A week or so ago there was a great set of comics in the paper.
Do you ever read Non-sequiter? Wiley has a strange sense of humor but
he hit on some amazing insights in his series, "Why we’ll never understand
each other." One of the comics pictures a Mom and a kid at dinner time.
The first square is "What they hear" and pictures a boy in front of
a plate of food. He hears her say, “there’s nothing I enjoy more than
making you puke." The next square is "what she said" and has
the mother saying “It’s good for you.
The next in this series of why we don’t understand each other has a picture of a husband and wife. He’s lounging in a comfortable chair and she’s standing in a coat holding her purse. What he heard…"let’s go drain the life force from your body.” The next frame What she said “Let’s go shopping.”
She said, he heard, He said, she heard. That’s the feeling I get from our gospel text this morning. This is the single longest dialogue that Jesus has with anyone recorded in the New Testament. I’m sure it’s this long because they are just not communicating. They’re on different wavelengths, separate channels, Mars and Venus. I have little doubt that this is one of those stories that an early audience found almost comical. After all, the reader knows something that the woman doesn’t. The reader knows that this is Jesus, this is the Messiah, the Savior, but all this woman sees is an arrogant Jewish man. This is a woman who isn’t used to taking anything from anybody. She’s a little hardened by life, has been around the block one or twice. To the early readers this Jesus has the answer to life, which he offers to her but she’s too tough, too jaded, too life weary to get.
Maybe what we see in their dialogue is that we’re just a little too tough, too jaded, too life weary to really recognize Jesus and to hear what he’s got to offer when he comes to us. Maybe in our ongoing dialogue with Jesus we’re just not connecting because like this poor Samaritan woman what we hear is not what’s being said. It seems to me that there are three important things that take place in this encounter that have ultimate significance to us. One, Jesus meets us in the everydayness of our lives but challenges us to see that life is more than that. Two, that Jesus is not ultimately interested in what our past has been but in what our future might be. And three that true worship is not about place or time or form but about spirit and truth.
So, the text tells us the woman comes to the well as she has no doubt done every day of her life. She’s doing the things that make for life, for survival, for getting by. She’s getting water but she might as well have been buying groceries, getting on the train to the office, putting gas in the car or heading for the coffee room for a snack. And Jesus encounters her in the most mundane and ordinary of ways. What he says is, Use your bucket to get me a drink of water. What she hears is, “Samaritan scum woman, get busy getting me, a self important, arrogant Jewish man, a drink of water.” John says, Samaritans and Jews don’t have anything to do with one another. That’s an understatement. The animosity between them has gone back hundreds of years. She sees Jesus as a member of another religious ethnic group, a male, a rabbi who really doesn’t want anything to do with her. She’s labeled, pigeonholed and categorized this man already so she doesn’t have to encounter him. Jesus counters by offering her “living water.” But in a “he said, she heard” way, she wants to talk about the history of the well, about the bucket that’s needed to transport the water, about anything and everything mundane and ordinary.
Sometimes I think we get into that trap. Jesus comes to us in the midst of our everyday activities with living water and all we are interested in is how big, how much, how many, how long, what impact does this have on getting the job done, with going on with my life. Jesus comes to us with living water, the words of life and (we just want to say, Don’t bug me, I’ve got to make a living, feed the kids, have a moment to myself and on and on and on.) Our jaded cynical selves just can’t hear what he’s saying. The second thing that happens in this “he said, she heard” encounter is that Jesus makes it clear that Jesus knows who she is and still wants to give her living water. Scholars have debated for centuries the moral understanding of this husband interchange. Was she a prostitute or just unlucky enough to have gone through five husbands? We could continue debating that but more importantly to this interchange is that the woman ends up believing that Jesus knows her. Twice she credentials Jesus to others by saying, “he told me everything I have ever done!”
How much we long to be known and to be understood. Certainly the ads on TV with sister are a crass example of this. In a more sophisticated way we like to take psychological profiles, inventories, magazine quizzes anything that enlightens us to who we are and how we tick. We just took a good one on the WELCA retreat. We want to understand ourselves but more importantly we want to be understood.
The living water that Jesus offers the Samatritan woman and
us is that we are known altogether and loved and accepted. Jesus knows us completely
and loves us anyway. As our epistle lesson says…
A street minister in Chicago tells the story of a young mother, who came to
his homeless shelter, sick frightened, racked by guilt and despair. With tears
streaming down her face she told her story of drug addiction, prostitution and
how she had abused and endangered her two year old. Revolted by her degrading
story the street minister was silent. Finally he asked if she had ever thought
of going to church for help. “I will never forget the look of pure astonishment
that crossed her face, he writes. “Church! She cried why would I ever go
there? They’d just make me feel worse than I already do!” How is that
for a condemnation of the contemporary Christian church the community called
to represent Christ to the world? he says.
But Jesus doesn’t just leave our Samaritan women there, he challenges her to go deeper. She admits that Jesus may be a prophet but again she wants to debate the old animosities, the old feuds. We Samaritans worship here, you Jews worship there. Jesus sweeps aside her attempts to deflect his attention from her to some ancient argument. Jesus says “Those who worship must worship in spirit and truth."
It is easy for us to get caught up in squabbles within our
denomination and squabbles between denominations. It is easy for us to try to
deflect attention away from how we worship, how we proclaim Jesus messiah by
talking about how they worship, what they do, how they see God. Just as Jesus
accepts us Jesus challenges us and confronts us. Are we seeking the living water
that Jesus is offering or we deflecting Jesus advances by investing only in
the everydayness of life, seeking only water when living water is available,
Are we deflecting Jesus advances by wallowing in past regrets and guilts. Are
we so divided by how we worship that we fail to embrace true worship and living
water.
What he said, “Let me give you living water”, What she ultimately
heard, “You have the words of eternal life.” So may we also hear.
Amen.