"[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.]" [John 4:5-9]
It takes great courage--maybe more than we have on our own--to acknowledge that the people we have arrogantly deemed unworthy are not only theoretically "acceptable," but in fact already have been accepted, loved, and decreed worthy by God.
But that is precisely what we are brought face to face with from this opening scene from the story in John's gospel that many of us heard this past Sunday. Jesus, who had surely grown up surrounded by the racial prejudice and xenophobia that pitted Jewish people and Samaritans against each other, chooses to reject those old hatreds and the unspoken bigotry that was all around. And he chose a different path--one that recognized these people labeled "other" as worthy, beloved, and made in the image of God as well. Jesus is braver than we usually are in that way.
Before we go any further into this story--and we will, in the coming days, don't worry--before we get into the metaphors of living water, or the backstory of this woman who has been rejected at least five times and had her heart broken who knows how many more, let's just start with the bravery of Jesus to defy the casual and systemic hatred that was all around him. Because it truly is a brave thing to be able to say to the people around you, including neighbors you've known for years or acquaintances who watched you grow up, "I will not further the xenophobia you taught me was normal. I will not participate in it, and I will not give it a pass any longer." But that is precisely what Jesus does as he walks into Samaritan territory and offers genuine love to a stranger who is "other."
That is courageous, because it means risking alienation from all those people who you grew up with, people who had perpetuated and participated in a pattern of prejudice that they had been taught from generations before. You risk being accused of disrespecting your elders or betraying "your own kind" when you stand up and say "No" to the animosities that everyone had just gotten used to. You get blamed for "rocking the boat," for looking "political," or being swept up in the currents of pagan culture when you call out the bigotry that nobody else seems to notice. Jesus stares all of that down, because he is confident that God's love includes the woman with the water jar coming his way. And Jesus knows that genuine love--the love that is of God--does not let itself be watered down with the arrogance we call racism, nor any other arrogant mindset that seems somebody else as "less than."
Now, for us reading this story some two thousand years after John first jotted it down for us, it's easy to spot the prejudice and xenophobia in the story. John the narrator literally comes out and says, "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans," and he underscores the shock of the woman at the well that Jesus has asked for a drink out of her jar or cup. So it should be pretty obvious to us that there are dynamics of racial prejudice and systemic fear in this story. The harder part is being able to recognize that it's still all around us, like it's floating in the ether, and that we are still called to live in the love of Jesus that courageously rejects xenophobia.
That's particularly hard for the same reason it would have been hard for so many of Jesus' friends, neighbors, and relatives to recognize the bigotry they had all bought into: it's usually so thoroughly woven into the very fabric of everyday life that they didn't notice it anymore. A fish doesn't know that it's wet, after all. And for us, an awful lot of the prejudice, subtle hatred, and bigotry around us so thoroughly saturates everything around us that it can be easy not to notice it, or to stay asleep to it. Indeed, sometimes all of those forms of hate and fear dress up in the garb of Respectable Religion and it becomes a pious and righteous thing to uphold them. Most of the time, the inherited prejudices with which we are ingrained are subtle--it's not just the houses with Confederate flags flying in their yard or on their cars [although, true confession, my official counter of "Days-Since-I've-Seen-A-Confederate-Flag-Flying-In-A-Yard" just went back down to zero over the weekend, here in good ol' Union state Pennsylvania]. Most of the time, it's the casual remarks, the facial expressions, the teaching of children [without realizing that we are indoctrinating them with racism] about "not associating with THOSE people," or how some people are "not our kind of folk." It's the instant criticism of those who are different, or the nonsensical attempt to pretend we "don't even see the difference," rather than acknowledging the ways we are different--and yet beloved all the same.
It's hard to have this conversation, I know, because surely most all of us want to think of ourselves as lovely, good, decent, polite people--you know, people "without a racist bone in our bodies." But that's the thing: nobody has to sit you down and lectures you to "hate people like THEM." You just see it modeled over and over again in a million little ways--a thousand tiny slights, a hundred offhand remarks that "are no big deal, right?" You learn the systems and patterns you grow up in and inherit, and then you learn to defend those systems because your family and your neighbors and your community all thought they were good enough for them--so why are you too good for them now? And without realizing it, we end up perpetuating systems of hatred and fear that we would recognize as obviously wicked if we had someone like John the narrator telling our story as we have in this story from the Bible. But when you're living it, no voiceover will label the bigotries we are used to as bigotry--we need to be the ones who are brave enough in our love to be like Jesus, who simply refuses to perpetuate the xenophobia that just about everyone else around him had accepted as unchangeable.
To live in the love of Jesus will mean growing in that kind of courage--and like I say, quite often on our own we are not that brave. We go along with the crowd by nature, and it's hard to work up the nerve to say, "No--love compels me to act differently from what I have seen modeled around me." But what makes it possible to be brave in this way is that Jesus has gone ahead of us and blazed a trail, and he stays with us at the same time, refusing to give up on us when we get it wrong, and giving us the grace to start over. It's hard learning to break out of the systemic hatred and arrogance all around us and to dare something different--but Jesus' presence leading us right up to those we were taught to view with animosity makes us brave.
Today, let us go where Jesus leads.
Lord Jesus, make us brave enough to love like you. Make us courageous enough to say No to the hatred we have been complicit in, and to say Yes to loving all the way you do.
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