends the metaphor. “Drink of the water I give you and you yourself will become a source of this water.”
Now the woman realizes that not only was this man claiming to be equal to Jacob. He was indeed claiming to be far greater! Now the Samaritans held to a Moses centred doctrine rather than a David centred one. This is only expected since the Northern kingdom of Israel, which later became Samaria, separated itself from the Southern kingdom of Judah, which was ruled by David’s descendents. The Samaritans were looking for the Prophet like Moses of Deuteronomy 18.15. When Jesus extends the metaphor, the woman realizes that he is claiming to be the prophet like Moses that the Samaritans awaited. Only that prophet could have a gift such as the one Jesus claimed to have.
She understands that he is claiming to have a gift that only a fool would refuse. And she is no fool. So she asks Jesus for the gift. “Give me this water.” And if this were indeed that prophet, then the Messianic age would have started and physical thirst would have been abolished. So she boldly declares her faith by saying, “Give me this water, so that I may not have to keep coming here.” She is not running away from her problems. She is challenging Jesus to live up to his words. She has not misunderstood Jesus. She has understood him better than we understand him. If he is the Messiah then his blessings must infuse our physical world as well, not just our spiritual world. Jesus’ blessings cannot only be pie in the sky bye and bye!
To her statement of faith Jesus says, “Go call your husband and come back.” If this were literal, it just does not make sense. Remember, we already said that this encounter does not involve any sign, even the sign of revealing to the woman her past. If Jesus had revealed her past, he would have been performing a sign.
Yet, John goes to great pains to indicate both the first and the second signs and no other! If we are to treat John’s narrative with respect, we must interpret the passage in John 4 without any indication that Jesus had performed a sign.
Also, if we take the reference to husband as literal, then we have to explain why from the notion of living water, Jesus jumps to the woman’s husbands, then she jumps to him being a prophet and to worshipping on a mountain. The whole passage would then be a hodgepodge of disjointed segments that are as immiscible as oil and water.
But if we take our cue from the Gospel itself, which tells us that Jesus was performing no sign in this encounter, then we cannot take this talk of husbands as literal. It must be symbolic. But symbolic of what?
In 2 Kings 17 we read that the king of Assyria settled what later became Samaria with people from five nations – Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim. These people built places of worship to their gods in the region of Samaria. The Samaritans became corrupted and began to worship these gods. Then the king of Assyria sent a Jewish priest to Samaria to teach the residents how to worship Israel’s God. But the result was a syncretized religion that adopted practices from those of the foreigners and the ancient Israelite faith.
In light of the marriage metaphor used by many prophets to describe the relationship between God and Israel, we can conclude from 2 Kings 17 that the Samaritans had had five husbands – namely the gods of Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim. Then they turned to a faith which mixed worship of God with these foreign gods. In other words, currently the Samaritans were not in a covenant relationship with any god because Yahweh cannot be worshipped along with other gods.
As soon as Jesus mentions the five husbands and the one who is not a husband, the woman, who is very astute, recognizes that this is the kind of language the Old Testament prophets used to describe the relationship of God with Israel. So she says, “I can see that you are a prophet.” If she was avoiding talk about her actual husbands, Jesus would have called her out on that as he did with a few people in the Gospels. The very fact that he did not call her out for stating that he was a prophet meant that she was not guilty of avoidance. In other words, the discussion of prophets must dovetail well with the issue of husbands.
Anyway, she tells Jesus, “I can see that you are a prophet.” Not because he had told her all her dark secrets. John has already told us not to see this encounter as containing a sign. She recognizes a prophet because he is denouncing incorrect worship. A prophet’s primary task was not to tell people their secrets or to reveal the future, but to call people back to worshipping God correctly.
And so she continues with the subject of worship. “Where should we worship?” is her question. Here on Mount Gerizim as believed by the Samaritans or in Jerusalem as believed by the Jews?
Jesus also continues with the subject of worship and makes it clear that in the future the place of worship will be rendered meaningless for what would matter is that people worshipped in Spirit and truth.
Later in the Gospel, in chapter 7, Jesus says, “If anyone is thirsty, let them come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within them.” You can search night and day for an Old Testament passage that mentions streams of living water flowing from a person and you will not find it. But we have just seen Jesus, God’s Word become flesh, make this promise to the woman! Jesus is citing his earlier words in John’s Gospel as Scripture! Vizzini from The Princess Bride would say, “Inconceivable!” Of course, in chapter 7, John explains what Jesus told the woman. The living water is the Spirit.
And so we see what the encounter with the Samaritan woman is all about. It is not about Jesus’ telling the woman her secrets. Rather, it is about Jesus as the Bridegroom of the New Israel wooing God’s lost people of Samaria to re-enter a covenant relationship with the Father in which each one of them will learn from the Spirit that flows within them how to worship the Father. And he does it in much the same way as the towering figures of Samaritan faith found their brides – at a well.
But you may be wondering. “Isn’t the title of this sermon ‘The Challenge of Religion’? What exactly is the challenge Deepak wants us to recognize?”
From the earliest days of the Christian Church, people have recognized that the Gospel according to John is quite different from the Synoptic Gospels. The Church fathers and mothers - and yes, there were many church mothers - recognized the differences and gave a wide variety of explanations. And almost without exception they realized that a Gospel like John’s must not be read woodenly or literally.
Hence, even though many of the early Church fathers had decidedly misogynistic views, they, almost without exception, did not view the passage we are dealing with in a literal manner. In particular, they understood the husbands of the woman in much the same way as I have presented today - as a reference to foreign gods - and not as literal husbands of the woman. After all, they knew - and many of us have forgotten - that it was almost impossible for a woman to initiate a divorce in first century Palestine, let alone five divorces, which would have been needed if she was able to convince other men to marry her.
However, after the Christian faith was deemed legal by Constantine and once it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, things began to change. The Christian faith changed from a way of life to a system of doctrines; from an exercise of trust to a religion. But you may ask, “Deepak, isn’t Christianity a religion?” Ah, you may be right. Indeed, you are! But Jesus did not come to institute a religion, a system of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ that indicate how God is inclined toward you. That is precisely what a religion is.
A religion is nothing less than a promise that adhering to some system of permissions and prohibitions will appease a deity and make the deity favor a person. A religion is the idea that this world and what we do in it can be divided into the sacred and the profane. A religion is the assertion that there are sacred persons, sacred places, sacred periods, and sacred practices that can be distinguished from all that is profane. However, as poet and novelist Wendell Berry wrote, “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”
Extending this idea it means that any claim that there are persons or places or periods or practices that are unsacred is to accept that those persons and places and periods and practices have been desecrated. This is why Jesus tells the woman, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.” The idea behind the woman’s question concerning the authorized mountain on which to worship is that God is not accessible everywhere but only in certain parts of the world.
What Jesus does is re-sacralize formerly desecrated places. But once you have re-sacralized every place on earth, you do not need a special category of sacred persons who serve in sacred places or a special calendar of sacred periods during which the sacred persons serve in the sacred places or a special collection of sacred practices that only the sacred persons can officiate during the sacred periods in the sacred places. In other words, by re-sacralizing all places, Jesus does away with everything that religions need to ensure that they can propagate.
Unfortunately, once the Church became the stooge of the Empire, the challenge of religion proved to be too difficult to resist. There are many ways in which this happened. However, I wish to highlight just two. First, the acceptance of violence as a means toward ends. If there are particularly sacred places, persons, periods, and practices, then these will inevitably be a source of conflict between groups that hold different perspectives. Religions have been a reason underpinning violence for much of human history because religions divide the world into the sacred - us, of course - and the profane - them, of course.
Hence, the more closely a person is identified with a religion conceived as a legal framework, the more likely the person is to accept the use of violence to legislate that framework. We need only think of Church history when some people in power used that power to violently suppress and oppress those who did not agree with them.
Second, the relegation of women to second class level. At the outset, allow me to refute a common view. It is true that Greco-Roman culture had religious groups in which women were the priestesses. However, these were groups that were only for women. There was no known religious group open to women and men in which women held prominent leadership roles. To the contrary, many Greek and Roman authors faulted the early Church for the immodest, unchaste, and shameless practice of having women in positions of authority over men.
However, when we see Jesus here, he is the one who initiates conversation with the woman. He treats her as an equal, never with condescension. Her surprise was that he would speak with a Samaritan. However, Jesus’ disciples were surprised he was speaking with a woman. I think the difference here is how John tells us what to expect in Church history. Men will even reluctantly accept other men whom they disagree with in positions of authority as long as it means that women are kept away. However, Jesus does not treat the woman in that way. In fact, when she decided to play the evangelist by going off to the town to spread the news that Messiah had come, Jesus refused food brought by his disciples so that he could metaphorically eat the fruit of her labors.
These two effects are central to the challenge of religion. When you are convinced that women are inferior, you can prance around, like a buffoon is actually doing in the USA right now, arguing for more violence and testing people’s testosterone levels. When you are so afraid of different perspectives, you will insist on relegating half the population to the privacy of the home. Misogyny is the perspective of weak, cowardly men, who have lost the ability to recognize God’s good creation.
But Jesus will have nothing of this. By talking to the woman as an equal, by facing her questions without ridicule, by revealing his identity to her, by encouraging her to become an evangelist, by promising to quench her deepest thirst, Jesus reveals that she belongs in his presence. By rejecting the idea of sacred spaces, Jesus rejects the reasons behind the acceptance of violence. So will we follow him in this, realizing that his work involved the re-sacralizing of all our lives? If so, we will be placing ourselves in a position to stand up to the challenge of religion.