Romantic Comedy

Propers: The Third Sunday in Lent, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

If you want to get a girl, you’ve got to go to the well.

That would be the dating advice of the Hebrew Bible. Time and again, in the stories of Scripture, we see young men come of age, ready to be wed, who find their brides by wells. That’s where Isaac found Rebecca, where Moses found Zipporah. And it makes a certain sense. There’s a logic to it. Little girls weren’t sent to draw water in large, heavy earthenware jars. Water weighs a lot. And established, married women typically had servants or daughters to go and draw the water for them.

So if you were man in the Ancient Near East, looking for a young, yet mature, strong single woman, your best bet would be to stake out the village well. Moreover, drawing water was a social situation. People had to share, coöperate, wait for their turn. Thus, not only would you see just what a woman could lift, mulier fortis; you’d also see how she behaved around others, some hint at her character.

I’m not saying that it isn’t a little sexist. It is. I’m just explaining why so many biblical couples seem to have their meet-cute at the well. And this shouldn’t be terribly far removed from our own experience. When I was rather a younger man, not all that crazy long ago, lots of couples met up at the bar, to which we would still refer on occasion as “the watering hole.”

So if we know our Scriptures, if we’re familiar with these stories, then the fact that Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well in our Gospel reading this morning is going to raise an eyebrow. It sounds a bit like Jesus might be looking for a bride. And the ensuing dialogue, if nothing else, comes across, to me at least, as really rather flirty. But there’s a reason for that. And it’ll all make sense in the end.

“Jesus,” John tells us, “left Judea and departed again to Galilee. He had to pass through Samaria” in order to do so—except that He didn’t. He in no way had to pass through Samaria in order to get to Galilee, and John’s hearers would know this. It would be like me telling you that I had to pass through South Dakota in order to get to Wisconsin. Clearly there’s something in South Dakota that I want to see. Jesus has a reason for going to Samaria which has little if any relation to geography.

Now, some accuse the Bible of having no humor in it, but that has much more to do with their reading of it than with the text itself. This story seems full of humor to me. Comedy, after all, is connected to the unexpected, the surprise twist, the punchline. For that matter, so is horror. I think that’s why we often laugh when we are scared. Jesus is subverting our expectations from the get-go, to make us pay attention.

So Jesus is sitting by this well around noon, tired out from all His hiking about the Holy Land, when along comes a young woman bearing a jug for water. The busy time for any well would be first thing in the morning. By now the crowds have dispersed, the Apostles have wandered off somewhere, and it seems to be just the two of them, just Jesus and this woman; hence but a hint of impropriety.

“Give me a drink,” He asks of her. And she, taken aback a bit, yet nonetheless game for interaction, replies, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan?” And thereby hangs a tale. For you see, Jews and Samaritans go way back in the Bible. They used to be the same people, the same kingdom. Together they were Israel. Theirs was a federation of twelve tribes, give or take, united by a single monarch with a single Temple in the royal city of Jerusalem.

But there were disagreements, and disagreements led to war. Seems there’s always a war. And they fought the same civil savagery as we did, north versus south, except this time the north broke away from the south to form its own little kingdom. And the two of them feuded like sisters, the sort of love-hate relationship that can only really form in deeply dysfunctional families.

This went on for a number of generations until along came an empire—a particularly nasty one—which managed to conquer the northern kingdom of Israel. And to make sure that they stayed conquered, much of the population was deported, becoming what we call the Lost Tribes. The empire then brought in five other peoples from five other conquered countries to replace the lost population, all mixing and matching, so as to eliminate rebellious national identity.

The result was a hodgepodge of people called Samaritans who had Israelite ancestry, who worshipped the God of Abraham, Moses, and David, yet who also erected shrines to the five gods of the five foreign countries forcibly imported to the land. These ancestral tribal deities were called the ba’als, a word which means lords or gods or husbands. And keep in mind that good southern Jews looked upon all this mess in horror. To them, Samaritans were half-breeds at best, corrupted country cousins.

So when Jesus, a Jew—apparently an obvious Jew—asks a Samaritan woman to draw water from the well for Him, it’s a little scandalous, not least because such an action implies the possibility of romantic interest. It’s as though He asked her to buy Him a drink. Is it just a drink? There’s a little bit of West Side Story, of Romeo and Juliet, two houses both alike in dignity, in fair Verona where we lay our scene. There’s a hint of forbidden fruit between the two.

And their interaction is lively. She’s a clever woman, with no problem holding her own against a rabbi. “If you knew the gift of God,” He says, “and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” Oh-ho, so He thinks He’s the gift of God, does He? He’s basically telling her, “It’s not what I want; it’s what I can give you.”

“You don’t even have a bucket,” she teases. “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well?” That’s a neat line because not only is she pointing out their commonality, their shared history, but she’s also implying that maybe their mutual ancestor liked her people better. It’s a bit of witty repartee.

“I can outdo Jacob,” Jesus gently boasts. “I can give you living water with which you shall never thirst again.” “Well, then, sir,” she comes right back, “give me this water so that I don’t need to come out here and lug this jug around all day.” And He says, “Go call your husband,” to which she replies—with something of a smile, I’d imagine—“I have no husband.” Oh, now her cards are on the table.

You see what I mean? It’s a flirty scene. It’s a cute scene, something from a romcom. At least, that’s our expectation; that’s how we are reading it. But then John throws the twist: “You’re right in saying you have no husband, for you have had five, and the man you are with now is not your husband.” And she says, “My gosh, you’re a prophet.” But not for the reason that we might think!

So many modern preachers take this literally. They imagine that said woman really did have five husbands, despite how young she must obviously be, and that Jesus impresses her with this parlor trick, this psychic knowledge He ought not know. The lesson then becomes something like, “That’s too many men, ladies,” which is honestly just crass. But that’s not it at all. That’s not what John is getting at.

What’s really happening is so much more interesting. Because it’s a play on words, you see. When Jesus tells her that she has had five husbands, He’s saying five ba’als. Samaria, in other words, has had five gods and none of them are her true God. And the woman at the well gets it. Right away, she says, “I see you are a prophet.”

And without missing a beat, she shifts gears to talk about religion. The conversation didn’t go to where she thought it might be going, where we thought it might be going, but she is a woman of faith and very much game to talk about spirituality. Jesus convinces her not only that He is the Messiah promised to her people, promised to both of their peoples, but also to go and tell the others, to go and bring the crowd. Christ has found His Bride in Samaria, and she is His Church.

The woman at the well is an evangelist, a preacher, a missionary. Through her, Christ redeems Samaria, redeems His schismatic wayward people, redeems the Lost Tribes of Israel. Indeed we know that Samaritans were among the earliest of Christians. So do you see now the humor in the story? Do you see the point? Jesus did come to Samaria to claim His Bride, not in this one woman only but in all of her people. The war is over, the schism healed, the family joined as one in Christ.

It is pure grace, pure mercy, pure and unexpected joy. It is a wedding: of God and His people, of Christ and His Church, of the Creator and all His Creation. And yes, there is that thrill of romance. For love, by God, shall save us all.

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