SERMON FOR THE THIRD SUNDAY IN LENT, MARCH 15, 2020 TEXT: JOHN 4:5-42

I find this story strange and much of the commentary on it frustrating. Last week’s Gospel was a passage from the third chapter of John. It presented the story of Nicodemus, the Pharisee who comes to Jesus by night and ends up mystified by the Lord’s insistence that one must be born again to see the kingdom of God. ”How can these things be?” Nicodemus asks, to which Jesus responds, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?” Well, the poor man is trying. Yet he often takes a hit when contrasted to the woman at the well, whose encounter with Jesus is recorded in the fourth chapter of John. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, a privileged male, an insider Israelite, who fails the theological test. The woman, on the other hand, is nameless — just for the record, may I point out that Jesus never asks her name — female and an outsider, who engages in serious dialogue with Jesus about matters of faith. She too takes him literally at first, thinking the living water he offers will spare her repeated trips to this well, just as Nicodemus thinks the talk of being born anew is about physical birth. But she, in contrast to Nicodemus, catches on to the spiritual meaning Jesus has in mind. She is able to carry the conversation further and see in Jesus not just a teacher come from God, not just a prophet, but the possibility that this may well be the Messiah who is to come. She is portrayed as a more open and apt student than the Pharisee.

Then there is a lot of speculation about the woman’s character. A long tradition has concluded that there was something sketchy about her morality — those five husbands and the man she has now who is not her husband, well, I mean, what do you make of that? The woman at the well gets conflated with that other nameless woman in John’s Gospel, the poor soul caught in the act of adultery. Consider the fact that she goes to the well at noon, when the usual time for the village women to fetch water would be early morning, before the heat of the day. She must have had some reason for avoiding their company, and their censure seems a likely explanation.

But other interpreters insist this is reading far too much into the text. The woman may simply have been unfortunate, repeatedly widowed and/or divorced by her husband, but always needing a connection to a man to survive in this patriarchal society. Some scholars suggest number six who has not married her may represent a levirate marriage. That is, being childless at the death of husband no. 5, she is passed along to his brother, who does not formally marry her. Well, maybe, but whatever the explanation, it doesn’t appear to matter to Jesus. He doesn’t tell her to repent or go and sin no more. He tells her to go fetch the bloke, but she doesn’t go, and he doesn’t say anything more about it. This school of interpreters points out that if she was so disreputable as to be ostracized by the other women fetching water, it is very odd that when she bounded back into town and bore witness to Jesus, “[m]any Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.”

Having rescued her character from unwarranted speculation, the no-fault interpreters turn their attention to the nature of her life-changing encounter with Jesus. For example: “By telling the woman who she is, Jesus shows her who he is. By confirming her true identity, he reveals his own, and that is how it still happens. The Messiah is the one in whose presence you know who you really are -- the good and bad of it, the all of it, the hope in it.” That’s a lovely conclusion for sure, but is it warranted? I know the woman announces to her community that “He told me everything I have ever done,” but all we’ve got here is Jesus tallying up her partners. The mother of my daughter Lucy’s best friend has been married five times, and Lu tells me there is somebody else on deck now. But finding herself to be wrong about Mr. Right and repeatedly making a course correction does not constitute everything this accomplished woman has ever done.

There is a remarkable passage late in John’s Gospel, an exchange between Jesus and his disciples after he washes their feet on the last night of his life. The Lord acknowledges, “I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, but will tell you plainly of the Father. On that day you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God. I came from the Father and have come into the world;again, I am leaving the world and am going to the Father.” His disciples said, “Yes, now you are speaking plainly, not in any figure of speech!” (John 16:25-29). They have had to work hard to get to this point. On numerous occasions their literalism has left them flat-footed in the presence of the metaphorical Jesus in John’s Gospel.

In today’s story, for example, the disciples come back from the city where they had gone to buy food. They urge Jesus to eat. But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” And now Jesus takes off, just as he did in response to Nicodemus’ question (“How can anyone be born after having grown old?”) and that of the woman at the well (“How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”). “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” So, Lord, does that mean you have had lunch?

If you are a dog owner you have likely encountered the Kong. The Kong is a hard rubber toy, shaped somewhat like a top, narrow at one end and widening out at the other. It has an opening cut out of the middle where you can stash a treat or a blob of peanut butter. And your dog will exercise his wits and coordination, working hard to find the treasure at the core. The Jesus we encounter in John is the dispenser of gospel Kongs, challenging us to wrestle with figures of speech and conversations that root themselves in a particular situation but quickly soar into eternal truth. Earnest Nicodemus, trying to imagine how these things can be, the bewildered disciples who nevertheless persist, and the Samaritan woman who in short order wonders aloud, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” — they serve as guides and goads in our journey to the place where we too can say, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.” Amen.