Lent 3, Year A | John 4:5-42
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
March 12, 2023
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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John’s Gospel tends to be one of the more popular books in the Bible, at least among American Christians. It has the perfect blend of narrative, philosophy, and mysticism to pique our interest and keep our imaginations active, wondering not only what Jesus was like in person but opening the door to a plethora of ideas along the lines of “what if.”
Unfortunately, throughout the centuries this Gospel has been used as an excuse for massive amounts of antisemitism, both outside and within the Church proper. The way John references “the Jews” and their apparent antagonism toward Jesus initiated an unnecessary rivalry between our religions that has led to mistreatment, abuse, torture, and even genocide. I expect John probably would have chosen to phrase things a little differently if he could have seen how his words have been used to justify so much trauma and bloodshed.
One of our problems in approaching John is that we come to it from a position of stability and power. Formal practice of Christianity might be declining in the United States, but it still underlies the foundations of Western Cultures, including our own. With the long reign of Christendom—Church as State—and modern attempts to reinstitute it, we should realize it will take more than just a few generations to truly forget or be lost.
Approaching John from this position of dominance, particularly so many centuries after it was written and from a cultural lens utterly foreign to the author’s world, leads us to easily misinterpret it as an us-vs-them narrative. But what’s happening in the background of this Gospel isn’t a battle between Christianity and Judaism for claim to Absolute Truth. It’s a fight between brothers. And it’s rare that we even properly identify all the characters we find here.
That’s because John is a tale of sibling rivalry involving not two brothers but three; where we read “the Jews” as an ethnic monolith there are multiple closely related yet distinct groups. It might help to think of it as an extended variation on Luke’s parable of the prodigal son.
Judea, one of the two southern regions, is like the older brother. As the eldest, and the one formally expected to inherit God’s promises, they hold the majority of religious and political power over the region. Their way of doing things is, by both tradition and legal mandate, the “right” way of behaving. With the father apparently absent from household affairs, Judea has placed themselves in the family leadership role and, similarly to many modern families, demands the other children comply with their expectation of what the parents would want.
Samaria, the other southern region, would more closely relate to the idea of the prodigal son. Although directly related, Judea treated Samaria as a sort of half-brother—technically part of the family but not a particularly desirable one. Close in age, Samaria and Judea have been fighting for centuries, with Samaria continually bucking his older brother’s leadership and often heading out in his own direction. Partly because of this apparent insolence and partly from factors outside either of their control, Judea actively hates Samaria, and Samaria returns the favor. These would be the brothers who attend a family reunion out of respect for their parents but who refuse to spend any time in the same room.
Finally you have Galilee. He’s kind of the dopy little brother filling in the role of the prodigal son’s foolish father. Neither Judea nor Samaria are quite sure what to do with him. They don’t hate him. Neither has active animosity toward him. Everyone secretly finds him funny and endearing, but almost everything he does makes them roll their eyes. Galilee tends to be the first physical target for bullies from outside the family, and although his brothers will always come to his defense, they’re kind of tired of his tendency to attract trouble. General sibling rivalry exists between all of them, but Judea and Galilee remain closer than Galilee is with Samaria. Galilee, however, doesn’t really get why Judea and Samaria are always fighting.
As outsiders, when we look at the family it isn’t too hard to distinguish between Samaria and Judea, but Galilee is a sort of forgotten character. His overall resemblance of Judea and relative lack of significance gets him lost within John’s label of “the Jews.” From the outside, frankly, we would say all three are Jewish. However, when John uses the phrase he’s primarily referring not to the family as a whole or to the two closer siblings but to the Judeans—the strict elder brother—alone. Because despite the amount of time they might spend there, it turns out that John and Peter and Andrew and even Jesus aren’t actually from Judea: they’re Galileans. And looking at the text from a family perspective, an important part of this Gospel’s story is the tale of the forgotten youngest brother finally stepping out of his siblings’ shadows and working reconciliation within the family.
Today’s reading, which opens with all the tropes of a stereotypical Ancient Near Easter love story, mostly focuses on Samaria, represented by the woman at the well, and Jesus, the Galilean teacher. Jesus has just come from hanging out with Judea and decides to stop in to visit the rest of the family on the way home. They haven’t seen each other in a long time, and at first Samaria mistakes him for their other brother: “Why do you, a Judean, ask me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink? Indeed, Judeans don’t interact with Samaritans.”[1] Jesus, however, doesn’t allow the misidentification to offend him or distract him from his goal, choosing instead to work toward reunification by maintaining the conversation between Galilee and Samaria.
I do feel like it’s necessary to address a side issue here. Sex sells, even in church, and preachers tend to love dredging up all the lurid details they might be able to imagine about the woman at the well’s relationship history. Having more than five husbands, it’s easy for us to fall into the Victorian assumption that she’s immoral and therefore unworthy of talking with our Lord and Savior.
Before we run off into our long tradition of judgment, however, let’s remember that Jesus is the one who started this conversation—and the one who keeps it going despite all the misidentification and misunderstandings that present themselves. Also, John never presents her response as anything other than a statement of fact. Jesus doesn’t seem particularly shocked by it, either. It may have been unusual for a woman to have been married five times, but there could have been a variety of reasonable explanations for it. Her husband(s) may have died, and the region practiced inheritance traditions regarding a brother’s wives that were deeply foreign to our expectations. The broader culture of her time is also unlikely to have allowed her to initiate a divorce, so if that was her situation, she would have been more of serial victim than any kind of offender.
No matter the reason for her multiple marriages, any negativity we read onto her is more a revelation of our own hearts than it is of her as a person. Based on the text itself, we can’t really assume anything about the woman other than that she had endured more than her share of bereavement or rejection. Like with Bathsheba, Salome, and a seemingly infinite list of others, we use our longing for a spicy story and tendency to eroticize the exotic to allow us to stand aloof, self-righteously accusing the victim rather than moving toward her in sympathy or support.
The same was true for Samaria as a whole. They had endured a tremendous amount of abuse and rejection not only from family but from surrounding kingdoms over the centuries. Judea’s continuing animosity probably just served to keep all those old wounds raw.
Bringing things back together, it’s that Original Sin playing out again and again. We’re always finding a way to reject, dismiss or somehow “other” a person either in hope of making ourselves feel better or in order to subtly distract from our own faults. Two weeks ago it was Adam’s best friend and life partner Eve. Last week it was my neighbor who doesn’t think or “believe” identically to me. Now it’s my immediate family member. Who knows where we’ll find ourselves doing it next?
And maybe that’s the point. Perhaps we outsiders are being allowed to view this family story as an example of what can be not just for them but for all of us. We, who use proximity, presumptions, and prejudice to divide ourselves from one another have the opportunity to witness reconciliation actively occurring within a deeply fragmented family.
It would have been easy for Jesus to try to distinguish his Galilean self from the Judeans who continued to mistreat Samaria, but he doesn’t allow the co-identifications and deflections to derail the conversation. He sidesteps the subtle insults and misdirections, remaining focused on his goal: reunification. Ignoring what’s thrown at him—and what continues to maintain and excuse the distance among the siblings—he offers an alternative from the stale family history stagnating in the ancient well, focusing instead on the hope of a new way of being, a flowing, living water that can clean, refresh, and restore everything it comes across and everyone who drinks it.
Not even Jesus can undo the past. What is, is, and no one can change what has already been. But there’s always opportunity for the future. Through Christ’s guidance and example, perhaps we can move beyond our hatreds and rivalries, our disagreements and histories as both abusers and abused. Reconciliation, however, is never easy or simple. It requires desperate honesty, the willingness to accept blame we might not think we deserve and to take responsibility for what might not be our direct fault, topped with continual and active evidence of repentance—of turning to God and God’s paths as frequently as we realize we’ve gone astray. But through God’s power and love, we can indeed join together in support of and care for one another, initiating the dawn of a new, more hopeful chapter in our ancient family narrative.
[1] John 4:9 | my translation