So he came to a town in Samaria
called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s
well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the
well. It was about noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw
water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone
into the town to buy food.)
The Samaritan woman said to him,
“You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For
Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the
gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him
and he would have given you living water.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and
the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our
father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his
sons and his livestock?”
Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be
thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.
Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up
to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me
this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw
water.” He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
“I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “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.”
“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our
ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where
we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me,
a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor
in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we
worship what we do 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 the Spirit
and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God
is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
The
woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he
will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I, the
one speaking to you—I am he.”
Han is a Korean cultural trait which has many origins. It denotes
a collective feeling of oppression and isolation in the face of insurmountable
odds, including aspects of lament. The minjung theologian
Suh Nam-dong describes han
as unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness
because of the overwhelming odds, a feeling of acute pain in one's body, and an
urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined."
Han is sorrow caused by heavy suffering, injustice or persecution, a dull lingering ache in the soul. It is a blend of lifelong sorrow and resentment, neither more powerful than the other. Han is imbued with resignation, bitter acceptance and a grim determination to wait until wrongs can be righted. It connotes both despair at recognition of past injustice and acceptance of such matters as part of the Korean experience.
In modern times this included surrender to the Japanese, occupation by Japanese, women taken by force to be used as ‘comfort women’ for Japanese soldiers. Koreans living in Japan, even if born there, were until recently required to carry special identification and be fingerprinted. Discrimination in Japan continues, even to those who are second or third generation. Han could be described as the collective ‘dark night of the soul’ of the Korean experience.
Most
of the texts we see involving Samaritans are contained in the New Testament scriptures.
And there is a reason for this. Samaritans were an ethnic and religious community
distinct from other peoples of the Levant; this appears to have occurred after
the Assyrian conquest of the Kingdom of Israel in approximately 721 BCE. Jewish
tradition affirms the Assyrian deportations and replacement of the previous
inhabitants by forced resettlement by other peoples, but claims a different
ethnic origin for the Samaritans, involving several different ethnic groups
forcibly resettled in the land.
This account is contradicted by the
version in Chronicles where, following Samaria's destruction, King Hezekiah endeavours
to draw the Ephraimites and Manassites closer to Judah. Temple repairs at the
time were financed by money from all "the remnant of Israel" in
Samaria, including from Manasseh, Ephraim and Benjamin. Jeremiah speaks of
people from Shekhem, Shiloh and Samaria who brought offerings of frankincense
and grain to the House of YHWH. There is no mention of Assyrian resettlement.
Yet by the time we find the
Samaritans mentioned by Jesus in the texts – Samaritans are considered unclean,
for they don’t worship the same way the Jews do, they don’t follow the same
purity laws, nor the same forms and rituals of worship. Despite their Israelite
heritage, they are considered “less than”. They are always discriminated against
by the Jewish people. So they are a people with the same ethnic origins as the
Israelites, yet they carry a heavy history as well – displaced, slaves and
refugees, yet not included by their own people. They carry centuries of ‘han’
in their experience.
And into this context comes a woman of Samaria – who comes to the well to draw water. Traveling from Jerusalem in the south to Galilee in the north Jesus and his disciples took the quickest route, through Samaria. Tired and thirsty, Jesus sat by Jacob's Well, while his disciples went to the village of Sychar, about a half mile away, to buy food. It was about noon, the hottest part of the day, and a Samaritan woman came to the well at this inconvenient time, to draw water.
In his encounter with the woman at
the well, Jesus broke three important Jewish customs: first, he spoke to a
woman; second, she was a Samaritan, a group the Jews traditionally despised;
and third, he asked her to get him a drink of water, which would have made him
ceremonially unclean from using her cup or jar. This shocked the woman at the
well. Had the religious leaders seen it, they too would have been shocked. Jesus
has just defied all social mores dearest to the Jews.
What’s critical for me in this text
is the larger picture, and I’m setting aside John’s agenda of Jesus as the ultimate
answer for everyone, noting that John’s Gospel was written a hundred years
later. I’m not convinced that’s what is happening here. Perhaps it’s what Jesus
is doing, what he is modelling, away of treating others – which is the core of this
text.
Jesus is practicing radical
inclusivity. The woman represents a whole people who have been shut out, who
carry a whole load of ‘han’ with them, from almost the earliest time of their
existence as a people. The fact that they share a genetic history doesn’t
count, for the Jews. They have become another race, not complete, not human. As
a whole people they have lived the ‘dark night of the soul’, and here is Jesus speaking
into that darkness, really offering not so much light as life in the midst of
oppression.
Barbara Brown Taylor, in the book “Learning
to Walk in the Dark” talks about the ‘dark night of the soul’ as it affects large
groups of people – and she puts it in the context of communities of faith and
the changes happening in today’s world. She says “The old ways of being
Christian are not working any more, not even for those who are old themselves.
Something in the ways has died – or is dying – truly cause for great sorrow
even among those who know the time has come – and yet at the same time
something is being born”. Authors Phyllis Tickle and Diana Butler Bass tell us
this time is the great church rummage sale which occurs about every five
hundred years or so. Every age has its accumulation of stuff, and has to decide
what stays and what goes. And it feels like a dark night, with no direction. And we struggle in fear trying to hold on. How
do we let go of what we love?
So for those of us who claim to be
Christian, seeing the old ways of being gradually die – what message is there
for us? My friend George Feenstra wrote this week “Remember the day
Jesus and the friends are walking along the way. Come to a well. Jesus sits to
rest while the friends go to find food. A Samaritan woman comes by. Jesus
engages her in conversation. That conversation opens the woman's inner eye.
What she thought was the truth about God is blown away by the truth about God.
God is not in some high holy place. God is sitting with her by the well as a
human being who crosses boundaries of exclusion to include her in the gracious
gift of life which is life indeed. “
God
sits here with us – each of us – offering life. So even as it feels as if we
are abandoned – we are not. We have the living water of faith, we have each
other. May it be so.
Sources:
1.
Barbara Brown Taylor . Learning to Walk in the
Dark, Harper Collins Publishers. 195 Broadway, New York NY 10007. Pp. 140-141
- George Feenstra, in online discussion, March 17, 2017
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