John 4:5-42

The story of the Samaritan woman has been a powerful draw for me ever since I began to pray with scripture.  It’s probably my favorite gospel story.  Yet, I have never been able to say why that is so.

I’m guessing that it is something about the character of the woman and her story.  A story that I understand to be the story of a woman who is the quintessential outsider.  A woman who can only exist at the boundaries of her own society.  In it, but not of it.  This woman, who has had five husbands and now fornicates with one who is not her husband,lacks essential respectability.  And simultaneously, she is a religious pariah to the dominant religious establishment that surrounds her and her homeland.  This woman who can only exist at the margins.  Outside the bounds that hold both respectable society and respectable religion together.

The outsiders’ story, the story of the alienated, the story of people marginalized by both religion and society form central themes in the biblical narrative.  Scholars from a wide variety of disciplines,in studying the stories of the Bible,often claim that this is the central narrative of the entire biblical text.  Bible stories take up the theme again and again of who stands in God’s favor and who does not and why that is so.

In our own day, in a climate of fear and foreboding, people generally and religious people particularly,remain caught in that narrative.  A narrative in which orientation to both self as well as bearing and orientation toward others rests heavily on our ability to say how we are not like other people.

And then there is Jesus.

What can we say?

As catholic Christians, we believe that Jesus is the very incarnation of the Divinity itself.  We’ve liked saying that Jesus shows us the face of God.Except that he doesn’t show us the face of God.  Not really.  Because like Moses, we can’t see God’s face.  We can’t even begin to imagine what God is or what God is like.  Both thought and language fail us.

But Jesus does show us a face.  And I think the face that Jesus shows us is the face of Love.Not any love but First Love; primordial love.  Love that brings forth creation.  The original source of all that is and that will be.  Jesus shows us the fountainhead of Love.

And what does the face of Love look like?

It looks like many different things in today’s story of this encounter at Jacob’s well.In today’s gospel, the face of Love appears as a man flush, hot, tired, hungry and thirsty.  Love is a vagabond, wandering, preaching the good news of primal love from one backwater village to the next in a backwater province of the Roman State.  Traveling across a countryside at times welcoming and at other times hostile.

And in today’s story, Love finds itself in alien territory.  Today Love is beginning to allow religious identity that holds others at bay to be undone.  Today Love begins to unravel for us the old stale formulas and human inspired-rivalries.  Love perceives that they won’t work because they have never worked.  Theold narrative depends on people set in opposition to one another.  Love knows that it is never going to get us back to where we long to go; to the one place we all long to return to.  To before the original narrative began to unravel.  On the day when a piece of fruit taken from a tree in a garden opened human eyes to shame and guilt.  Shame and guilt that forces us to cover our nakedness and hide.Love knows that we will never get back as long as religion and society continue to make God an idol that serves its needs by keeping God puny, jealous, vengeful, miserly, and one-sided.

Fear and guilt inexplicably generated out of the created order in a woman and man eating a Tree’s fruit.  It is not going to go away unless something changes and changes radically.  So what does Love do?  Love speaks because Love must speak.  Love speaks to a lowly woman of Samaria.  A woman doing a common, mundane ordinary thing like filling a water vessel.  The lowly woman[...]