3rd Sunday in Lent
Texts: John 4:5-42;
Rom 5:1-11; Ex 17:1-7
YouTube: https://youtu.be/vAkPzl0-sxg
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
IS JESUS MODELING ‘MARRYING’ YOUR ENEMIES?
Last week, we met Nicodemus under the cover of darkness, a person of relative power and privilege in the reigning imperial culture. He simply wasn’t ready to give up his position in that culture of death to follow Jesus’ new program of life, even if it meant entering into God’s reign of life. He needed to know more. He walks away.
This week, we meet a Samaritan woman in the heat of the sun at midday. It is the most unlikely of meetings — at a well, no less, a place known for picking up people of the opposite sex, kind of like bars today. It’s the well of their common ancestor Jacob, who happened to meet his wife Rachel at that very well (Gen 29:10). But this is the most unlikely of pairings for any marriage prospects. One is a Judean rabbi, the other a Samaritan woman. Judeans and Samaritans had developed a long-festering hatred for each other — certainly not candidates for marriage.
But, as it turns out, unlike Nicodemus, this woman on the margins of power is ready to drink up Jesus’ new program truly based on life, truly based on lovingly caring for God’s home the earth and for God’s family, all fellow human beings. She is thirsty to drink in Jesus’ living water.
But to fully understand this story, we need to learn the coded language of the death culture of their day based on hate. We have evidence from a fairly reliable first century source, the Judean historian Flavius Josephus. In his book titled The Antiquities of the Judeans, Josephus outlines the deep-seated hatred between Judeans and Samaritans in the first century. It was no doubt strange to outsiders because Judeans and Samaritans have the same lineage to Jacob, to the twelve tribes of Israel who had dominated the Middle East under Kings David and Solomon a thousand years earlier.
But after Solomon, Israel had split into two kingdoms, North and South. The Northern Kingdom was defeated by the Assyrians in the 8th century Before Christ. The Southern Kingdom, known as Judea, fell to the Babylonians in the 6th century Before Christ. Josephus references a verse in the Judean scriptures, 2 Kings 17:24, quoted in your sermon notes, where the conquering king of Assyria, brings the people of five other nations into the fallen northern kingdom of Israel, now known as Samaria.
The number five, as in the Samaritan woman having five husbands, is not a coincidence. In short, this verse was a prooftext of why Judeans and Samaritans are cousins who both descend from the lineage of Jacob, but Judeans had held out longer from being conquered; and so they looked down their noses at their Samaritan cousins as having intermarried with five other ethnic groups. They, the Judeans, had remained pure. The Samaritans, of course, saw things differently. They were the ones who had remained more true to their ancestor Jacob. Living and worshipping in his land.
So there you have it. Feuding cousins. Judeans and Samaritans. For centuries they had hated each other. And here was a Judean rabbi offering living water to a Samaritan woman, at the well of their common ancestors Jacob and Rachel, who had met at that very well. So Jesus actually brings up what can happen at such wells: watering the seeds of marriage. “Go get your husband,” he says to the woman. When she tells Jesus she doesn’t have one, Jesus confronts her with the coded language used for the mutual hate between their peoples, which she immediately recognizes. When Jesus tells her that she has had five husbands and that the man she’s with now isn’t her husband, he isn’t talking literally about her marital status. He is using the Judean prooftext from 2 Kings 17 about the Samaritans having intermarried with five other peoples. The man she lives with now, of course, is Rome.
Which helps make sense of the woman’s response, “Sir, I can see you’re a prophet.” Many centuries removed, we Christians have tended to think of prophecy in terms of knowing things that we ordinarily shouldn’t know — like the marital status of a stranger you meet. But that’s not what prophecy actually is in the Bible. Prophecy is more about discerning the path on which people are currently walking and finding a way to confront them with it.
In this case, Jesus is offering everyone captured in an imperial culture of death and different path to choose, a path that actually leads to life. So he uses the ancient prophetic language of marital fidelity. Many of the prophets — the prophet Hosea was especially famous for this — they had warned their people about cozying up to empires in terms of them cheating on their God Yahweh. They used the language of marital infidelity to warn their people to stay true to their God. The Samaritan woman immediately recognizes this prophetic language and is more than willing to choose the other path which Jesus offers.
Which also makes sense of where their conversation goes next: to places of worship, Mt. Zion vs Mt. Gerizim. How does one go from living water to marital status to the mountain on which one worships? By talking in somewhat coded language, language of metaphor, about choosing the path to true life over the current path to death. Nicodemus wasn’t ready to hear about the difference between mere flesh and Spirit last week — Jesus trying to tell him that he must be born again of spirit. This woman is. Things of the flesh, like who they intermarried with or which mountain they worship on, are things which have divided their peoples, Judeans and Samaritans. These things can be healed and overcome by choosing the path of God’s Spirit, the way of overcoming our past hatreds and divisions.
Jesus is offering her a marriage proposal of sorts. When they choose of path of worshiping in God’s Spirit together, they are choosing the path of leaving behind that which divided them. They are choosing to live once again as God’s one human family, based on life-giving mutual care instead of deadly domination of one over the other.
We are offered the same choice here today, and every time we meet here in our place of spiritual worship. There are the cultures of division and death all around us — and God’s culture of true life. We are to choose. In our country, for example, we used a prooftext from Genesis 9, printed in your Sermon Notes, that’s similar to 2 Kings 17. In this country as we were founded, we used these verses where Noah curses his son Ham and his descendants to be enslaved to the descendants of his brothers. Africans are the descendants of Ham we said, so the Bible justifies our enslavement of them. Crazy, right? But it was held with religious, leading to a bloody Civil War.
We are still living in its long, deadly legacy of racism. We cannot truly choose another path without fully acknowledging it. And our white ancestors came to this continent where other peoples already lived. With the excuse that they ‘obviously’ worshiped God wrongly — worshiping on the wrong mountain, so to speak — we justified taking the land from them. We cannot truly choose another path without fully acknowledging the continuing legacy of this history. That’s what the Samaritan woman is doing. Choosing the other path.
We are embarking on a war with Iran and already our Christian politicians are citing religious differences among the reasons for the war (an example in the Sermon Notes). Can we see that Jesus is trying to get us to move past religious differences and simply be better, more loving human beings together? To stop choosing nationalistic cultures of death and to begin choosing the living water we might share as one human family? Are we hungry and thirsty for something different? Let us share the bread of life and the cup of forgiveness together that we might be fed for new life. Here and now. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, March 8, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/vAkPzl0-sxg
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from John Dear
