Husband of Us All

Scripture: Third Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

Have you ever stumbled into the midst of someone’s family conflict, and realized that beneath the surface of their interactions laid a veritable ocean of bitter, divisive history?  It can be a bit awkward, to say the least.  You feel out of the loop.  That’s essentially what’s happened to us in our reading from the Gospel this morning: on the surface, we find Jesus conversing with a Samaritan woman at a well.  But we can tell there’s a lot more going on here than meets the eye, can’t we?  There’s history between their two peoples—family history.  And, as usual, it all starts with Abraham.

More than 5,000 years ago, God set into motion His ultimate plan to save and redeem both our fallen humanity and the rest of Creation.  This plan started with a wandering Aramaean named Abraham and with his wife Sarah: “I will be your God,” the Lord swore to Abraham, “and you will be my people.  Through you and through your offspring, I will bless all the nations of the world!”  Abraham and Sarah went on to have a son, Isaac, who ended up meeting his wife, Rebecca, by a well.  Isaac and Rebecca would go on to have a son named Jacob, and, wouldn’t you know it, he met his wife by a well.

Now’s when things get fun.  Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, earned a new name, Israel, and sired no less than a dozen hale and hearty boys.  These 12 sons would go on to found the 12 Tribes of Israel in the land still named after their father to this day.  In addition to his vast array of biblical accomplishments, Jacob—that is, Israel—won the everlasting gratitude of his descendants by digging a bunch of wells to make the desert bloom.  He was so skilled at finding water, in fact, that people attributed to him various legends, including the tradition that a traveling well actually followed him around, and that he never needed a cup because any well that he approached would miraculously bubble up and overflow with water.

Now, for a stretch of about 400 years, the 12 Tribes of Israel found themselves enslaved in Egypt, until that day when God sent the lawgiving liberator Moses to lead His people back to freedom in the Promised Land of their ancestors.  By the way, guess where Moses met his wife: by a well. I’m beginning to sense a pattern.

So the 12 Tribes of Israel made their way back to the land of Israel, where each tribe was assigned a portion of ancestral land.  But, much like the 13 American colonies, the 12 Tribes began to complain that their government wasn’t centralized enough. They wanted to be more like the pagan nations around them; they wanted a king.  God warned them that this was a bad idea, yet they insisted.  So God gave to them a king.  From now on there would be one king for all of Israel and one Temple for the worship of Israel’s one God.  Both king and Temple would reside at Jerusalem, the newly chosen capital city, which sat in the land assigned to the Tribe of Judah.

Alas, having been given what they demanded, the people now grew unhappy.  As with America, the Israelites began to regret demanding a centralized authority, as they chafed under its oppressive yoke.  So the country divided itself, north and south.  Southern Israel remained loyal to the kings of Judah, and so became known as Judeans or Jews.  Northern Israel chose for itself a new capital city and new place of worship at Samaria.  Unfortunately, things didn’t go so well for the North.

After just a few centuries, the Assyrian Empire managed to conquer the Northern Kingdom of Israel, but not the Southern Kingdom of Judah.  The northerners were deported en masse, forever to be known as the Lost Tribes of Israel.  And to make sure that the remaining Israelites couldn’t rise up against their Assyrian overlords, the Assyrians brought in other conquered peoples from all over their sprawling empire, and forcibly settled them in Northern Israel.  The Bible records that there were five of these imported pagan tribes, and each group brought with them their tribal god—decidedly not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  These pagan idol-gods would become known as the five Ba’als, the title of Ba’al meaning “lord” or “husband.”

To the horror of the good Judeans to the south, what was left of their northern brethren intermixed with the imported pagan tribes, and worship of the one true God blurred with worship of the five heathen Ba’als.  The resulting group, half Israelite and half pagan, drew its name from their old capital city; they were the Samaritans.  For pious Jews, Samaritans were an abomination: corrupt, defiled half-Jews, black sheep from a fallen branch of the family.  And good God-fearing Jews did not associate with mountain-worshipping Ba’al-loving pagan-breeding dirty heathen Samaritans!  Why, the very idea.

So there you have it, brothers and sisters: a quick-and-dirty family history, spanning the 3,000 years between Abraham and Jesus.  And it all comes to play this morning.  Armed with the lowdown on the bitter division between Jews and Samaritans, let us return to our Gospel reading with freshly opened eyes, that we might discover what, exactly, God is doing amongst the heathens of the north…

First off, Jesus is traveling from His home region of Galilee down south to Jerusalem, home of the one true God’s one true Temple.  We covered that.  But whereas most good Jews would follow the River Jordan, avoiding Samaria completely, Jesus chooses to lead His disciples right through the half-breed north.  Methinks He’s up to something.

Tuckered out by the hot desert journey, Jesus plops down by a well whilst His disciples run off to buy some food.  This particular well happens to have been dug by Jacob, father of the 12 Tribes of Israel and thus common ancestor to Jews and Samaritans alike.  When a Samaritan woman comes to the well, Jesus asks of her a drink.  Now why does this seem familiar?  Oh, yes: asking for a drink at a well was how Isaac met his wife.  And how Jacob met his wife.  And how Moses met his wife.  Hmm.

This unnamed Samaritan, who appears to have more sense of proper etiquette than does our dear Lord and Savior, says, “Whoa there, buddy.  I’m just here for the water.  Besides, I thought that Jews weren’t supposed to talk to my half of the family.”  “Ah,” says Jesus, “if you but knew the Gift of God”—i.e., Himself—“you would have asked Me for living water, and you’d never be thirsty again.”  Now, for Hebrews, living water can mean two things: flowing water from a stream (far preferable to any stagnant well); or the Word of God, Who, again, would be Jesus.

“What, Sir, are you greater than Jacob,” the woman parries, “who dug for us this well and who likewise needed no cup for he traveled with flowing water?”  “Well,” smiles Jesus, “how about you go get your husband and we’ll all talk about it?”  And, like a single woman at any modern watering hole, our Samaritan coyly replies, “I’m not married.”  “Oh, I know,” Jesus says.  “In point of fact you’ve had five husbands”—that is, five Ba’als—“and the man you’re with now is not your husband.”

Suddenly, the woman is paying attention.  And for that matter so are we.  The five husbands of this woman represent the five pagan gods of Samaria.  And the prophets long spoke of the true God, Yahweh, as Israel’s true husband.  “You’re a prophet!” the woman sees.  “In that case, tell me, who is right in our family feud: the Jews who worship in Jerusalem, or we who worship on the mountain?”  “Well,” Jesus replies frankly, “the Jews are right, but it doesn’t matter, because the true Temple—the true presence of God—is standing right here before you.”  Now the woman, and we listening in, are astounded.  “Are you the Messiah,” she gasps, “the One for Whom both Jews and Samaritans await?”  And for the first time in the Gospel, Jesus invokes the divine Name of God: “I AM.”

This story at the well, brothers and sisters, is not simply about some witty banter between Jesus and an individual.  Rather, this is the story of Samaria’s salvation.  The Lost Tribes of Israel, conquered by heathens and despoiled by pagans, have been reclaimed by their one true Husband, the Lord God of their ancestors, after all their pagan idols—the five husband Ba’als—have failed.  The Messiah has come, God in the flesh, and even before He enters loyal, God-fearing Jerusalem, He reclaims the farthest fallen and most hopelessly lost of God’s children.  And He claims them by the well of living water—the well of Baptism.

The Samaritan woman, wrongly denounced by history as a harlot, in fact becomes the first Christian missionary, confessing Christ at first as Sir, then as Prophet, next as Messiah, and finally as Savior of the world.  Through Christ and His relationship with her, all of Samaria, the Lost Tribes of Israel, are redeemed.  Christ comes to make the family of God whole.  He is the fulfillment, the culmination, of all those promises made by God to Abraham and to his children forever: to Jew and to Samaritan and, yes, through them to the Gentile, to the pagan, to all of us.

Thanks be to Christ, Who claims us as His bride, the Church.  In Jesus’ Name.  AMEN.