“The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”
We are picking up our study of the Gospel of John after our Advent & Christmas break and I want to say a word about preaching. I have been the rector of All Saints for 24 years and during that time I have preached through a full book of the Bible only one time and that was the series I preached on Romans only a few years ago. I am not lamenting the fact that I have only preached though one book of the New Testament because I do not think it should be the norm for Anglican pulpits. I preached for 20 some years without adverting to a series and I believe that should be the norm or at least the rector should have a good feel for the church year before he deviates from it and then he should work to sustain the rhythms of our ordered life. I believe we can do that, remain in tune with the liturgical year, by taking the sort of break we have taken during seasons of preparation, devotion, supplication, and penance. So I intend to preach from John till Ash Wednesday and then I will once again suspend the series for the purpose of participating in the great Forty Days of Fasting during which time we will enter into the mystery of the Paschal, which word by the way means simply “passover.” For the Catholic the Paschal mystery is made visibly present for us in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. But I am once again getting ahead of myself. Let me conclude this interlude by saying that I believe that it is very good indeed for you that I am preaching through books of the Bible and there is nothing irregular to the practice and we have the examples of the Church Fathers to vouchsafe the practice. So let us get back to John.
Please recall that last time I spoke on the matter, I said that we had reached a watershed in our study of John and this is it: this Gospel is the narrative of the Sacrament of Love between Christ and his Bride; it is the narrative of the Nuptial Union between Christ and his Bride. Therefore my intention is that we focus upon our common destiny that is revealed to us in the Nuptial Mysteries of the Life of Christ in the Fourth Gospel. Recall as well that I have suggested that everything that occurs in this conversation between the Woman of Samaria and our Lord Jesus Christ — our last text — ought to be read and understood as a conversation between the Bridegroom and his Bride. I would say, just as a refinement of that, that the conversation by the well is more the wooing of the Beloved by the Bridegroom and the story ends with just what we expect from Holy Matrimony — the “gift and heritage of children.” That is, the relation of Matrimony between Christ and his Bride is effected by the Bride’s faith and trust in the Bridegroom and the outcome is progeny, that is in this case the conversion of many in the Samaritan village:
“And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman, which testified, He told me all that ever I did.” John 4:39
The point she made to the men of the village when said, “He told me all that ever I did,” is not that Jesus merely tells us all about ourselves because he knows everything. The clue here is the moment of truth in her conversation with Jesus when she declared:
“The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things.”
Her word to the men of the city, “He told me all that ever I did” is not that he is all knowing because having God in your midst is not comforting unless you are at peace with one another. Her word to the village is not that Jesus is merely all knowing, but that he takes everything that is really real, the really good, the really bad, and the really ugly, and he makes it right. She believed not that Jesus was a spooky mind reader, but that he was the Messiah, the Prophet-like-unto-Moses, who is the final embodiment of the Jubilee – the Jubilee being the time when slaves and prisoners are freed, debts are forgiven, land is restored, work is to cease as we return to a sort of Garden of Eden experience as we live naturally and creatively at peace with God, at peace with one another, and at peace with creation. In one of Jesus’ sermons cited in Luke he declares:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, To preach the acceptable year of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say unto them, This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” Luke 4:18-21
In her own way, from within her own horizon, with her own words, the Woman of Samaria is saying the same thing. This man brought fourth her sin not to shame, not to control her and certainly not to destroy her. But rather he drew out the whole truth so that those sins may once and for all be destroyed and she, as her pure bride, may enter into the happiness her true husband had prepared for her. The Scriptures were being fulfilled, by which I mean the whole story was coming together at Jacob’s well right before her eyes and she believed Jesus and he took her as his own Bride because she believed him.
Though I am not going to read the dialogue, I do want you to take note — this an enchanting conversation. Please take time to read it this week. It is natural and so very unprocessed, so instinctive, like playing catch with your child — you toss the ball so she catches it and she tosses the ball back. You have two people here and they reside outside of the imagination of the writer; they reside in what we call the real world. But the Apostle deserves credit for capturing the dialogue, which was probably conveyed to him by Jesus or maybe even the woman herself. The point I am making is we need to savor the dialogue, pay attention to the setting, take into consideration their posture, and attend to the response of the disciple when they returned. You will passover to the event if you luxuriate in the vitality, the pizzazz of their tête-à-tête. This specificity, this concreteness is all important.
Jesus has not come to save humankind in general, but each instantiation of humankind, each person, created with an inexhaustible potential for eternally flowering into a specific person and, never decaying. Our’s is not a state of being that is unchanging and static. The state of Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt is not our future, but our’s is one of maturing, unfolding, and of everlastingly breaking to blossom.
“The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”
At this point the author steps into the narrative and he invites us along, informing us that just then Jesus’ disciples arrived from the city with provisions and the Woman dropped everything, left the well, left her water pot, and dashed back into the city.
“Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he.”
An exact, though awkward, reading of that last verse would be this:
“Says to her – Jesus [that is] – I am who am speaking to you.”
Now whether that phrase, “I am,” had for her the sharp provocation it does later in the Gospel we do not know. What she certainly heard and what she went back into the village to say was that there was a man over yonder at the well and he claims to be the Messiah and she believed him. And she was convincing enough in her testimony to those who knew her quite well that “many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman…”
I pointed this out just a few weeks ago: it is fair to compare and contrast characters in a narrative and if we compare and contrast the Woman of Samaria with Nicodemus the grand ruler of the Jews we may learn a few things. Nicodemus came to Jesus under the cover of darkness and Jesus revealed his mission and Nicodemus threw up one objection after another. And he continue to do so after Jesus made it very clear that everything in life depended upon believing him. Nicodemus left the Light of the World, reentered the darkness, and made his way back to the Temple. He shows up two more times in the Gospel; one he makes a weak and ineffectual plea for fairness to Jesus among his fellow Pharisees and then in John 19 he and Joseph of Arimathea are identified as the one’s who removed Jesus’ dead body from the cross and placed him in a newly crafted tomb. That is the last we hear of Nicodemus.
The Woman of Samaria came to Jesus at the brightest time of day and though she raised objections, she ends believing Jesus to be Messiah. Unbidden, she raced back into the village, and regardless of her bad reputation, a large number of the Samaritans believed in Jesus that day because of her.
I said earlier that the conversation between Jesus and the Woman of Samaria was the wooing of the Bride by the Bridegroom and the story ends with just what we expect from Holy Matrimony — the “gift and heritage of children.” That is, the relation of Matrimony between Christ and his Bride is effected by the Bride’s faith and trust in the Bridegroom and the outcome is progeny:
“And many of the Samaritans of that city believed on him for the saying of the woman…” John 4:39
I suppose one story here is of that man (who would not have given Woman of Samaria the time of day much less take a drink of water from her) and who plays it safe with the hometown crowd because that man believes he has a lot to lose. The other story is that of a woman who has little or nothing to lose, or maybe she just counts what she has to lose as worth nothing, when compared to finding Jesus Christ, the Lover of their Soul, their true Husband, the God of the Universe.