If you thought, Wow that’s a long passage, you would be right! It is, in fact, the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the Gospels. I’m not sure, but it might also be the longest Sunday reading we have all year, though to warn you, the next two weeks aren’t much better. I’ll try to keep my sermons a little on the shorter side.
That’s especially important today because we have a baptism! Welcome to the Meyer family and to John, whom we’ll be baptizing. Welcome also to everyone here with them--family, friends, godparents, grandparents. Like many of our families here, the Meyers came from different traditions and have found in the Episcopal Church the best of all worlds. We’re so glad you’re here.
John’s Gospel gives us some long but wonderful stories this time of year. Last Sunday, we read about Nicodemus, a religious leader who came to Jesus by night and asked him what he must do to inherit eternal life. Jesus replied that he must be born again, or born from above, and Nicodemus, failing to apprehend the meaning of Jesus’ (admittedly esoteric) teaching, sort of trails off and disappears from the story.
Today’s reading follows right on the heels of that, so if you were reading these in sequence in John’s Gospel, you would notice, they’re meant to go together. Like with Nicodemus, Jesus and this woman talk right past each other, one speaking literally and the other in metaphor. Also like there, we have here a private and intimate conversation compared to so many others in the Gospels, where there are crowds nearby.
But the differences between that encounter and this stand out perhaps more: Nicodemus is a man, and an important religious leader, but this woman is as marginal as you can get, being a woman and a non-Jew. Also, Nicodemus sort of trails off and just stops engaging with the conversation; we’re not even sure if he hangs around to even hear all of what Jesus says. This woman continues (and even leads) the conversation right to the end, making it the longest exchange Jesus has with anyone in the Gospels. Nicodemus encounters Jesus at night, and leaves, as far as we can tell, unbelieving. This woman meets Jesus at high noon, and becomes, as our tradition has it, the very first Christian evangelist.
In fact, the Samaritan woman has a whole life outside of the Gospels. In Eastern Orthodox churches, she’s even given a name, Photina, meaning light (same root that gave us “photon”), and she was said to have had five sisters whom she converted, along with her extended family. All these together became the first Christian missionaries, and when the emperor Nero persecuted the Christians in Rome, Photina and her sisters were there, becoming also the first Christian martyrs.
We know a lot about her from the tradition, but this is the only story we have of her in the Bible.
She comes to the well at midday, which (as things do in John’s Gospel) functions on a number of levels: noon signals the insight she’ll gain in this conversation, but it also explains why the two happen to be alone. No one wants to hoist up a bucket or jar to a well in the blazing sun; it was an errand best left for early morning or late in the day.
The well itself would have reminded any early reader of this Gospel of the wells in the Old Testament. The kids in Church School today are learning that wells are a recurring theme in the Bible. This particular well was the patriarch Jacob’s well, where he first met his wife, Rachel. So, Jesus meeting a woman at the well brings to mind such betrothal stories and romantic encounters, only to then subvert that conventional story.
The misunderstanding that follows is typical of the Gospel of John. First, the woman notices Jesus is a Jew, calls him a rabbi, and wonders why he’s talking to her since he’s a man and she’s a woman, plus Jews don’t talk to Samaritans--this was a centuries-old rift. He asks her to give him a drink, and then offers her “living water.” The Greek word can mean simply running water, water from a stream as opposed to from a well, which is what she takes it to mean. But of course, Jesus means something more.
Next the conversation turns to this discussion about her five husbands--again, the exact opposite of the sort of exchange a man was supposed to have with a woman at a well, if they talked at all. And interestingly, all this doesn’t lead to a conversation about morality or marriage or family, and there’s certainly no scolding or judgment passed; instead she steers them to one of the most important (and controversial) religious conversations a Jew and Samaritan could possibly have: Where is the true Temple, on our land or on yours? A topic on which the two, surprisingly, agree. [You know, only this morning did force of this particular moment in the conversation hit me: they both basically conclude that There’s so much more to both their faiths than this obsessive little, earthbound and distracting discussion they’ve been having all these years--if we just interact on a level up here, where we actually agree on a lot, a lot of the stuff down here doesn’t matter, and we could save ourselves much unnecessary grief.]
Sometimes it’s said that the miracle in this passage is the conversation. If you talk to someone long enough and stick with it, you’ll reach an understanding and both be changed. Let’s always remember to talk to each other.
At the end of the story the woman hurries off to share news of this encounter with her people, converting many of them and becoming in our tradition the first Christian evangelist. It’s hard to overstate how incredible this passage is: first for what it says about this woman and her capacity to comprehend, to interpret, and to engage with Jesus. Whichever Christians developed and/or passed on her story, calling her Photina (light) and giving her five sisters and making them a force for spreading the Gospel in a male-dominated society … Whoever told that longer story kind of took this to its logical conclusion. In the early days of women’s ordination in our church, fifty-plus years ago now, this was often the chosen Gospel reading. We should have listened to Photina about 2000 years sooner, but at least we eventually did.
So this is an incredible passage for what it says about women, but also for what it says about how we interact with people who are different from us. It’s one of just a handful of readings in the Gospels where Jesus seeks common ground with someone outside his own tribe. You never know who you’re going to get the most wisdom from, or who is going to be the most influential in your life. What stray encounter or conversation may set you on a different course. Not to include people is to miss out yourself.
But more than that, if we don’t include people, we’re neglecting one of the fundamental teachings of Christianity and the promises we make (and our parents and friends’ make for us) at our baptism: To seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves; and To strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being.
Include those whom society marginalizes; listen to, learn from, and really be changed by those who are different from us. If such teachings merit the longest conversation recorded in all the Gospels, it’s because they should. The answer to so much that’s wrong with this world is right here, in the conversation Jesus and Photina had, at the well. Amen.