God is not ashamed.
Wonderings:
I wonder if you’ve ever reconciled with someone after a conflict or a break in the relationship. And who initiated that reconciliation?
[this one is very advanced…] I wonder what you’ve done that you’re ashamed of?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Third Sunday of Lent.
Exodus 17:1-7; Psalm 95; John 4:5-42
and the song “Here is the way to holy ground,” which we sang as our opening song.
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
The readings appointed for us today tell us stories of flawed people. Problematic people. People it might be hard to root for.
In our first reading, the Israelites are tough to root for. This story comes from the book of Exodus, one of the big stories of our faith: God has seen the suffering of the Israelites, enslaved by Pharaoh in Egypt. And God does miracle after miracle to free them, to get them out of Egypt. Most dramatically, God tells their leader Moses to bring the people to the shore of the Red Sea, and Moses strikes the sand, and God makes a wall of water on each side, so that God’s people may cross the Red Sea on dry land. Pharoah and his army of chariots and chariot drivers are in hot pursuit: a whole army of slave catchers is chasing them—but when God’s people get to the other side, God brings the waters back together, and the Egyptians are crushed, drowned. No more.
And God begins to lead these people toward a land of promise where they may be free, and flourish. That’s easy to root for.
But these people have been journeying toward that land of promise for all of 5 minutes, and what do they do? They whine; they complain to Moses. They’re thirsty, and they want water now. Are we there yet?
And Moses, he goes and whines and complains to God. So God tells Moses to go ahead to the foot of a nearby mountain, and to strike the rock with his staff that parted the Red Sea—and he does, and there in the desert, there is a spring of fresh clear water. Water from the rock.
Right where they are. The stuff of life, flowing out of nothing. Just what they need, even though they are being really, really annoying.
How does God respond when we are being annoying—when we “test” the Lord? (Moses called this place where water flowed from the rock Massah and Meribah, which refers to this test.) How does God respond when we act in ways that are unworthy of us, and unworthy of the mystery and might and infinite beauty that is God?
How does God relate to our shame?
Our Psalm suggests that God got so frustrated with these ungrateful complainers that makes the Israelites wander around in the wilderness until all members of that generation pass away—and only then can their children, then grown, enter the Promised Land.
“They put me to the test, *
though they had seen my works.
Forty years long I detested that generation and said,
“This people are wayward in their hearts;
they do not know my ways.”
So I swore in my wrath, *
“They shall not enter into my rest.”
Ouch. But as I said in our Wednesday evening Bible Study, I don’t think of the Bible as a book of answers, but a book of arguments. Is that how God really is?
This Psalm says yes. But the Gospel according to John says no. As we heard last week, the Gospel according to John says that God is Love. When we’re acting out of our worst instincts, or caught in harmful or self-destructive patterns, or just melting down in ways that alienate us from Love, does Love react in kind? Does Love push us away until we become acceptable? Punish us until we’ve learned our lesson?
Our Psalm suggests yes—and many of us might find that image of God intuitive. Maybe because that’s what our parents showed us. Or because that’s the kind of justice we’re most familiar with: retributive justice. And of course we all know that actions have consequences, right? But our Gospel lesson today invites us to imagine that the mysterious logic of love that is woven through every fiber of the universe is stranger, and more dynamic, and more redemptive than cause and effect, or the letter of the law.
Our gospel lesson today invites us to imagine ourselves as not powerful enough to set the terms of our relationship with the source of life and love. And in this place we call that “God.” Our gospel lesson today tells us that God comes to us and meets each of us right where we are to offer us precisely the healing and liberation that we don’t think we deserve. The mission of God is reconciling people to the fullness of who they were created to be; the mission of God is to bring all people into a community of love made manifest in solidarity and justice, in sharing burdens and sharing abundance.
This story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well has a lot going on, and I’m not going to touch on most of it. There are complicated gender dynamics here that I find intriguing and…problematic. There’s a whole political and theological back story about Judeans and Samaritans, who both claim Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as ancestors. These two peoples both read the Torah, both worship the same God, they used to be part of a single, unified nation under King David and his son Solomon. But… Suffice it to say that there are small differences between these people, and over generations distrust, resentment, and even enmity has built up between them.
Maybe you can imagine a situation in which people who are deeply connected by a shared history no longer feel like they are part of the same nation, but can barely speak to one another; maybe even feel they are enemies.
And here’s the important thing about this context. This gospel is written by and for Judeans and their descendents—people who feel that distrust, resentment and enmity towards Samaritans in their bones. So this Samaritan woman is hard to root for.
Doubly hard to root for because as the context makes clear, this woman is a pariah even within her own tribe. She has come to draw water from the well around noon—nearing the hottest time of the day. It is women’s work in this culture to bring water home, and in the cool of the morning or in the evening, it is also a time to chat, to connect. But this woman is not welcome at the well at those times. She has come to the well here at noon precisely because she expects that no one else will be there to make jokes about her sexual history, or give her the side eye, or call her a cruel name.
She’s as shocked as anyone that Jesus, a non-Samaritan man, would even talk to her. Given the gender dynamics and the tribal politics, this is pretty scandalous. And again, what unfolds between them is complicated. But notice that Jesus meets her in the place and time where she’s most aware of being an outcast, most alone. Notice that Jesus initiates a relationship of mutuality: he asks for water from the well; he offers her water that will slake her deepest thirst—for dignity, for belonging. He invites her, in his way, into that community of love made manifest in healing and liberation. Notice that she is suspicious, that she pushes him away. But he’s able to show her that he is not there to judge her.
And ultimately the story tells us that she’s able to recognize him as the one that she and all God’s people have been hoping and praying for—the Messiah, the anointed one, the redeeming one. And notice that even though Jesus is on the “other side” of this deep division, he tells her that the redemption he brings will transcend and include their differences…and she goes and tells the rest of the town, and they come and meet Jesus for themselves and they recognize him as the Messiah. And notice, finally, that at the end of this passage these other Samaritan villagers are not just talking to Jesus; they’re talking to her. Her encounter with Jesus has not only reconciled her with herself, but reconnected her to a community—which we all need to be ourselves.
I want to end by acknowledging the most awkward moment of this passage, where Jesus says the quiet part out loud—naming the very thing that makes this woman scandalous to her neighbors. She’s had five husbands, and is now living with a man who is not her husband. Again, this passage is complicated and problematic—and passages like this have been read uncritically to shame women who are seeking divorce, or who are not “pure” as patriarchy imagines they should be.
I think there might be a life-giving way of reading this passage, though. Which is that God doesn’t sweep anything under the rug. God doesn’t love us because God looks away; or because we’ve succeeded in keeping our shame hidden.
God sees the whole of us. God sees all that we are ashamed of, all the hurt and guilt that we carry. And God is not ashamed.
When we are held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God, all that we carry is held—and God is not ashamed.
Here, right where you are, right where we are—may a spring of water gush up in us, flowing over with the life that really is life.
Amen.
