Her True Husband

Propers: The Third Sunday in Lent, A.D. 2017 A

Homily:

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

Of all the teaching encounters Jesus has with people throughout the Gospel accounts, today’s has to be one of my favorites. His interaction with the woman at the well is filled with allusion and double meaning, deep historical resonance, and what might even be a bit of flirtation, believe it or not. But in order to get all this out of the text, we must first speak a bit about Samaritans.

What we have here is a very ancient family feud. Genesis tells us that God chose the family of Abraham through which to save the world. Abraham had a son, Isaac; Isaac had a son, Jacob; and Jacob would be given a new name by God—Israel—so that Jacob’s twelve sons would go on to become the Twelve Tribes of Israel. But brothers rarely get along, especially in the Bible. And the tribes had a falling out. The northern tribes broke away from the southern tribes, splitting the nation of Israel in half. The upper half was called Ephraim after the largest tribe in that territory, and the lower half became known as Judah after the largest tribe down south.

The people of God were divided. Irrevocably so, it seemed. Sometimes they fought alongside each other; sometimes they fought against each other. Each side preferred to view itself as the true inheritor of Israel, and to view its wayward brothers as corrupted or misguided. Eventually the northern tribes were conquered by the Assyrians—an empire with a particularly nasty reputation—and much of their population was deported to foreign lands. The Assyrians were no fools: they liked to mix up conquered people, move them about, blend them together, so that they were less likely to band together and rise up against their conquerors.

The Assyrians brought in other defeated nations to resettle the north, five of them, to be precise. And each of these brought with them their tribal god. These gods became known as the five Baals, meaning the lords, or husbands, of the north. The resulting mishmash of peoples—Assyrian, Israelite, pagan, Greek, and everything in between—became known as the Samaritans, after their capital city of Samaria. For Judeans in the south, the Samaritans became a cautionary tale, a diseased branch of the family tree, the black sheep of Israel. Good Jews avoided Samaritans like the plague—which is why it proved so scandalous for Jesus to speak of a Good Samaritan, who proved more neighborly than the pious priests of Judah. All of which brings us to today’s Gospel reading.

In our story this morning, Jesus and His disciples are traveling through Samaria on their way back home from Judah to the Galilee. Jesus had not received a particularly warm welcome from the authorities in Jerusalem. And tired out from His journey, Jesus understandably takes a break from the noonday heat by a well that Jacob himself had given to Joseph, his favorite son and progenitor of the northern tribes. It’s here at the well that Jesus does the unthinkable: he asks a strange Samaritan woman for a drink.

This should set off alarm bells for a couple reasons: first because by the time of Jesus the division between Jews and Samaritans is at least a thousand years old; but also because wells are very suggestive places in the Bible. You only speak to a strange woman at a well if you’re looking to find a wife. When Abraham wanted a wife for his son Isaac, he sent his men to find Rebekah at a well. When Isaac’s son Jacob met his beloved wife Rachel, it was at a well. Moses the Lawgiver chose a wife from the daughters of Jethro, whom he defended at a well. There’s a reason that we still call singles bars watering holes, and it’s not just because of the drinks.

It is in some ways very forward of Jesus to ask a strange woman at a well for a drink, and a Samaritan woman at that! And she, for her part, understands this, and is taken aback. “How is it that You, a Jew,” she responds, “ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”

The banter has begun. “If you knew the gift of God,” He says to her, “and who it is that is asking you for a drink, you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”

The woman comes across as confident and clever. “You don’t even have a bucket,” she tells Him, “and this well is deep. How exactly are You going to give me a drink?” You can see how this is almost flirty. She’s not putting up with any nonsense, but she wants to see where this strange Jew is going with all this.

“Those who drink of the water that I will give to them will never be thirsty,” He says enigmatically. “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

Fair enough. “Sir, give me this water,” she retorts, “so that I may never have to keep coming here to this well to draw water again.” (So that I don’t have to come to the well again. Hmm.)

“Go and get your husband,” Jesus says. “Sir, I have no husband,” she replies, sounding rather coy. This might even be going somewhere. But then He says something she does not expect to hear: “You are right to say you have no husband. In fact, you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you’ve said is true.”

Now, it’s not at all clear whether or not Jesus is being literal here. We hear this story and think, “Wow, how does a woman this young go through five-and-a-half husbands?” But of course the word for husband is Baal, Lord. And indeed the Samaritans have five Baals, five foreign tribal gods who were brought into the land by forced deportation centuries ago—none of which are the northern tribes’ true Lord. Their real Baal, their real Lord, their real Husband is the Lord God of Israel, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And that God has come now in the flesh, sitting by the well of Jacob, searching for His lost wife. All throughout the Bible, the relationship between God and His people Israel is spoken of as the loving relationship between husband and wife. This continues in the New Testament, as we speak of Christ the Bridegroom and of His holy bride, the Church. Marriage is always a religious image in the Scriptures.

The whole wordplay, the whole encounter, all the flirtatious banter has led up to this one great revelation: that God has come; that the Lord has descended to earth as He promised through the prophets from of old; and He has come to claim His wife, His people, His beloved Samaritans who abandoned Him a thousand years ago to chase after gods who were not their true Husband. A thousand years of enmity and conflict and strife are here proclaimed done, the division of God’s people is annulled, and all the children of Abraham, North and South, are called to give witness to the fulfilment of the promises given to their ancestors so many long ages past!

And by God, she gets it! The woman at the well gets it! She realizes that this Man before her might actually be—no, that in fact He is—the Messiah, the Anointed One, the promised Christ who is none other than God in the flesh calling her home, calling all her people home! And she runs and tells the Samaritans, and they come to see for themselves, and they proclaim to her and to all the world, “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!”

The woman at the well is, in effect, Christ’s Apostle to the Samaritans. And all of Samaria rejoices that the mercies of God have come to dwell amongst them. And the whole time, Jesus’ Twelve Apostles are utterly clueless and befuddled as to what just happened here in this half-breed hick town. I love it.

We know from the book of Acts that the Samaritans go on to become enthusiastic converts to Christianity, and that Justin Martyr, one of the truly great early Fathers of the Church, was a Samaritan by birth. But this tale of reconciliation and redemption goes beyond the story of any one particular people. This Gospel speaks to the very heart of who and what God is, of His inexhaustible patience with those who go astray, of His ceaseless love for all His children, no matter how wayward or fallen, no matter how faithless or divided, so that even a thousand years of bitter division and blood feud are as nothing before the fountain of mercies poured out for the world in Jesus Christ our Lord.

That’s why I love the story of the woman at the well. For she did find her true husband at the watering hole that day, and she led all of her people to the truth as well. Thanks be to God that He is ever waiting for us to return to the waters of our Baptism, the waters of eternal life, ever ready to forgive us, ever eager to welcome us home.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.