Women at the “Well, Actually…”

Sermon

My wife and I celebrated an anniversary this week, and so I’ve been thinking about our family and the friends who supported us in those days. I was speaking to one such a friend this week and thinking about a toast she gave at one of our celebrations. She said, then, something like: I know that Lindsey loves Jesus… And part of me felt very proud of my dear friend, and I felt seen and loved. Another part of me was thinking: how very dare you. My wife is here. Clearly you’ve been overserved… I’ll see if someone can drive you home.

Inclusive of all those feelings, I feel like my reaction is also reflective of my love for Jesus. It is different from my love for my wife. I don’t think my spouse is Jesus or my best friend or my dad or my mom because Jesus is also God, and that’s a context that’s beyond me, but also inclusive of me, and therefore all our metaphors work and also don’t fully work. I’ve been fond of calling God Creator, as of late, but I’ve realized at some point I must also add Sustainer, or it seems like God creates and then exits. The words we use can change our understandings of God.

But, as embarrassing as it might’ve been in some sense, it does make sense that one of my kindest friends would mention Jesus around a celebration of my wife. We love Jesus’ inclusion of people, the knowledge of an embodied, incarnate God. And I admire Jesus. I think Jesus is funny. I get upset with Jesus—I get way more upset if Jesus has been misunderstood—like I get upset when our son misinterprets my wife—No, I do not believe Mum said that you could leave this mess here. I’m very certain of it. I knew her before you—don’t take your Mum’s name in vain.

I’m not entirely sure who I love and who I’m upset with when I read the story of the woman at the well; it’s possible they’re all the same people.

At this point, I find myself very upset by the discredit of a woman’s work at the end of the longest and arguably most interesting conversation we have of Christ having with anyone. This woman is clearly a theologian and an evangelist, and it sounds like her remarkable acts of living through grief and disenfranchisement while engaging God in labor later on gets wrapped up with a, “well, actually, we did this work” type dismissal. There are other translations that make this seem less dismissive of her thoughtfulness and speaking, and labor to get there, but they all fall flat for me.

It’s possible the intention was not to be dismissive, but inclusive of the beliefs of others, sure, but I know my unwell feeling isn’t just mine—many women, many people who do not identify as men, have approached scripture with hope and felt like they’ve been let down a well, actually… Here the feeling of falling is assisted by a history of assumptions made from only a few things a reader can know about her. We know she’s a Samaritan woman—and she knows a lot about Jews, Samaritans, and worship.

We know she’s had multiple husbands—Jesus told us that, ugh, Jesus. And that makes me mad because of course that’s one of those things that leads to those assumptions that have been made about this woman—but I’m going to try and remember my friend said I love Jesus and give Jesus the benefit of my doubt. What else do we know? She’s getting water in the middle of the day by herself, which could mean something, yet she also seems to be respected, bucking assumptions, based on how people receive news from her. No one would have gone out from the city to see this guy she thinks is the Christ without this woman saying so—it seems unlikely she’s unwell.

That is a big deal. Samaritans, well, actually, most women in general, would not have spoken with men in most contexts. So it is a big deal, and at least as we have it written, Jesus initiates this, the longest conversation we have in any of the gospels. Maybe he initiates it because he is God, the Creator, and knows her already—as a Sustainer, Jesus may know that she knows a lot about worship and history because he knows all our thoughts—maybe! Or maybe Jesus knows because he knows by context, living in a world with women, that women have always educated themselves, even when cut off from formal education, as nearly all women and girls would have been at this time.

And it’s clear she knows a lot—she knows that they have common ancestors. She knows that Jews worship in Jerusalem and others do not. Why? Well, actually, it may not have been a choice; many may have been cut off from worshipping in Jerusalem. And people worshipping outside Jerusalem may have had broader things to say about our God, as they worshipped in a wider space, but we also have record, in biblical texts, that some worshipping outside Jerusalem did sometimes lead to incorporating worship practices that were harmful, even deadly. So even though there is a shared ancestry here, it’s not hard to see why there is also anxiety and maybe animosity. Jesus says she speaks the truth, and that everyone who worships in spirit and truth is worshipping God. This woman gets from Jesus one of our very best theologies.

That’s incredible. She stands out among the many men that Jesus has conversations with. Having multiple husbands would not have been what made her stand out! It would have been normal in that time and space. And it was almost certainly not a life this woman would have chosen—divorce was not possible for a woman to initiate, so she’s either living through the grief of multiple deaths and/or being divorced through a man’s dismissal multiple times. None of this chosen—on top of living through the grief of not being able to be autonomous, since it would’ve been almost impossible for a woman to operate in this society without the advocacy of being with a man in some form. Some commentators think the five husbands are a metaphor for five groups that would’ve invaded Samaria, which makes sense as we try to understand the dangers of imperialism, but isn’t helping this woman at the time or any assumptions we have made about her now.

Jesus, we don’t even have her name here. That’s how little autonomy she has, same with most of the other women we get to read only bits of in our scriptures. My great hope here is maybe she kept part of the story to herself. Maybe like Jesus’ mother, she treasured some things in her heart. Maybe she knew, or maybe Jesus knew, it would be a story taken down by a punishing society that would make assumptions about her, so they kept some things for her. I like to imagine that Jesus said more, or maybe at least less of the parts I have mixed feelings about. Maybe that’s it.

Either way, she seems very open to receiving this living water, which could also be understood as running water—basically that she could have a more convenient and healthier water source. A well is still water; it can be poisoned or go bad, and on top of all that, it’s hard work to get to this water every day—but troubled, bubbled, running or living water, water that is moving, is actually more trusted.

So much more that she leaves her jar and goes to tell others what she’s seen and heard. And many believe this is a vision of what’s to come when women are the first to tell the story of Jesus’ resurrection at Easter. So what about today?

Today is International Women’s Day. I’m not confident that I even knew it was a thing until 2018 when I was at the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations with a delegation of Presbyterian women—which is something that happens every year, on and around International Women’s Day; do Google it. There are 70 women from the Presbyterian Church there today, advocating for women and girls. And International Women’s Day has been happening every year on some timelines since 1857. Some histories count the founding in 1911, because that’s when it spread through European and American labor movements and was established in Russia. It is an official holiday in many countries, and in others, it is remembered with physical space, monuments. Of note for today, throughout the decades there have been many International Women’s Day rallies in Iran. And still, women and girls there and everywhere are dismissed; dismissed and targeted.

The work of marginalized communities, women’s work, is often dismissed, and then it becomes a target or collateral damage.

There’s another shorter conversation within this long conversation. Jesus is talking to the disciples after they return—the disciples who didn’t question Jesus when he was talking to this woman, which I would also note is a behavior shift.

Jesus said, Those who harvest are receiving their pay and gathering fruit for eternal life so that those who sow and those who harvest can celebrate together … others worked hard, and you will share in their work.

We can’t fully know if this conversation happened, or if it happened at another time and then it was put in with this story about this brave woman. I’m glad my friend said I love Jesus and not that I love the Bible, because I probably would have stood up then and said, “Well, actually,” and dismissed her with some Martin Luther quote about scripture. But she knows that somewhere in here, I do trust the Spirit, the wisdom, which is seen in this woman we read about; the wisdom of these texts can come through even if they were written down with a less wise agenda.

We share in this work. We continue the work of women and men and people who don’t identify with that binary, with indigenous people, with persons of color, with girls and boys and aunts… We share this work now.

We celebrate this work. Maybe we don’t always feel like there’s a burbling spring within us. Maybe we feel way more like we’re up to our necks in poisoned water—but maybe we have moments, a morning, where we feel like we’re aligned, allies with the brave theologian and evangelist we meet here today, with women and girls we only know a little about. And my hope is that in those moments we know that to be on the side of unknown girls and women is to be on the side of everyone, to the benefit of everyone. So be it.