Lent 3 March 8, 2026 with The Rev. Angela Compton-Nelson

https://www.episcopalchurch.org/lectionary/lent-3a/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:58

It is no longer because of what you've said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world. In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. If this were a movie, the opening scene might be zoomed in on a clay vessel, abandoned on the chiseled corner of an eight-sided well, coming into view as the camera zooms out, a bucket still suspended in mid-air above the water's surface at Jacob's well. In this opening scene caught some point mid-zoom, and just for a moment, only at the corner, a woman's dusty, sandal foot, linens in motion around her ankle. She is leaving the scene. Having come for water midday, she unexpectedly encounters an unknown Jewish man and leaves with more than she came for. Her encounter with Jesus in the bright light of midday happens only a chapter after the Jewish teacher Nicodemus encounters Jesus in the shadows of deep night. Unnamed in the New Testament, this woman we call the Samaritan woman at the well was given the name Photini by early Christians, a name which means luminous one. As one who meets Jesus in the day, she becomes an early source of the proclamation of the light of Christ. When after her encounter, she tells the people of her town about Jesus, and they come to know him for themselves. This story becomes a narrative answer to the question offered by the Israelites, recently sprung from Egypt, in the Old Testament lectionary reading today. Is the Lord among us or not? We start with the woman belonging to the sandal foot, leaving our opening scene. While unnamed in the story, as I mentioned, the Samaritan woman is given the name Fotini by the early church. This may surprise those of us who are used to hearing about the Samaritan woman as a profligate sinner, a sexual outcast avoided by a community from which she has been ostracized, coming out to draw water in the heat of midday rather than at times during which the well might be busier in early morning and late evening. But when the conversation between Jesus and the woman turns to the woman's marital status, it seems that this very interpretation of the Samaritan woman as a profligate sexual sinner is really obvious. Much is made of the woman's marital status by 2,000 years of preachers and theologians who have commented on it. It is this part of her conversation with Jesus, though, that gives that gives her her reputation of sexual sin. But if the point of the story were her sin, we might expect Jesus to conclude the questions and dialogue with her about marriage or any other part of the conversation by saying, Go and sin no more. It is, after all, this very phrase that Jesus will use four chapters later in addressing another unnamed woman, this time a woman at risk of stoning, brought before him as one caught in adultery. The redirect to the woman's sin, it's distracting to us. But if sin isn't the point, then what is it? This encounter between Jesus and the woman at the well is a callback to the marriage stories of the Old Testament. While there is no mention of this exact well, which the woman calls Jacob's well, the reference to Jacob, aside from the theological point that the woman is making about Jews and Samaritans, which we will get to in a moment, is meant to put in our minds the other wells that happen in the story of God. Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Sepporah. In biblical literature, wells are often sites for meetings that end in marriages. In all of these stories, men travel from foreign places and meet women at wells. The women leave their conversations with men, conversations in which they always talk about water, a predictably common conversation topic in the middle of an arid climate. The women tell members of their communities about the foreign men and then accept the men into their communities as visitors, offering them hospitality. You can see the form in today's gospel story. But then those foreign men marry the women that they meet. Well, this doesn't end exactly as those many marriage stories do. It does play with the trope. And the woman and the people with whom she shares about Jesus do enter into long-term relationship with him in a meaningful way. She is transformed. Her conversation with Jesus is his longest conversation in the whole of the New Testament. And it's a wide-ranging theological spar, which begins predictably from an antagonistic place. And this antagonistic place is our next stop. In the story's opening lines, the woman expresses her surprise that Jesus is talking to her at all. How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria? Alongside the Gospel writer's reminder that Jews and Samaritans do not speak to one another, this question clues us into the relationship that exists between Jews and Samaritans in the uncomfortable encounter that the first hearers might have expected between the two characters. While both Jews and Samaritans follow the Torah and share descendants, the antagonism between them is deep and enduring. The people residing in the region of Samaria are those who, because of geography and distance from Jerusalem, were not subjected to rounds of deportations by the Assyrian Empire. Samaritans remained in the land of Israel and Judah, while many others in Israel and especially Jerusalem were sent away for generations. Different geographies and these relationships to foreign powers during the periods of Jewish exile and return created centuries of differing political and social histories between the two ethnic groups. For those who were sent into exile, Jewish identity was forged around the hope for the temple in Jerusalem and the traditions of the rabbis. But Samaritans understood this to be a modification to the story of God. For Jews sent away in exile, the people of Samaria who remained were a mixed race of Israelites and foreign settlers, people who were assumed to have intermarried with occupying Assyrians, creating a people who were another category entirely, neither mainstream Jews nor Gentiles. This woman who in her encounter with Jesus begins from this antagonistic place might be expected, does become the first to share that Jesus is the Messiah, that both Jews and Samaritans have been hoped for have hoped for, the Messiah who is now among them. She is the first in this gospel to indicate something significant about Jesus' identity. A gospel that begins with, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. This encounter that she has with Jesus is enough not only to overcome the divisions that have long existed for the two characters, but for her to enter into a long-term relationship with the Savior. Some of the earliest images in Christianity, including many in Roman catacombs, are part of this story. Jesus and the Samaritan woman around a well, often pictured with eight sides, but sometimes in the shape of the cross, pretty much exactly like the font in this knave. You can see this still in many contemporary icons of the scene. For us, this should rightly suggest that this is a baptismal text, as should the relationship and conviction that grows out of the conversation with Jesus and the woman. But if it is a baptismal text, it is also a story about the cross of Jesus and about our ongoing relationship with him. It is difficult for those of us who live with running taps and the protection of modern-day housing to understand the significance of water in a harsh and unforgiving climate. A place where water is sparse, carefully conserved, and demanding of the entire community's maintenance and care. But living water is even more valuable because it moves. It's not stagnant and unsafe, but alive, refreshing, and essential for life. It flows sometimes seemingly from nowhere, growing and contracting with rain and with melt. The relationship that Jesus says he offers to the Samaritan woman, the gift that he offers to her, the gift he says he offers more generally, is this living water, eternal, inexhaustible, life-giving, and preserving, a metaphor she would have understood viscerally. And when she asks Jesus for this living water that he offers, she's at first confused by his answer. But at the story's end, when she finally leaves the well to go and tell her community about Jesus and deposit that he's the Messiah that they've been waiting for, she leaves her jar. Is the Lord among us or not? Well, for the Samaritan woman, it's clear that he is, that she has received what she needs at the well. As Jesus begins to encounter people in the Gospels, the central question is who he is. For the characters in the New Testament interacting with Jesus, they ask, each in their own way, is the Lord among us or not? As people encounter the person of Jesus, of God incarnate, they come to believe in who he is, and they are invited into a life in which they must be committed to a relationship with him. But it is possible for them to do this because Jesus Christ is God first committed to a relationship with them and with us. We'd be remiss to ignore the cost of this relationship and how difficult it is for people to grapple with it. While we do not know truly what happens with the Samaritan woman after her time with Jesus, the tradition that develops around her, around Fotini, includes her baptism, the proclamation of the gospel, preaching to the powers that be, and even her martyrdom at the hand of Nero. The cost of the cross, the cost of this baptismal story is tied with the gift of the relationship with Jesus, a life that receives his living water. And all of this comes into view. And while these traditions about her are not stories in the Bible, it is instructive that this woman, from this moment on, is considered by the church to be equal to the apostles. This is one of the church's answers to the question, is the Lord with us or not? With her life, the Samaritan woman becomes a reality. It becomes a life in which the reality of God's presence with us is embedded at every level of the story and to which we too are invited. Thanks be to God.