Relinquishing the Gavel--March 14, 2023
"The [Samaritan] woman said to [Jesus], 'Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.' Jesus said to her, '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!'" [John 4:15-18]
So, a confession: for a lot of my life, I assumed Jesus was scolding this woman with a not-so-subtle jab about her having had five husbands before... and for a lot of my life, I was wrong.
It's funny how easily we put ourselves in the role of judge over other people--even people we know dangerously little about--and how quickly we assume the worst of them when we do. And from there it is even easier to assume Jesus endorses our verdict over the people we have decided to condemn. Funny, isn't it, how often we picture Jesus standing beside us in condemnation of others, rather than with his arms wrapped around the ones we have condemned? And how easily we try to force Jesus' words to sound like a condemnation of this woman for who she loves or how her relationships have gone, rather than hearing them as Jesus' way of saying, "I know what you've been through; and I'm not running away from you."
What I want to propose is that if we have read, or heard [or been preached at] that this passage shows us Jesus shaming this woman for her past marriages, we need to listen and look again more closely and see whether those conclusions come from the text, or from our assumptions about her--and maybe our own insecure need to find someone we can cast as "less than" or "unworthy."
The truth is that we just don't know how she got to this point in her life, having had five previous relationships end and now muddling through a sixth. It's easy to assume she is the problem, and that she's wrecked six marriages because of some fault of hers--that's easy because it lets us make her the problem, or at least allows us to look down condescendingly at her. But Jesus doesn't speak with that assumption. Maybe she's met a lot of jerks, and everybody in her town was pressuring her to get hitched rather than wait to meet someone who would treat her well. [You know what they say about dating in small towns: your odds are good, but the good are odd.] It is certainly possible that she has outlived multiple husbands who have died [there was even a commandment in the Torah about widows marrying the brother, or brothers if need be, of the deceased to continue the family line in what was called "levirate marriage," and the Sadducees even present Jesus with a hypothetical question of just such a case with a widow of seven husbands at one point in the gospels, too]. It's possible that, in a culture where some Respectable Religious Leaders taught that you could divorce your wife for something as petty as burning dinner, one husband treated her like garbage and threw her away, and then she became convinced that she wasn't worth any better treatment than that. It's possible she had been through a host of terrible arranged marriages, or that one or more spouses had been a victim of violence from the occupying Romans. There are countless possibilities, and yes, certainly, one of them is that she herself was a contributing factor to her past marriages ending.
My point is to say that the text itself doesn't give us more information, and Jesus doesn't seem to make any assumptions, other than that he seems to know what surely was an open secret in town--and he doesn't scold or shame her over it. It's almost like Jesus names this fact to get it out in the open and say, "If you're worried about me judging you when I find out about your past, you don't need to worry--I already know, and I have no condemnation for you." It's like defusing a bomb before it goes off, or a nurse acknowledging the wound you've been trying to cover up with your arm--so that you don't feel like you have to hide it, but so that it can be treated and healed.
And yet, so easily, we can come to a story like this and turn this woman into a pariah or notorious "sinner," and once we've decided to take that interpretation, we start hearing Jesus' words with the same judgmental tone of voice, even if that's not what Jesus himself had in mind. Jesus doesn't end this conversation trying to push this woman into a cookie-cutter pattern of a family with a husband, two kids, a dog, and a white picket fence. He makes his offer of life that is infinite to her as she is, without additional prerequisites, expectations, or conditions. That's the thing: sometimes I think we modern-day Respectable Religious Folks think that Jesus has called us to find people we have decided are "broken" and then to "fix" them by forcing them into the molds we've prepared for them, when Jesus instead just finds people, regardless of the barriers others would have put in his way, and tells them, "I'm giving you infinite life as a free gift. This love is for you."
We have a way of reworking Jesus' message to sound like "Come to me and I will make you fit the expectations of other people better, so then they won't judge you so much," rather than hearing him say unabashedly, "I already accept you; I don't condemn you, and I'm not here to rub salt in the wounds from what you've been through. And I won't bail out on you." And when we do that, we reveal the worst kind of arrogance around--the kind that dresses up as compassion but is really condescending pity. That's not love--that's a backhanded way of saying, "You are currently unacceptable, but I can change you and make you acceptable according to my standards." Jesus doesn't do that to this woman. He simply names the elephant [or all five of them] in the room as if to remove their power over her--he says, "I know about what you've been through. And my offer still stands." Jesus isn't here to pity this woman or look down on her. He treats her as a peer, going toe to toe with her from topic to topic without talking down to her or belittling her.
So here in a new day, how can this story shape the way we treat people? How can Jesus' way free us from the baggage of arrogance we've been lugging around with us, and simply love people where they are at? How might Jesus' way of putting this woman at ease without making it feel like they all have to walk on eggshells or avoid touchy subjects give us direction for our words and actions? And maybe how could this closer look at a well-known story make us take a second look at the ways we often co-opt Jesus to endorse our judgment over other people and the assumptions we make about them? Where have we been sitting in judgment over people--and where has Jesus been trying to peel open our clenched fingers and reliniquish the gavel?
Wrestling with those questions and figuring out some answers won't be easy--but it will certainly be more honest than ignoring them. And it might just help us to more fully love like Jesus--and that makes it worth the effort.
Lord Jesus, keep us from trying to speak for you or to steal your authority to back up our condemnation of other people. Teach us to love like you.
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