Cutting Through Our Defenses

Cutting Through Our Defenses--November 6, 2017

Jesus said to [the Samaritan woman at the well], "Go, call your husband, and come back." The woman answered him, "I have no husband."Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem..." [John 4:16-21]

Okay, here's just some free good advice.  I don't particularly care if you are happy with it or unhappy with it, and I am not going to be bothered if you don't like it.  This is just one of those things that from time to time needs to be said while we are in the neighborhood and on the subject: it's a bad idea to live with someone without being married to them.

All around bad idea.  There are plenty of rationalizations around to try and say why it should be ok, or why it's "just how things are these days," or why that's old-fashioned thinking, but I'm gonna stick with it here: it's a bad idea to live with someone without promises made to one another that you are both in this for the long haul--we just usually call those promises "marriage."  And it's a bad idea to sleep with someone without those promises made as well.  It's not just the statistics and studies that indicate that cohabitating couples are more likely to divorce later (although there are such statistics).  It's, at least in part, the ways we are so easily led to treat the other person in a relationship as an object to be consumed and thrown away, rather than someone on whom you can build a life.  Marriage is more than just a piece of paper--it is the public declaration of promises... and if someone isn't willing to say in public that they won't bail out on you, I'd be cautious before building a life with them.  Yes, there are indeed some couples who defy the odds, but there are so, so, SO many ways it can go terribly wrong and end up a colossal mess--but a mess that the other person feels no compulsion to stick around and work through with you if there are not promises made and daily lived out.  It is, in a word, stupid, and confuses genuine love with fleeting flutters of endorphins and brain chemistry.S0, bottom line on the free advice: it is a bad idea to live with someone or sleep with someone without the promises of faithfulness that we usually just call "marriage." 

Okay.  Now that that's said, here's something that amazes me about Jesus and brings me up short.  Jesus chooses to enter into the colossal mess with the woman he meets at the well, rather than politely looking the other way on the one hand or just scolding this woman from a distance and walking away with a look of smug self-righteousness.  Jesus enters the mess, and that makes all the difference.

Just right off the bat, it's a wonder that Jesus breaks the social rules that would have kept any other respectable rabbi from even speaking in public with a woman who wasn't a relation. Most everyone else in Jesus' culture (including his own disciples, when they appear on the scene later in the story) would have scolded Jesus or scowled at him for breaking the social rule of the day that you weren't supposed to be in public with a woman other than basically your mother, your daughter, or your wife.  And then on top of it, Jesus intentionally delves into the mess of her life story--but there's not a word of scolding or shaming.  There is simply truth-telling.  He knows her story, and he knows that she's lived with a string of broken relationships (and yeah, it is plenty easy even for people who make the promises of marriage to end up bailing out on each other, too, so nobody is saying that just speaking vows makes a marriage enduring).  He knows that she has been burned by men who used her and walked away, men who treated her like she was disposable, that she's just now at the point where promises or no promises don't seem to matter.  And here's the thing that gets me about how Jesus handles the mess: he doesn't condemn, and he doesn't turn away to keep things polite and surface-level shallow.  He deliberately steers the conversation into the mess, as if so say, "Just we are clear, I know about everything that's happened to you, and everything you have been through--and I'm not walking away."  He lets her know he will not be scared off or scandalized if he finds out that he knows she's had five husbands and is now living with someone who is just as likely to bail out on her as all the others before. 

That's why Jesus has to enter into the mess.  We all know what it's like to have a friend or a co-worker who treats us just fine, until they find out some unpleasantness about our past, or they discover that you have different political preferences and convictions, or that you are friends with someone they just can't stand.  And you know, in those moments, the temptation to keep some part of yourself hidden in the future--you don't want to lose a friend, or have a bad working relationship because now they know something about you and see you differently, or are scandalized and decide to walk away from you.  We know what that is like, and so does Jesus.  So Jesus cuts right through any of those distance-creating defense mechanisms, so this woman doesn't put on a good face in the hopes of keeping Jesus from finding out that there are messes in her past and her present.  Jesus cuts through all of it, not to scold her and tell her to shape up, but to let her know that there is nothing she can do or has done already that will scare him off. (You'll notice, perhaps in a way that makes the moralizers in all of us squirm, that Jesus doesn't tell her to break up with her new boyfriend or that she's out of his good graces because she's been divorced--there is not a whiff of punishment or even a hint of brow-furrowing from Jesus.)  Once he has entered the mess with her, he can again offer her the invitation of life from.  But for someone who has been hurt too many times before, and for someone who is now used to hiding the mess in her life from people's judging eyes, this woman needs to know first that Jesus does not have an ax to grind or a lesson to teacher or a moral to recite.  He offers her acceptance.  He offers her grace.  He offers her honesty.  He offers her "real."

That's what it is to let mercy move us into the mess of this life.  Instead of keeping things surface-level polite, or backing away from people who seem too "scandalous" for respectable religious people to associate with, Jesus leads us right into the mess of one another's lives. 

And he leads us to be honest about the messes in our lives, too, and to once and for all take off the foolish masks we have been wearing to make people think there is a smile on the outside when there is only turmoil on the inside.  Jesus leads us into the mess--the mess of one another, and the mess beneath the polished exteriors we have been taught to project to the world.

Thank God for the gift of "real."

Lord Jesus, cut through our defenses and meet us where we are, here in our messes... and help us to acknowledge the messes inside us, too.