Other, Not Sinner

Other, Not Sinner--February 27, 2019

"So [Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.  A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink.' (His disciples had gone into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered here, 'If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water'." [John 4:5-10]

Do not confuse being "other" with being "sinful."  Jesus does not.  Not once.

For all the times I have read and re-read this well-known story from John's Gospel, I don't think I had ever noticed that until today.  At least, I had never really stopped to consider this before (a reminder, as God's Spirit has a way of doing, that just when I think I have pinned a text into submission, the Scriptures wrestle me back down to the ground and punch me in the hip like God does to Jacob).  But notice that even though this woman has baggage, and Jesus is not afraid to deal with the broken relationships of her past when the time comes for that, Jesus doesn't treat her being "a Samaritan" as sinful by itself.  

Yes, she is different from Jesus--he comes from a Jewish background, and she has grown up in the neighboring region of Samaria.  And yes, that has also brought with it different religion (they banter about that, too, eventually), different culture, different ethnicity, and a whole host of differences.  And to be sure, there was plenty of animosity between Judeans who saw themselves as the "faithful remnant" who had not been tainted by intermarriage with foreign nations and empires, and the Samaritans, who held onto part of the heritage of ancient Israel but had also been interspersed among other people groups over the centuries and created something of a new culture that was a hodge-podge of nationalities, customs, and ethnicity.  The Judeans saw themselves as the "pure" and "true" people of God, and looked down at the Samaritans as "tainted," "impure," and succumbing to the ways of the world... and the Samaritans had their own vitriol to fling back at the Judeans.  From the Judean perspective, just being Samaritan was a wicked thing--because to them it meant you were comfortable with compromising with the world and its wicked ways.  And from the Samaritan standpoint, being Samaritan was simply what you were born--you couldn't "repent" of being Samaritan any more than you could repent of being brown-haired.  And from the Samaritan perspective, you kind of had to ask why you would need to repent of being brown-haired.  It was just a part of who you are.  

Jesus, however, does not accept the assumption that being Samaritan is a moral failure.  And he does not treat this woman as sinner because of her kind of humanity. She is "other," but she that does not, by itself, mean "sinful." 

That is critical for two reasons.  First, it means that Jesus is able to accept her, to cross boundaries that have been set up between them, without having to hem and haw about whether it is okay to associate with her.  He doesn't have to say, "Just so you know, me sitting down at this well with you is not an endorsement of your Samaritan ways," because that's not even an issue at all for him.  Jesus sees the difference between them, of course.  He doesn't spout any nonsense that he "doesn't see Samaritan-ness or Judean-ness," because of course, sure, it's there. But Jesus doesn't see being a Samaritan as anything to apologize for, repent of, or confess.  He sees she is different, but being different in this regard does not mean she is wicked. Jesus doesn't assume that his talking with her is an act of pity for some poor, misguided sinner.  He sees himself as one person talking to another person, both of whom are different kinds of thirsty. But there is no song and dance about how being Samaritan is by itself something that needs to be forgiven.  It does not.

And because this woman's identity is not a boundary (and never was, for Jesus), it is possible for their conversation to get deeper eventually, so that the messes she has come through in her past can indeed be named and dealt with.  She's been through a lot of bad relationships--they both know that.  And Jesus neither condemns nor applauds that fact--he just makes it clear that he knows she has been through a lot of dead-end relationships like the Goodbye Girl and he knows that she has been hurt.  And part of what Jesus has to do is to say, "I'm not like all those other dead-ends.  I have something good to offer you as a free gift--as free as water from a well."  And it is possible for Jesus to make that offer genuinely because they haven't gotten hung up on the bad theology that being a Samaritan was a sin.  Because that's not in the way, they can get to the real hurts and real dead-ends she has been through.

In all of this scene, Jesus does not patronize or condescend to the woman at the well.  He treats her as someone he can be honest with, and she can be honest back with him, because she comes to discover that she isn't being attacked for being a woman, or for being a Samaritan, or for anything... because she isn't being attacked at all.

The rest of their life-changing conversation, one which ends with the woman eventually going out and telling all her friends and neighbors about Jesus (which apparently is not a problem for Jesus, either), is all possible because at the beginning, Jesus is clear that her being "other" is not something to be ashamed of, to apologize for, or to confess.  It is possible to be "other"--to be different in some way--without having to say you are sorry for it, to pretend the difference is not there, or to cover over it.  Jesus doesn't forgive this woman for her otherness, because otherness is not something for which one must ask for forgiveness.  Otherness does not become an impenetrable boundary between them.  It is simply the truth.  

It is telling to me that the Bible often envisions God's promised future as a gathering of all sorts of "others" without insisting that they all become identical.  Isaiah dreams of wolves and lambs, cows and bears, lying down side by side to eat safely, but without the wolves all being zapped into become sheep.  They are transformed in such a way that they do not eat or kill each other, but they remain other.  Apparently, God is not ashamed of the otherness. The violence and hostility between those old enemies has been taken away, but not their difference.

Today, it is important to remember that Jesus is able to distinguish between "otherness" and "sinfulness." Yes, there are things in this life that are wicked and terrible and rotten which we need to turn away from.  Yes, we are constantly called away from giving ourselves back into the power of sin.  Yes, we are right to confess where we have sinned and where we continue to struggle.

But "otherness"--being different--whether it is the Samaritan woman talking with Jesus, or cows and bears in Isaiah, or the person waiting for you to tell them that God love them... and so do you, these things are not sins to be confessed. They are differences between us which can either become obstacles if we make them such, or they can simply be part of loving people as they are.

Can we do the difficult work of following Jesus into whatever unexpected conversations he gets himself into? And can we go there, as he does, without pity or condescension, and instead with the love that sees people honestly and calls them beloved?

Lord Jesus, give us the wisdom to know the difference between sinfulness and other-ness.