A big shout out to lectionary “Year A” in the three-year cycle which gave us just yesterday the intrepid and resilient (though sadly nameless) “woman at the well” in John’s account of the Gospel (4:5-42). She herself was a fount of living water as we gathered for worship in this Lenten season, in these days when white patriarchy is running amok across the globe and an oily rain is falling on the people of Tehran—an unprecedented environmental catastrophe.
Rather than oil in the streets, and as if like Moses, we struck the rock in the wilderness in worship and out from ancient biblical texts streamed the kind of clear watery refreshment we hardly knew we needed so terribly much. How fortuitous and perhaps even divinely inspired that the lectionary landed on these biblical texts in Women’s History Month—a month that really should feature actual women (with names, damnit!) and not merely stereotypes.
It’s dismayingly difficult to keep women real given the long, the achingly long literary, religious, and political history of turning the stories of women into archetypes, symbols, and violent cliches. As we now know in some fresh and horrifying ways from Jeffrey Epstein’s island of misfit billionaires, women (and girls) are not merely tropes but objects to be traded, trafficked, bartered, enslaved, raped, tortured, and killed.
A Sunday lectionary hardly seems up to the task of unraveling and dismantling such an infernal misogyny, unless we pay attention, and unless we take ancient stories as contemporary beacons, and unless we insist that Scripture really can inspire and equip us—with the Holy Spirit’s charisms—to live as revolutionaries, just like Jesus.
So let’s be sure to notice when reading the story about that fierce woman at the well—and then notice again, and then still once more (because deeply ingrained patriarchal habits are insidiously hard to break)—that there’s absolutely nothing in this story about repentance and forgiveness; but there’s quite a lot in this Johannine story about cycles of patriarchal domination.
Let’s take a step back from that observation (which sounds like heresy in my Evangelically-shaped ears) and consider carefully the calcified cliches behind which women so often disappear. Just a couple of weeks ago, for example, on the first Sunday in Lent, the lectionary assigned the classic story from Genesis about the temptation of Adam and Eve by the serpent.
Ah! But that’s not how most of us remember that story. Most of us have heard it referred to as the “temptation of Eve,” who then seduces Adam to make the same mistake she did.
That difference makes a significant difference: imagining only Eve present for the serpent’s temptation makes Eve a symbol of the original seductress who leads to the fall of man (both in the generic and particular sense)—and who does so again and again, from generation to generation, wearyingly repeated as stale caricature on a manly stage.
John’s story at a well in the desert has often been read in much the same way as that iconic story from Genesis. In fact, the literary figure of “Woman as Wicked Seductress” is so common—infusing the air we breathe and the water we drink—most of us don’t even have to know about it to read John’s story with that motif as our interpretive lens.
I grew up hearing this story as an encounter between Jesus and a sexually promiscuous woman—a woman who had led astray no fewer than six men—and how wonderful it is that God’s forgiveness can extend even to someone like her; but none of that is even hinted at in John’s telling.
The first-century context of the story offers alternative ways of reading that are much more plausible. Given the ancient mortality rate, this woman could have been widowed multiple times; cultural customs would have forced her to marry the brothers of her deceased husbands, one after another.
It’s even more likely that she was struggling because of religious marriage regulations in which only men could initiate divorce, and for any reason at all; the social and economic vulnerability of unmarried women might have forced this woman to remarry after multiple divorces just to survive—and perhaps that’s why she resorted to living with a man who was not her husband, a way just to put food on the table.
To repeat once more: Jesus says nothing at all to this woman about forgiveness, not even repentance; what startles and astonishes this woman is that Jesus apparently knew—he knew and he named—what she had been enduring and living through.
Reading this story apart from the usual patriarchal assumptions about sexual morality can itself be quite liberating, and a way to notice a remarkable first-century embrace of a woman as student and disciple, as compelling witness and evangelist, and some would say one of the earliest apostles! A whole village follows Jesus because of her ministry!
But there’s more: John goes still further in his portrayal of Jesus as a divine social revolutionary with a story that isn’t about just any (anonymous) woman; this woman is from a village in Samaria, a region denigrated and despised by the religious elite in Judea. (It takes hardly any imagination at all to bring to mind today’s “Judeans” and “Samaritans”.)
Recall the biblical story (1 Kings 16—2 Kings 9) about Ahab, a corrupt ruler of the northern Kingdom of Israel, who made a political alliance by marrying a Phoenician woman by the name of Jezebel. Together, they set up their own capital city away from Jerusalem and in Samaria, where they established a temple for idolatrous worship.
Even when those details from the biblical story are unfamiliar, very few would fail to recognize the name “Jezebel”—yet another emblematic figure of the dangerous seductions of women in the affairs of men.
John the Evangelist may have been enamored with a misty-eyed neo-platonic mysticism (and I confess to finding wonderful insights when I read him that way), but right now, today, it matters even more to see in this one Johannine woman the embodiment of both the vexations of gender and the hostile rivalries of ethnicity.
I mean, what if John is writing this story not as a way to illustrate God’s gracious forgiveness of a “sexual sinner” (dare I repeat this? that is not in the story at all). What if he is instead writing a story of God’s own determination to liberate women from their patriarchal classifications, and to heal the wounds of ethnic rivalry and hatred? Sure, preach forgiveness, but not with this story; this one is about freedom.
Oh, how much richer this story becomes when it’s not merely and crudely about how many sexual partners a first-century woman may have had (honestly, who cares?) but rather how often women become trapped in cycles of male domination and control, illustrated by this one woman—an illustration embodied by a woman of undesirable ethnic heritage.
John may be rooted in thick and even convoluted theological speculation, but he is also (I am convinced) committed to taking otherwise simple and ordinary encounters and rendering them with a brilliant divine presence and transformative insight.
Consider the lectionary’s rich texts last week, for the first Sunday in Lent: not only the story of Adam and Eve’s temptation but also John’s story about Nicodemus, a member of the judicial counsel of the Judeans, coming to visit Jesus at night. The symbol of darkness can remind us of seeds planted in the soil of Earth, just as the body of Jesus himself is eventually planted in a dark tomb, from which will sprout an Easter life.
Yesterday, by contrast, John’s Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman drawing water at high noon, in broad daylight. Something important is being brought into view, being revealed and illuminated for us to see.
As I read this familiar story once again this year, I kept returning to the frame John seems keen to create for it: authentic worship. If “proper worship” divided Judeans and Samaritans, then John insists in the bright light of day to show us living water flowing like a crystal stream of healing between the Judean Jesus and the Samaritan woman—water that not only restores life to a parched land but also provides a balm for the ethnic violence that has scarred the land.
That violence is rooted in the ethnic and patriarchal hostilities that have marred human history for millennia. True and life-giving worship, in other words, will always lead us into relationships of healing and reconciliation for the sake of Beloved Community.
The day is coming, Jesus says, when the true worshippers of God are not tied to any one location or belong to only one chosen race or exhibit a favored gender but shall instead all worship together in spirit and in truth—both outwardly in our bodies and inwardly in our souls, as the lectionary collect for the day declared.
As these lectionary texts lead toward the Eucharistic Table, it’s worth remembering that John is the only Gospel writer to include a rather grisly detail in the story of the crucifixion: both water and blood flowed from the pierced side of the crucified Jesus (19:34).
Now, it is certainly possible to read that moment as a forensic examiner: the Roman centurion’s spear likely pierced through the pericardial membrane around the heart of Jesus, releasing its watery fluid along with the blood.
Sure, but I don’t think John cares one little bit about that. I think John cares that human beings are physically born from their mothers in a mix of both blood and water, and here it flows from the Jesus who invites us all to be “born again.” The fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich imagined exactly this: the wound in the side of Jesus as the womb from which we are reborn into New Life—Jesus, she said, is our blessed mother.
Even if John only gestured toward the socially transformative power of authentic worship, it’s high time we take that conviction with us to the Eucharist Table. There we remember the death of Jesus and proclaim the hope of Easter—the intertwining of memory and hope creates true and genuine community, as Josiah Royce once noted, and leads to the formation of Beloved Community, as Martin Luther King, Jr., later preached, and which John the evangelist insists leads to rebirth.
Rebirth as mere “blank slate”? No, but being born again into a world where the life of a woman at a well in the wilderness can reassure us that God’s living water shall not fail to heal us and free us from the racially gendered systems of domination that wound us all.
