Theological Truth: St. Photina models the path of evangelism: seen to saved to serving.
As you may have noticed, today’s Gospel is a rather long story about Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman at the well. It occurred to me that the length of the reading could exhaust a congregation’s ability to retain it all – and I can assure you it challenges a slightly distractable preacher’s ability to decide on a single sermon—so I thought it might help to read a section and then reflect, read and reflect.
The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to John.
Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
It’s helpful to remember that this story follows Nicodemus coming to Jesus at night, the passage where Jesus gives us this unforgettable assurance: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son…God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” God’s love—not merely an attribute but absolute identity—is made known in the way Jesus lived and died and rose again. Through the incarnation, God in Christ experiences the hunger, thirst, and weariness that is part of human existence. He slumps over in the heat of the day at the same place Jacob labored, the same place countless others have sought refreshment, the same place that sits under the roof of St. Photina Church about 40 miles north of Jerusalem today. God’s connection is that real, that close, and that ongoing. Jesus keeps showing up amid our human needs with an intimate understanding of the human condition and an insatiable desire to save us.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)
Notice that Jesus initiates the conversation. This is scandalous. The Samaritans were enemies. They were descendants of Jews who had intermingled with the invading Assyrians. They had a corrupted religion and a tainted bloodline. As if that wasn’t scandalous enough, men did not talk to women in public, and definitely not to women who were not related to them. And the thought of drinking out of the same bucket? EWWW! And yet Jesus, despite his own fatigue and thirst, reaches out to her. He makes the first move. For God so loves the whole world and all the people in it that he gave…he keeps offering us chances to wade in the lifegiving waters.
Jesus answered her, “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.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
I love this honest and authentic exchange. God’s love invites, never coerces. Jesus offers to provide more than she needs, more than she can imagine, but she’s skeptical. Aren’t we all? God’s unconditional love does seem too good to be true. The beginning of conversion is conversation—a dialogue. Jesus initiates, she engages. Just like the Israelites in the Exodus reading, we too journey in stages, led by the Spirit of God.
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
God’s love for the world feeds our deepest hunger and satisfies our burning thirst for a connection with Something and Someone beyond ourselves. Jesus offers a Way to cure the restlessness in our hearts, the ache in our souls, and the desperate angst of the Union which we simultaneously crave and fear. And just like with the Samaritan woman, despite our imperfection and without any merit on our part, Jesus appears offering more than we can ask or imagine. All we have to do is jump into the waters of Baptism, the wellspring that meets our deepest and truest needs.
But there’s more. This water of new life is not for our use, it’s for our transformation. We don’t just drink from the well, we become the well. Our calling isn’t to merely get a cup-full that lasts a day, but to become a channel connecting others to the life of the world.
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
So, what’s going on here? Is Jesus shaming her about her marital woes? Does she have anything to be ashamed of? Many scholars have pointed out that the ability to divorce was in the hands of men, so she was more likely the victim rather than the transgressor. In any event, Jesus offers her the chance to be fully seen, and therefore to know that she is fully loved and accepted. Nothing to hide. No need to cover up. For God so loves the world and each of us…warts and all. It keeps us humble. It focuses on God’s goodness rather than our righteousness. We can then worship in spirit and truth.
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”
The honesty and candor of the woman stands in contrast to the disciples’ hesitancy to ask Jesus about the situation. Perhaps they were still learning to move from being cups to being wells. Perhaps they hadn’t realized yet that Jesus wasn’t just a prophet, but the Savior of the world.
Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
This is where the promise of Jesus begins to take effect. The woman is now doing the work of a disciple. She is evangelizing. She is becoming a well of holy water gushing up through her, offering to all those in the vicinity this new life-giving good news. She does it in the same proactive, yet gentle and inviting way of Jesus. Come and see this Love that sees and knows everything I’ve ever done and yet loves me anyway. Could this be what saves us?
Can we trust that this Love for the world does indeed save the world? Can we trust it enough to leave our water jars behind—the drudgery of short-term fixes that never fully satisfy? Can we let go of the attitudes and approaches, the divisions and disappointments that feed us for a day, but ultimately leave us hungry? Are we ready to jump into the waters of God’s love and become a vessel of that same love for the world?
Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”
It’s safe to say that the fields are ripe for harvesting. We are materially rich, but our souls are famished. We are more connected than ever, yet loneliness and isolation constitute a literal health crisis. We have become so technologically advanced that algorithms of our own making drive us further and further apart.
In David Zahl’s book, The Big Relief: The Urgency of Grace for a Worn-Out World, he talks about a neighbor of his who, after going to his church for a few months flagged him down while walking her dog and “proceeded to gush about how the church had become the highlight of her week. She couldn’t get enough and seemed almost taken aback by this fact.” When Zahl asker her what made it special, she replied, “Every time I leave…I feel so much relief!” (p. 7) The harvest is plentiful with people thirsting for such relief.
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “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.”
Sometimes we wonder if our children will have faith. Others wonder if our faith will have children. One statistic I heard at the conference we attended this past week is that 7% of Episcopalians invite someone to church compared to 38% in other denominations. My guess is that Trinity outperforms the 7%, but that we are nevertheless paling in comparison to the evangelism efforts of St. Photina, the Samaritan woman at the well. Perhaps she can inspire our evangelism.
Don’t worry. It doesn’t require a bullhorn or a hard sell. We need only trust that Jesus is already reaching across the divides and initiating the conversation. There’s no need to hide. There’s nothing to prove. God knows everything that we’ve done (and left undone) and loves us anyway. Each and every one of us. We’re free to love and be loved. What a relief! Our work is to share the astonishing “too-good-to-be-true-ness at the heart of God” (Zahl, p. 9). It’s just like Jesus says, when we drink deeply of these life-giving waters, they become a spring gushing up through us and carrying others into this new and eternal life. The world is thirsting for the lifegiving waters of God’s grace. Why settle for a cup when the world needs a river?
The Gospel of the Lord.
