“Little children, love one another.”

These were the words of the Apostle John when he was too feeble and old to say anything else to his flock. All he would say to them was, simply: “Little children, love one another.”

Last night, as we were listening to the readings at Vespers, we read the epistle readings for the Holy Apostle Simon the Zealot, whose feast day is celebrated today. It was a mistake, apparently — according to the Typikon, this year that feast is transferred to Tuesday, but I’m glad we made that mistake, because the Apostle John and his writings have a deep and abiding place in my heart. In fact, this mission was originally the Orthodox Mission of St. John the Theologian. Bishop Seraphim eventually said, “Oh yes, well, we’ll keep St. John, but we’ll give you St. John of Shanghai instead.” So I was like, “Oh, okay — who’s that?”

John, in his epistle that was read last night, says two things that are pivotally important, that are the core of our faith. He says: “God is love.” As C.S. Lewis points out, it doesn’t say that love is God. It says God is love. If there is one word that can sum up who God is for us as human beings, in terms of our ability to know and understand him, that word is love. And then John goes on to say that anyone who claims to love God but does not love his brother is a liar, and the truth is not in him. Because how can you say that you love God whom you have not seen, if you do not love your brother whom you have seen?

It’s interesting that these epistles were chosen for Simon the Zealot. The Zealots were — I suppose we would think of them today as a separatist group within the Roman client kingdom and eventually province of Judea. They were committed to winning Israel’s independence by any means necessary. They didn’t much care about methods or what they had to do or undergo. In fact, a splinter group of the Zealots would apparently sneak up behind Roman soldiers or Roman sympathizers and stab them in the back with a dagger.

This is the world Simon the Zealot came from — maybe he wasn’t part of that splinter group specifically, but that was his movement. And yet, among the same twelve apostles, you also have Matthew. Matthew was a tax collector — exactly the kind of person that Zealot splinter group would have crept up behind and stabbed. And they’re both there, among Jesus’ disciples.

This is what I want to talk about today, because I think it is absolutely pertinent to us — especially as we look at the Gospel reading we just heard — in our current, highly divided political climate. It is very difficult nowadays, it seems, even to talk to one another, let alone to understand one another.

So let’s look at the Gospel reading: Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman, which is the feast that has actually bumped the Holy Apostle Simon the Zealot to Tuesday. And, as we do so, I want to front-load our reading of it by thinking carefully about who the two people are who are sitting down and talking to one another — or at least, I think Jesus was sitting down; she might have been standing.

Usually we think about this story in terms of the Jewish-Samaritan divide. The Jews hated the Samaritans — that comes up in a number of stories and parables. Jews would even go around Samaria to avoid it. Jesus didn’t: he went through Samaria. Because the Samaritans were imposters, they had a false religion, they only recognized the first five books of the Pentateuch, and even then only partially, and from the Jewish perspective they were interlopers who had taken the land. The Babylonians had resettled the populations, these people had been placed there, and they now occupied what was supposed to be the land of the Jewish people — and they weren’t giving it back. So they did not like one another. So that’s usually the starting point. And that’s a fairly good starting point.

But of course the person Jesus was talking to was also a woman. In those days there was more of a divide between men and women, with rules and social expectations around who would talk to whom — and who wouldn’t talk to whom. But more than that, as we go on in the story, we realize this is a very deeply troubled woman. She’s had five husbands, and she’s living out of wedlock with a man who is not her husband. She’s also a bit of a liar. She’s a social outcast. She’s a bit of a zealot for her false Samaritan religion.

In fact, if there’s anyone the Son of God — the one who insisted on the holiness of his people Israel, who gave the Law and said “You shall not commit adultery,” who hates sin in every form — if there’s anyone whom this man would not want to speak with, it’s probably this Samaritan woman. She’s a sinner, she’s a liar, she’s an adulteress — or at least there’s something wrong there… it’s not actually specified — she’s a social outcast, she’s a Samaritan. There’s no possible hope of any kind of mutual understanding coming out of this.

But of course we’re not talking about just anybody sitting down to speak with her. We’re talking about the Son of God. We’re talking about Jesus. We’re talking about the one who is the love of God incarnate.

And so Jesus is tired. He’s sitting by the well. His disciples have gone to the village to find food. And this woman of Samaria comes up — and he talks to her. That’s the first thing we have to think about. And I want us to think about it in terms of our own positions. Is there anyone we wouldn’t talk to? Anyone we’d write off as a lost cause? But for Jesus, she’s not a lost cause. He says, “Give me a drink.” He’s actually putting himself in a relatively vulnerable position here, making a request she could simply refuse — which, in a manner of speaking, she kind of does at first.

But he opens up the conversation in a way that both of them can understand. They’re at a well; it’s relevant to the situation. And she says, “How is it that you, being a Jew, ask a drink from me, a Samaritan woman?” (Since Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) So the first issue he encounters right away is identity. There’s no question about her identity — she’s a Samaritan woman, that’s clear — but this identity is what should keep them absolutely apart. Identity is a fraught issue today. It divides us and makes us not want to engage with certain people. This is not new.

And Jesus doesn’t address that question actually. He doesn’t get dragged into establishing the terms of the conversation before it can go anywhere. Instead, he gets right to the heart of the matter: this woman needs healing. Because this is what love does — love cares about the other person, looks for the best in them, wants the best for them. So he immediately addresses the heart of the matter with: “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

OK, so, that’s a bit weird, but it’s something that will be at least a little attractive to her. Living water — what’s that? She does get interested in it a bit later, but initially she focuses on the practical: “Sir, you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where are you going to get this living water?” And then — I love this — “Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well and drank from it himself, as well as his sons and his livestock?” Our father Jacob. That’s brash. Possibly even arrogant. She’s talking to a Jew — a descendant of Jacob — and and claiming that he’s “our father Jacob and he gave us this well.”

Interestingly, this also is nothing new: Isaac dug wells all over the place and people were chasing him away from each of these wells. Wells are important, and the Samaritans have established their claim to this one and she’s going to defend that claim!

Here we have politics. Politics threaten now to derail the conversation. Because this is the Jewish homeland, it’s supposed to be part of the land God gave to the Jewish people, and the Samaritans are occupying it. And we’ve seen in modern times what happens when this kind of dispute arises — in Kosovo, or in the Ukraine. What do we do? We fight. “This is our home. This is our homeland. This is my place. This is my heritage.” And Jesus doesn’t go there. He simply continues on with what he began: “Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again. But whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst. The water I shall give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life.”

And it works. She drops the political question. All of a sudden she’s genuinely interested: “Oh, wow. This could be convenient. I won’t get thirsty again… I won’t have to come to this well again…” It is, by the way, noon. She’s alone. There’s a reason for this. Women didn’t draw water alone in the heat of the day — you went with the other women in the cool of the morning. But she’s alone, and for a very clear reason, which is what Jesus immediately addresses next.

He says, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” And the woman says to him, “I have no husband.” I love Jesus’ response here: “You have well said, ‘I have no husband.’ For you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband — in that you spoke truly.” What does he focus on? He focuses on the one thing she said that was actually true. Maybe a good lesson for us. We want to find all the things a person said that were wrong: “You made this mistake, and that logical fallacy, and this part of your argument doesn’t work…” No! Focus on what they have right. Focus on the truth. That’s the part that will enable you to build a bridge, to begin to create mutual understanding with whoever you’re talking to.

And that’s what Jesus does here. But he also doesn’t ignore the rest. He takes what she passed over and puts it front and center: “Here’s the problem. Maybe we should address this.” Well, she doesn’t want to address it — so now she pivots to religion. We’ve had identity, we’ve had politics, we’ve had morality, and now we have religion.

“Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet.” (Yeah, you think? He knows her entire history!) “Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, and you Jews say that Jerusalem is the place where one ought to worship.” Actually, it’s interesting because I think there’s a bit of a shift here. She recognizes that he’s a prophet, and yes, she’s using religion as a good distractor — now we don’t have to talk about the moral question! But she’s almost open about it. She’s not saying flatly, “We’re right, we should worship on Mount Gerizim.” She’s opening up the question, opening up the conversation.

And Jesus says to her: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know.” He’s not pulling punches. But even as he says “You are ignorant, you actually don’t know the truth, your worship is incorrect,” he’s also saying: “You worship” — there’s almost some validity here, some potential that he is seizing upon. “You worship what you do not know; we know what we worship, for salvation is of the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The woman says to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming, who is called Christ. When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus says to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

This is the most open that Jesus is pretty much anywhere in the Gospels about his being the Messiah. He just straight up tells her, “I’m the Messiah. I who speak to you am he.” And we do have to be careful about what we disclose about ourselves in our own conversations, but sometimes there is a moment to open up — in humility and vulnerability — and disclose the truth about ourselves, especially if it’s relevant to the conversation, which Jesus does right here.

At this point the disciples come back and are shocked to find him talking with this Samaritan woman. But none of them are brave enough to say anything about it. They see the problem — “What are you doing” — but none of them address it. None of them ask, “What do you seek?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

And the woman leaves her water pot, goes into the city, and says to the men — many of whom she knows… intimately — “Come, see a man who told me all the things I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” And they went out of the city and came to him.

The disciples then urge Jesus to eat, and he says, “I have food that you do not know of.” They’re all thinking, as usual, in literal terms — “Someone must have brought him something while we were away… Who would have brought him something?” — and he says, “I have food that you don’t know anything about. My food is to do the will of him who sent me. Look up to the fields — they are white, ready for harvest.” And I can just imagine the disciples looking up at that moment and seeing a crowd coming toward them. That’s the harvest.

Many of the Samaritans believe because of what the woman tells them, and they ask Jesus to stay. He stays with them for two days, and then many more believe simply because of his own words. And they say to the woman, “Now we believe — not because of what you said,” (they know she had a tendency to stretch the truth a bit) “for we ourselves have heard him. We know that this is indeed the Christ, the Savior of the world.”

Now, you’ve heard most of this from me before. If Fr. Thomas Hopko hadn’t beaten me to the punch with the name of his podcast, the name of my podcast would not be “Translating the Tradition” — which I think is a pretty good name — but would be “Speaking the Truth in Love.” Because this is one of the topics nearest and dearest to my heart.

We, as followers of Jesus Christ, as ones who want to look him and at what he has done and follow in his footsteps, should be doing exactly what he does here, which is speaking the truth in love: speaking the truth in love to one another. Neither identity nor politics nor morality nor religion should be off the table in our conversations with one another. But as we converse, we should be looking for what the other understands and acknowledges as true. We shouldn’t gloss over where they have things wrong, but at every moment, in every conversation with everyone we meet, we should be seeking their best interests — seeking to love them, even as we speak with them.

As the Apostle says, “Let your speech always be seasoned with salt.” It should be tasty. It should be something people can dig into and enjoy — because you love them. It is an expression of your love for them. This is what should characterize us as followers of Jesus Christ. This is how we need to love one another.

“And speaking the truth in love, we will in all things grow up into him who is our head.”

Little children, love one another.

Scripture readings referenced:

* John 4:5-42

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