Third Sunday in Lent; 12 March 2023; Lent 3A (RCL); Exodus 15:1-7; Psalm 95; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:4-52.
I’m convinced that John uses marriage as a metaphor for the new kinship established by the eucharist in the Christian community. Jesus’ first miracle in John, after all, was changing water into wine at a wedding feast. And, here we have Jesus meeting a woman at a well, where Isaac (or Abraham’s servant on Isaac’s behalf), Jacob, and even Moses all met their wives. And they met them by asking for water. And water becomes an unending supply of wine.
Jesus asks the woman at the well for a drink of water, and sets off a series of disputes: Jews won’t use the same dishes as Samaritans; the nature of living water; whether Jesus is greater than Jacob; where one must worship. And through it all, Jesus never gets his drink of water. Many commentators have speculated on how it is the woman has had five husbands. Was she passed from brother to brother like the woman in the Sadducees’ example? Instead, I think we need to take seriously the metaphor of marriage as religious kinship.
If the woman at the well stands in for Samaritans in general, it is true that they have had five “lords” or “husbands” (Ba’al is a word that denotes lordship, and Ba’al was the husband of Asherah). Five Empires had conquered the Northern Kingdom: Assyria, Babylon, Medes, Persians, and the Seleucids. And now, Rome. Certainly, the Judeans attributed this kind of “whoring” to the Samaritans (Just read a little of Jeremiah). That’s why, when Jesus tells her she has had five husbands, and the one she has now is not her husband, she replies that the Samaritans ancestors worshiped on Mt Gerezim — this is a conversation about lordship and worship.
She calls him a prophet, and then mentions Messiah, and Jesus claims the title. When the villages come to meet Jesus, they give him the title “Savior of the world,” one of the titles given to Caesar, her current lord who is not her husband.
When his disciples return, they are surely startled that Jesus is speaking with a Samaritan woman, and when he claims that he has already eaten, they would have been doubly startled by the implication that he has eaten food provided by the Samaritan woman. Instead, Jesus tells them to look at the fields, white for harvest. In chapter 12, when Philip and Andrew tell Jesus that certain Greeks want to see him, he responds, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Truly, truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” If ever there was a non sequitur, this is it. And then, those Greeks disappear from the story. I believe the harvest is a metaphor for welcoming people into the Johannine community. First, Samaritans, and then Greeks, if the community is willing to let go of its Jewish identity (fall into the ground and die).
Still a hard lesson to take to heart — we should welcome the despised. That is the food Jesus has to eat that his disciples know nothing about.