A Samaritan Woman: The PLEA

Text: John 4:5-42
Theme: “A Samaritan Woman: The PLEA”
3RD Sunday in Lent
March 27, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

In the Name of Jesus

There was no spring break for Jesus. The Pharisees – with their hands on the religious pulse of the people -- had heard that He was gaining quite a following, so He decided to get out of the area of Judea. No rest for the weary! It’s time to pack up and head north!

There were a number of ways to travel back up north to Galilee from Judea and, surprisingly, our Lord decides to go through Samaria. Others may or may not have advised Him to take a different route. Whatever the case, it was risky business for a Jew to travel through Samaria. Why is that? The answer has to do with race – or racism. In America, we had a civil war over that issue. Much of the age-old strife in the Middle East, when it’s all boiled down, is on account of race.

The Jews of Jesus’ day considered the people of Samaria – the Samaritans – to be second-class, second-cousins. They were thought of as inferior half-breeds. Chances are that many of us have distant relatives that we’d really rather not spend a whole of time with. Such relatives have something in common with fish out of water: after a day or two they start to stink. That’s putting it mildly. There was a saying, popular at the time of Jesus, which said: “The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.” That’s putting it directly. Also, there is evidence that the feelings were reciprocated; they went both ways.

Decades ago, the singer Cher -- of Sonny and Cher fame -- waxed auto-biographical when she wrote:

My father married a pure Cherokee
My mother's people were ashamed of me
The indians said I was white by law
The White Man always called me "Indian Squaw"

Half-breed, that's all I ever heard
Half-breed, how I learned to hate the word
Half-breed, she's no good they warned
Both sides were against me since the day I was born

The feelings behind such language, or ones similar to them, may have gone through the mind of the woman, the Samaritan woman, who saw this stranger sitting at the ancient well of Jacob where she had come as she always did to draw water.

No stranger to us, it was Jesus. We are told that He was tired – a very human thing to be. Jesus, well aware of where He was and who this woman was, speaks up. Road weary, worn out, and thirsty, He utters a plea: “Give me a drink.”

It should be noted that such verbal exchanges – again, in Jesus’ day – were entirely inappropriate. Men didn’t talk to women in public like that. That was a big no-no. Already, Jesus has crossed a boundary if not broken a barrier. While it may disappoint some folks, Jesus was never much for political or even religious correctness – as they were then understood.

The woman – as shocked as she surely was! – barely had time to think. If she did, it perhaps would have gone on like this: “Who’s this? Is another man – this time a Jew – here to play grown-up games with me? Will he use, abuse, send me away like all the others?” She doesn’t scream in rage. She doesn’t run. (That’s one of the miracles in this story, I think.) She stays put and asks the obvious question: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”

Jesus, only too aware of the race problem and the social propriety that was at stake, says: “If you knew the gift of God, 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.’”

She noticed that this tired man did not have a bucket or some such thing to get the water out of the well. “Where can you get this living water?” she asks. “Are you greater that our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and his herds?”

“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again,” says Jesus, “but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a well spritzing up to everlasting life.”

The woman, either honestly hoping to get some of this water or thinking it all a badjoke, says: “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” Living water should have its practical benefits. It certainly could save a trip out to this old well in the searing heat of the day!

Jesus, still parched, says, ‘Go, call your husband and come back.” She says, innocently, “I have no husband.” Jesus says, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

There was not much she could do about being a woman in that patriarchal, male-dominated society. Also, there was nothing she could do about being a Samaritan woman. Put together, that was a double whammy of badness! But the five husbands thing was something she likely thought she could hide. No one could tell that just by looking at her. It was her secret. Christian writer Alyce McKenzie writes: “Her whole life is organized around keeping her secret. She dreads the moment it comes out. It’s like the jack-in-the-box clown. It stays in the box but then the handle starts turning and that creepy music starts, and then Pop, goes the Weasel! Out comes the secret, and there is shame.”

The Samaritan woman is in good company. Like her, we, too, have something we would rather not have others know about – even those closest to us. As it is said, “Some things are better left unsaid.”

In 2004, a man named Frank Warren started a website called postsecret.com. It was an art project. He asked people to mail in postcards that had one of their secrets written on it. The rules were that the secret needed to be anonymous and something that was never shared with someone else. The website is still going strong. Here are just a few from Warren’s website that cover the range from humor to heartache:

--In high school I was so desperate for a boyfriend I dated a guy who went to Star Wars Conventions…and he dumped me.

--Even vegetarians think of meat from time to time. I know I do.

--My insomnia is going to get me fired.

--I can’t stand my stepmother.

--When things go well for me I have to wreck my life all over again.

When you own up to a secret, you run the risk of being rejected. That’s why people send anonymous postcards to a website – because they are afraid to confide them to another human being face to face.

With the Samaritan woman, Jesus did the confiding for her. He said what she could not bring herself to say. Would He, too, reject her? No.

And the woman, to her credit, does not bail on Jesus. Often, when painful truth makes the light of day, people seek quick escape. Not this woman. She hangs in there and says to Jesus: “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we much worship is in Jerusalem.”

Jesus does not rebuke her for changing the subject. He says: “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not now; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The woman, now free to reveal a yearning deeper than her secret, replies: “I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes he will explain everything to us.”

Jesus declares: “I who speak to you am he.” That was the good whammy to end all good whammys!

The disciples now enter into the scene. They wonder what in the world Jesus is doing talking to a woman out in public. During that exchange, the woman slips away and is no longer silent in public. She heads into town and has no compunction about speaking up. She tells the people: “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?”

This woman, together with the acquaintances, invites Jesus to stay. Jesus did – for two days, we are told. In the end, many more became believers. They said to the woman: “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Jesus knows our secrets – all those things we’d rather not talk about in polite company. He knows our prejudices, our pre-judgments. He sees beyond our Sunday best.

All of the pain, all of the wrong that the woman felt and that that woman caused, Jesus knew. All of the pain, all of the wrong that we have felt and we have caused, Jesus knows.

All of it, every bit of it, He took to His cross. He paid for it there, says the Gospel. He erased the insurmountable debt as He hung battered and dying. In His resurrection from the grave, He gave us that message that causes wells of living water to spritz up in our hearts.

Just think: it all started with one man, his parched throat, and his plea: “Give me a drink!”

What is Jesus asking you for this Lent?

Amen.