HEALING A BROKEN COMMUNITY AT THE WELL

John 4: 1-42

by Andrew Marr, OSB

Jesus is doing more than taking a journey for the sake of taking a journey when he walks through Samaria and stops at the town of Sychar. Jesus has left Judea where the Jews are orthodox because of their racial purity and their proximity to the temple in Jerusalem. Samaria is the land of heretics who worship at the wrong place and are not racially pure. Samaria became impure when the Israelites who were not deported by Assyria (i.e., the lowest classes) mingled with the people who were deported by Assyria into the area from elsewhere. These Samaritans were not allowed by Ezra to be part of the temple cult when the second temple was built after the Babylonian Exile. That these Samaritans would turn around and worship on a local mountain only proved they were heretics who deserved to be rejected. Jesus, then, was moving away from the orthodox big shots in Jerusalem and moving toward the outcasts. John says that Jesus “had to go through Samaria” to get to Galilee. This necessity was not geographical. The route through Samaria was the most expeditious route, but it was possible to go around it. Most devout Jews from Galilee preferred to take the longer route rather than walk through “enemy” territory. The “necessity” of Jesus’ route, then, is rooted in obedience to the One who sent him.

Jesus sits down at Jacob’s well in the town of Sychar in the country of outcasts. It is ironic that a well associated with a patriarch should be in “enemy” hands. Jacob is a major actor in the story told in the Jerusalem Establishment, but the people who use his well are heretics. The well is the social center of town, but nobody else is there when Jesus sits down. The well’s social dynamics have been acted out earlier in the biblical narratives where important courtships have started there, not least the wooing of Rebekah on behalf of Isaac and Jacob’s wooing of Rachel. These associations would have flooded the memories of John’s readers.

Then a woman comes to draw water from the well. This action might look quite ordinary, but two things are wrong with this picture. For one thing, it is about noon, the worst time of day to come and draw water. The second thing is that the woman is alone; she is alone at a highly social place. These indications show that this woman is an outcast in her town. If she were not, surely she would have come to the well early in the morning when it was cooler, when everybody else was there, and she would have shared the latest news with her friends. So, before a word is spoken, the scene set up for us is one where Jesus is in a town of outcasts with nobody to talk to except the local outcast.

When Jesus asks the woman for a drink, her reply reflects her country’s outcast status. A man who is among those who have made outcasts of the Samaritans is asking a favor of her. The woman’s specifying that the request is made of a “woman” hints at her own outcast status in the society. It is significant, however, that the woman, outcast as she is, aligns herself with the corporate outcast identity of her country. In relation to an “oppressor” from the “Establishment,” she is one with the very people who reject her. Moreover, the woman hasn’t come to the well for the fun of it. She has come to fill a jar and carry it back home. As we shall see, she is not carrying the water for herself, but for another man. To be ordered to fetch water for yet another man, and an enemy of her people at that, raises the woman’s hackles, and understandably so.

Jesus then tells the woman that if she knew who he was, she would be asking him for living water. Although Jesus is now offering something to the woman, her hackles rise up a bit higher, because she feels that Jacob’s well is being called into question and she is ready to defend her town’s well and its water against any claim that somebody else has better water. Once again, the outcast in her own country is defending her country and culture. What this shows us is that a victim within a culture usually has no alternative to the rejecting culture for that person’s cultural identity. And so it is that the Woman at the well renews solidarity with her fellow Samaritans. Jesus then describes the living water that he wishes to give as “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” This promise might tempt us to go off on a mystical flight, but it is important to remember that the well is a focus of community, and we shall see that community is what this promise of living water is all about. Many commentators have mocked this woman for “not getting it,” when she asks for this living water so that she won’t have to keep fetching water every day. It should be noted, however, that toting a water jar to a well and back in the middle of the day is no laughing matter.

Jesus confirms the communal dimension of the “living water” when he asks to woman to go and bring her husband. This request lays bare the woman’s place in her community as the communal scapegoat. In the ensuing exchange, the woman is amazed that Jesus knows the truth about her. However, it really didn’t take a magician, let alone a messiah, to see the implications of the woman’s coming alone to the well in the middle of the day. The only thing that really is amazing is the precision of Jesus’ knowing that she has had five husbands, unless the number given is a bit of hyperbole. That she might currently be living with a man who is not her husband is also a good guess. Her work of toting the water jar to the well and back is then, all the more onerous since it is done for the sake of a man who has taken advantage of her outcast status.

Now let us look at the picture that Jesus has just unveiled. We will take the number five literally, since the principle is the same, even if it is an exaggeration. Five men have married and divorced this woman and one other man has entered into a relationship with her. When one considers that it is almost certain that each former husband has married somebody else, thus implicating the whole family of each of these women, we begin to see that what Jesus has done with this seemingly casual request is uncover the social matrix of Sychar. In short, this woman has received all of the blame for the divorces and her current tenuous status, and apparently, none of the blame has gone to any of the men. In a small town, this represents a significant part of the population connected with this scandal. No wonder the woman has to absorb all of the blame!

On top of all this, just about every commentator since has followed suit and heaped all the social blame on the Woman at the Well. She is constantly called a fallen woman, while none of the men involved in her life are ever considered as possibly fallen men. It has been noted that three marriages is the maximum allowed by Jewish Law, and so this woman is a violator of the Law. But how many marriages were allowed to women? Especially marriages made at their initiative? One might think that the fourth and fifth husbands were also violators of the Law, but the commentators don’t mention that. As if this were not enough, this woman has been accused of running from one man to another because of her insatiable thirst for men. What this sort of accusation overlooks is the fact that it was men and not women such as the Woman at the Well who had the right to initiate a divorce, and a divorce could be initiated on slight grounds. Maybe the woman was a bad cook, but considering the way she acts in this story, perhaps her husbands found her a bit uppity. Considering the hazards of being an unprotected woman in her time and place, an insatiable thirst for men need not have much to do with her accepting five marriage proposals and then entering a common-law arrangement with a man. This woman has also been accused of acting in a “mincing” way in an attempt to seduce Jesus into being her next lover. Far from being seductive, I find her very cautious and defensive in relation to this stranger until he opens up the reality of her social situation, at which point she seems more interested in worshiping rightly than in hooking her sixth husband. It has also been suggested that she told Jesus she had no husband as part of her strategy of seduction. For one thing, she was telling Jesus the truth when she said she had no husband. Besides, why should she tell any stranger under any circumstances that she had a live-in relationship with a man? Moreover, what is wrong with the woman hoping that Jesus might offer to marry her to that she would no longer have to carry on with her irregular conjugal situation? This woman can’t win!

Since I have gotten smug and self-righteous about other peoples’ attitudes to women, it is only fair to say that my reflections were tilted into this direction by some comments on Paul Nuechterlein’s reflections on this Gospel at http://girardianlectionary.net/year_a/lent3a.htm. Significantly, it was some female colleagues of his who pointed out the matter of a woman’s place in the marriage scheme of things in a place like Sychar in the time of Jesus. I must admit, then, that I, too, have been mesmerized by the cultural inheritance that automatically isolates the woman at the well as the sinful person in Sychar. This only goes to show how easily the mimetic process perpetuates scapegoating, even among those of us who read out our bibles, so that the town’s perception of the Woman at the Well continues to be the lens through which we see this woman.

Jesus’ articulation of the woman’s social standing draws from her the exclamation that he is a prophet. It needs to be noted that, for a Samaritan, a prophet is not a ranting gadfly like Elijah or Isaiah, but someone who will come and definitively explain the Torah. This is also what the term “Messiah” meant to them. And so it is that the woman asks Jesus whether or not their local worship is legitimate, or if the Jerusalem Establishment is right after all. Suddenly, the Woman at the Well is no longer so defensive of her own culture. Clearly Jesus has undermined the woman’s cultural identity enough for her to consider moving beyond it. This suggests that the Woman at the Well experienced being told by Jesus about everything she had done as a door opening up to freedom. It makes little sense to me that the woman would have shifted to Samaria’s position as a scapegoated culture if she had only been convicted and freed from personal sin. Rather, the Woman at the Well must have felt freed from accepting her position as communal scapegoat, and that opened her eyes and heart to her culture’s situation in relation to the Jerusalem Establishment. More important, the woman is beginning to see Jesus himself as offering a viable alternative to her cultural inheritance. If this suggestion is right, then the woman has made an extraordinary leap of faith in this man who is still nearly a stranger to her.

Jesus’ reply to the woman’s question deftly relativizes both cultural claims by subordinating them both to worshiping in spirit and truth. In one fell swoop, Jesus has totally jettisoned the scapegoating structure of the Jerusalem Establishment vis-a-vis Samaria. Neither temple matters. Neither temple is legitimate. What matters is worshiping the Father in spirit and truth. The Woman at the Well has understood the implications of Jesus’ articulation of her social standing. By unveiling the scapegoating mechanism of the town, Jesus has undermined the sacrificial religion that depends on that scapegoating mechanism. That is to say, a society can worship in spirit and truth only when it has faced the truth of its communal scapegoating and renounced it. When Jesus claims that he is the Messiah, he is making that claim in Samaritan terms, but with a twist. He is indeed proclaiming all things in the sense of telling the people what’s what, but he is proclaiming something quite different from what the people were expecting.

At this point, the woman leaves her jar and goes back into the city to tell all the people that this stranger has just told her everything she has ever done. Some commentators disparage the woman’s level of insight on the grounds that she only seems impressed by a man’s parlor tricks, but has not become attuned to Jesus’ sublime teaching of worshiping in spirit and truth. But this woman knows what she is doing. She is presenting to her fellow townspeople the same challenge that Jesus had presented to her, a challenge to her status of communal victim that in turn challenged the legitimacy of their communal cult. In short, what the is moving back to the starting point that lead to Jesus’ sublime teaching on true worship. The important thing here is that by telling everybody that this man has told her everything she has ever done, he has also told her everything they have ever done. The people are suddenly confronted with the truth of their scapegoating activity. The shock of seeing the communal scapegoat suddenly act out of freedom from her assigned role must have been profound. Perhaps it also hinted at the freedom that could be theirs if they listen to her and then listen to the new man in town. With the gauntlet thrown at their feet, they have to make a vital choice as a community. Either they try to retain the status quo or they accept the radical change that the woman has accepted. The only way to retain the status quo is to find another scapegoat. Fast. The stranger who has so radically changed the woman is the obvious choice. Otherwise, they need to listen up to what this prophet tells them and take it to heart, in which case the community will admit to the truth of their own communal scapegoating activity and change radically to the point that they will worship in spirit and truth.

What Jesus has done here is a reveal multiple concentric circles of scapegoating. The Roman Empire scapegoats the Jewish Establishment. This circle does not come into this particular narrative, but it becomes very important in the passion narrative at the end of John’s Gospel. The Jerusalem Establishment, in turn, scapegoats the Samaritans. In their turn, the Samaritans of Sychar scapegoat the Woman at the Well. All of this is to show that people who are scapegoated are just as apt to hold themselves together by scapegoating one of their own as more powerful forces are apt to do it to weaker groups. Politicians depend on this phenomenon when they solicit the votes of economically disadvantaged people by enlisting their help in oppressing other people who are even weaker than they are. When there is scapegoating within scapegoating, all levels reinforce each other. On the other hand, if one breaks the pattern at one level, the rest will unravel. It is significant that Jesus starts with the communal victim and not one of the town’s elders. By freeing her of her victim status, he gives the people of Sychar the opportunity to free themselves of their victim status as Samaritans.

We have here much the same fundamental scenario that the synoptic Gospels present in their narratives of the Gerasene demoniac(s). In his analysis of this story in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, René Girard suggests that the possessed man is the local scapegoat for the Gerasenes. The demon’s name of “Legion” seems to allude to the Roman imperial power that possesses the town. When the possessed man is healed, the community has the opportunity to renounce their scapegoating activity and thus free themselves of the Romans. But they do not do that. Instead, the townspeople come out and tell Jesus in no uncertain terms to leave the place. The economic loss of the pigs is not the big problem. The problem is losing their local scapegoat. They choose not to listen to the man who freed their scapegoat. Interestingly, the freed man asks to follow Jesus and Jesus tell him to stay where he is and proclaim the truth of what has been done to him, precisely what the Woman at the Well does in Sychar. It seems highly unlikely that the people of Sychar were thrilled to be told by their local outcast that the Messiah has just dropped in and laid bare the truth of the community. Most likely, the people of Sychar had much the same attitude about Jesus when they came to the well as did the Gerasenes had when they came out of town to meet him.

When the disciples return with some food, they register the same unease about Jesus’ breach of social decorum as did the Woman at the Well but, unlike the woman, they say nothing. The disciples offer Jesus some food that they have brought, but Jesus turns them down with a cryptic teaching on obedience to “the One who sent” him. The “mystical” meaning is no more individualistic than the living water Jesus offered the Woman at the Well. The obedience that is food and drink to Jesus is highly social, as the following words show. Jesus has rejected the social table fellowship with the disciples, perhaps to show that the table is not yet filled. When he says that the “fields are ripe for harvesting,” he means that the Samaritans of Sychar are ripe for harvesting, and so they shall prove to be. The food and water symbolism, as John uses them in this chapter, suggest that a society that is obedient to the One who sent Jesus is living water and food for the people who live in it, not only at the physical level, but also at the emotional and spiritual levels as well.

Unlike the Gerasenes, the people of Sychar believe in Jesus. Far from driving him away, they invite him to stay, and many more come to believe “because of his word.” What Jesus has done is gather the whole town of Sychar around the well. The Woman at the Well is no longer the victim at the center of the society; she is at the edge around the well with everybody else in town. The center is now Jesus. The Samaritans have accepted the truth of what they were doing socially in their own town and have moved to the level of worshiping in spirit and truth, thus freeing themselves from their scapegoat status in relationship to the Jerusalem Establishment. This does not mean that the Jerusalem Establishment is so willing to loosen its grip on Samaria. In a subsequent altercation with Jesus these very authorities, they ask him in exasperation: “Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (Jn. 8:48) When Jesus first offered to give the woman living water that would spring up into eternal life, the woman feared that Jesus was going demote the status of Jacob’s well in favor of a well of his own. What happens in Sychar is very different. It is Jacob’s well that is filled with living water that quenches the thirst of all who drink from it. Jesus has not placed a different well in a rivalrous position against Jacob’s well; he has transformed Jacob’s well and thus the town. What has taken place here is an astounding miracle! The people of Sychar have renounced the system built on the victimization of one person and accepted from Jesus the truth that makes them free. Compared to this, turning water into wine or walking on water are small potatoes!

What John has given us, then, is a vision of God’s kingdom, nourished by the living water of obedience to the will of the One who sent Jesus. Significantly, this vision comes early in the Gospel. The ending of the Gospel that takes place in Jerusalem is quite different. That is, after this communal acceptance of Jesus’ word in Samaria, the rest of the Gospel records ever greater failures on Jesus’ part to draw people into sharing his obedience to the One who sent him. The closer to Jerusalem, the greater the failure. This progression of failure begins when the people fed in the wilderness try to seize Jesus and make him king. It ends with Jesus nailed to a cross with the inscription: “The King of the Jews.” If the conversion of Sychar in Samaria illustrates the will of the One who sent Jesus, then the crucifixion most emphatically does not illustrate the will of the One who sent him. That is, as Girard has insisted time and again, the crucifixion was willed by human beings and not by God. Nonetheless, the Passion narrative reveals the truth of ancient scapegoating methods just as clearly as does the story of the Woman at the Well. The question is whether or not we will do what Jesus what the Samaritans did, or align ourselves with the Jerusalem Establishment. That is, will we do what Jesus told us at the end of the parable of the Good Samaritan: “Go and do likewise?”