We are going to go on a trip to Samaria this morning for today’s Gospel passage. When you’re packing, don’t forget to put into your travel bag another earlier passage from the Gospel of John. It tells the story of the calling of the Apostle Nathaniel. Here is the passage:
Philip [who had been recently called by Jesus] found Nathanael [presumably Philip’s friend from his home town] and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 2:45-49)
Now, we can travel to Samaria! We’ll come back to Nathaniel a little later.
I have always been curious about Samaria and Samaritans. And I love looking up this stuff.
So, when King Solomon who built the great Temple in Jerusalem died, his kingdom split into two kingdoms. The kingdom in the north was called Israel or the Northern Kingdom. The kingdom in the south was called Judea or the Southern Kingdom. The city of Jerusalem was the capital of Judea, the Southern Kingdom. The first reference to Samaria that I know of is as the capital of Israel, the Northern Kingdom. Samaria was the city from which the wicked King Ahab ruled the Northern Kingdom. (1 Kings 16:24 and 22:10; 2 Kings 17:5-6) Samaria would have been a place where Ahab and his wife Jezebel worshipped the idol Baal and where the prophet Elijah confronted them.
In 722 B.C. the Assyrians, a fierce and militaristic and very powerful people, came down on Israel, the Northern Kingdom, like wolves on the sheep fold — to paraphrase Lord Byron’s poetry about the invasion. The Northern Kingdom, Israel, was essentially obliterated. At the same time or afterwards, there was probably an exchange or mixture of populations because the Assyrians had a policy to deport the original inhabitants of conquered nations and to move foreigners into them. So, the people who lived in the former kingdom of Israel became a kind of semi-Hebrew people who came to be called Samaritans. Worse still, although they worshipped the Lord, the Samaritans did not worship in Jerusalem and recognized only the first five books of the Old Testament as Scripture.
The Assyrians did try to take Jerusalem and conquer the Southern Kingdom of Judea. But they gave up their campaign. Therefore, the people of Judea did not undergo any population mixing or switching. They remained an identifiable ethnic group that the New Testament calls the Jews. These people had gone into exile when Babylon conquered the Southern Kingdom, but they returned after the exile as a whole and entire people. Many of these Jews lived in a region called Galilee where Jesus grew up in Nazareth and headquartered for a while in Capernaum.
Mutual dislike and prejudice grew between these semi-Hebrew Samaritan people and the genuine the Jews of Judea and Galilee. They treated each other like impure and disgusting strangers.
When Jesus lived, Samaria was a very large territory that almost entirely separated Jerusalem from his home area of Galilee. The best way to travel between these two places was an issue. For example, how was Mary going to travel to visit her cousin Elizabeth or how were Joseph and Mary to travel from Galilee to Bethlehem to be counted or how were people from Galilee to get down to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover? Well, there were essentially two routes. One could go through Samaria and face dirty looks or one could take a longer route up and down the valley of the river Jordan to the east.
In our Gospel, Jesus decides to go through Samaria on his way from Jerusalem to Galilee. It was the quicker way, but more unpleasant socially than the longer way through the Jordan valley. So, Jesus, a crosser of boundaries, if there ever was one, crosses the biggest political frontier in his part of the world — the one between Judea and Samaria.
Jesus, tired and by himself for a while, decides to rest at the Well of Jacob, which is an important place for both Jews and Samaritans. A woman comes with her jug to draw water, and Jesus asks for a drink. The woman gives what is probably a typical Samaritan response: “So, you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan, for water. Give me a break.” Jesus draws her in: “No, you give me a break. If you knew who I am, you’d ask me for water.” She takes the bait: “Please. You don’t even have a jug. And where is your water coming from, huh? Are you going to dig a well of your own? Are you greater than Jacob who dug this well?” Jesus presses: “Forget about Jacob’s well. If you drink my water, you will never thirst again. It will spring up in you to eternal life.” The woman thinks and says: “Oh, man. That is the water I want. I will never thirst again and I will never have to drag myself to this well.” As you can see, she is pretty literal.
But Jesus has her attention and he clinches the discussion when he tells her to get her husband. She, who is quite honest, says that she has no husband. Jesus then tells her something he actually should not know: that she’s been married five times before and she’s now living with a man outside of matrimony. She is surprised. She is also a serious woman, and the discussion takes a serious turn because she accepts that this Jewish stranger is a prophet. She can then raise questions about the distinctions in worship between Samaritan and Jew. And this leads to discussion about the future and the erasure of such distinctions. As Jesus says to her, in the future people will worship in spirit and truth. This woman with her jug gets this automatically because she says: “I do know that, in the future, the Messiah is coming.”
And then Jesus says to her directly something that, I think, he has never said yet to anyone in all the Gospels. He says to her: “I am he.”
She runs back to the city. She leaves behind her jug which must be a valuable household “appliance”. But her leaving the jug is also a symbol that she now has different water. She will never thirst again. And her excitement excites other Samaritans in her city, and they entertain Jesus and his disciples, a of Jews, for two days. And they believe in our Lord. Spirit and truth, as he said, have penetrated and it’s happened directly with no intellectual discussion.
I believe that Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman is about calling or being called. I think that Jesus has come to the well deliberately to call this woman. As is the case with Nathaniel whom Jesus saw under the fig tree, the Samaritan woman is taken aback by her own “fig tree moment” when Jesus tells her about her marital and non-marital life. Nathaniel’s reply to Jesus was more direct than the woman’s as he speaks his conclusion about Jesus right to Jesus’ face. Plus Nathaniel became one of the Apostles, persons whom we think of as the Gospel’s classic called people. But this does not mean that the Samaritan woman is not called too. Apostles are not the only “called people”.
So, what is a call? Where to we go from here when we leave this city of Sychar saying good-bye to the Samaritan woman and her fellows citizens?
Well, if this woman with her jug is called, doesn’t it mean that each of us has a call? And isn’t Lent a good time to think about this? I say this because Lent seems a time for organizing one’s life: What is God’s purpose for me?
I don’t know what saints and theologians have said about “calls”. But I suspect that, for Christians like us leading a Christian life, a call can be very general and/or very specific. We ask ourselves the question: “What does the Lord want from me?” With the Samaritan woman, I would say that Jesus wanted her and her people to cross boundaries into a new life — the Gospel life of confidence, endurance, and joy. After all, Jesus was opening up awareness of the Kingdom of God and of spirit and truth as he told the woman. Just the acceptance of Gospel life is the response to a call. And the Samaritan woman really responded. Jesus gave her the treasure buried in the field, the pearl of great price. (Matthew 13:44-46)
The call to faith and Gospel truth is a general call. But calls for us might also be a variety of things that are short-term or long-term. We may be called to the essentially undramatic and loving work of family life like the immense labor of raising a child or caring long-term for a child. We may be called to caring for a chronically ill parent or spouse. I mean, how much effort and sacrifice and self-control and time go into caring for another! It is big.
If we’ve lost someone, we may be called to be a comforter of others when the need comes up. We may be responding to a call when we help the illiterate to read in some library literacy program or when we donate regularly to a food bank or a foundation providing medical care abroad. We may help old people or teens. Say you can’t get out of the house without help. Well, you can set aside time to pray for others. I mean, it’s not just the young bloods who are called. We old people get calls too. There are no limits.
I am not saying that calls must be for “big” things, like martyrdom or care for lepers on the island of Molokai way back when as Father Damien did. But every call is, in fact, a big thing — like caring for a spouse.
But calls are not measured by the effort to perform them as in “Dear Lord, not again! Another diaper! I’m going nuts!” They are not measured by effort because I think the signal of a call is that it calls, not to our capacity to work, but to our capacity to love.
Lent — maybe all year long — is a time to contemplate our calls, whether long term or short term or even in succession because we may have many calls in one life. We have to pay attention. We have to connect with what we do. Answering calls is a lifelong endeavor. And remember: Jesus is sitting by the well.
Thank you.
