Within Our Grasp
Third Sunday of Lent, Year A
by Sadao Watanabe
Exodus 17:1-7 | Psalm 95 | Romans 5:1-11 | John 4:5-42
After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. Revelation 7:9
I frequently tell my students that our flourishing as persons depends on the integrity of three fundamental, interwoven relationships: to God, to our neighbors, and to Creation, and that sin is more than anything else a disruption of these relationships. Which is to say it is division and dissolution. Which is to say it is a failure to love as we have been loved. While I cannot account for all the writers, teachers, and friends from whom I have learned this, a few come to mind, perhaps most notably the 20th century French theologian Henri De Lubac, who wrote in Catholicism: Christ and the Common Destiny of Man, that “all infidelity to the divine image that man bears in him, every breach with God, is at the same time a disruption of human unity” (33). The practical effects of this disruption include myriad forms of selfishness, exploitation, persecution, and ultimately, violence. Just so, humanity, “which ought to constitute a harmonious whole, in which ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ would be no contradiction, is turned into a multitude of individuals, as numerous as the sands of the seashore, all of whom show violently discordant inclinations” (34).
While these “discordant inclinations” have long since primordially infected the created order and become part of human experience, there are times when they are more conspicuously evident. This is clearly the case here in the United States, where civil disagreement has all but vanished, invective has replaced reasoned argument, and violence is fast becoming a first resort. Americans are alienated intractably by race, class, gender, and political affiliation without much in the way of prospects for finding common ground. One wonders if there is a way forward.
Our gospel text suggests there is. It is worth noting that the familiar story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman (John 4:5-42) is preceded by the story of a potentially divisive conflict averted. Jesus and his disciples were in Judea baptizing not far from where John the Baptist, who was also in the area, was doing the same. When some of John’s disciples told him they had heard from a Pharisee that Jesus was in the area and “all are going to him,” the Baptizer was unbothered. He told his followers Jesus’s success was an occasion for joy, rather than envy, concluding, “He must increase but I must decrease” (3:30). Jesus’s response was rather different, but equally peaceable; when he heard the same rumors, he decided to leave the area and return to Galilee, a journey that required him to go through Samaria (4:4), thus setting the stage for our text.
The complex, centuries-long history of mutual antipathy between Jews and Samaritans is more than can be addressed here; suffice it to say that at best they wanted little to do with each other. Jesus’s encounter with the woman at the well would have been underlain by a tension born of centuries of conflict and accumulated prejudice, which show up in their conversation in the woman’s subtle challenges to Jesus. When he asks her for a drink, she responds, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (4:9); when in response he offers her “living water,” she asks, in a manner of speaking, “Just who do you think you are?” Pointing out the depth of the well and his lack of a bucket, she skeptically prods, “Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us this well?” (4:12).
But these questions are of no great significance in the unfolding of the story, for the history of conflict underlying them is no impediment to the reign of shalōm Jesus is there to proclaim. Nor, for that matter, is the woman’s serial monogamy, which Jesus appears to mention primarily to turn the conversation toward the good news (4:16-19). The conversation thus turns away from the woman’s marital history and the contested faith of the Samaritans to the coming of the Messiah, whom the woman asserts will someday “proclaim all things to us.” When Jesus declares, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you,” the woman departs, returning to the city and exhorting her neighbors to “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done,” which moves them to return with her to the well, invite Jesus into their homes, and receive the good news, ultimately declaring, “we know that this is truly the Savior of the world” (4:39-42).
That the conversation between the woman and Jesus led to the gathering of the Samaritans into the people of God is good news and an indisputable sign of God’s reign, but that is not the only thing going on in the story. As the conversation was ending, just before the woman departed for the city, the disciples returned from their own trip to the city to buy food, astounded at finding their Rabbi conversing with a woman, and a Samaritan woman at that. They remained silent until the woman left, and then began to encourage Jesus to eat what they had purchased, which led to one of the metaphor-strewn lessons the Jesus of John’s gospel is given to delivering: After refusing their offer of food, Jesus said, “’I have food that to eat that you do not know about’… My food is to do the will of him who sent me and complete his work” (4:33-34). Jesus likens the work of announcing the good news of God’s reign—work that he had been training the disciples to do, as well—to harvesting crops, noting one important difference: harvesting crops is seasonal work, done once or twice a year, while the work of the proclaiming and inhabiting God’s kingdom is ongoing. Wherever there is brokenness—alienation, discord, exploitation, or violence—there are women and men and families and tribes—in need of healing. That healing is God’s work in the world, which is not complete until the kingdom has come in its fullness.
And what are the signs that the kingdom is being built, that it is moving toward consummation? Reconciliation. Friendship. Communion. Koinonia. De Lubac points again to the Fathers: “The redemption being a work of restoration will appear to us by that very fact as the recovery of lost unity—the recovery of supernatural unity of man with God, but equally of the unity of men among themselves” (35-36). May this be the reality we pray for and work toward, not as a faintly hoped-for dream, but a reality that is ever within our grasp.
Amen.