Photo by Bob Jenkin on Unsplash

A Sermon on John 4:5-42
by Rev. Chris Bohnhoff

She probably didn’t expect to see anyone at the well. Scholars tell us that women in first century Israel generally would have gathered water in the early morning to avoid the midday heat. So why was she there under the midday sun? In their time, John’s readers would have been immediately skeptical of her.

She probably didn’t expect to see anyone at the well, but there was Jesus, a strange man she could tell was Jewish and therefore probably hostile, asking for a drink from her village well.

What follows is one of Jesus’ favorite games: hide and seek, or is it I spy?

Will you pray with me? God of wisdom, we invite you to draw near as we pause on our Lenten journey. Help us to see through the superficial to the beautiful, singing essence of your creation. And guide us to co-create a world free of fear, where your people can come out from their hiding places into their full, God-soaked selves. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, our source, our comfort, the ground of our being. Amen.

We humans are storytelling machines. We’re so good at telling stories that we can look at a person and imagine we know everything about their life. Think about the things that you tell yourself about people based on their clothes, their age, their hair (or lack thereof), the bumper sticker on their car. And because we construct these split-second stories about others, we know that others are making up stories about us, too. Usually, in our safe, established spaces, this interchange of stories is just a part of our lives. Sometimes, especially in our teen years, we even play with the things we give the world to judge us by; we try out a new haircut or a new look. We might lean especially hard into a style to manipulate the emotional reaction others might have to us.

But the consciousness we have of others’ story of us is especially vivid when we don’t hold the power: when we’re the new kid in class, or the job applicant, or one who looks different from the dominant culture, or a woman alone in a public space near a man they don’t know. Who do they think I am? Who do I think they are? Am I safe?

The woman approaches the well and Jesus asks her for a drink. It would be a harmless question coming from some, but from a foreigner? A psychological scene is now set: the reader’s story about the woman at the well and the woman’s story about Jesus have been constructed, and on that basis, we’re wary of each other. Layered on top of this are the further revelations by Jesus that his power is greater than the woman’s ancestor, Jacob, and that the woman has had five husbands and now lives with a man that she’s not married to, and by the world’s standards, at this point, we and the woman should be too skeptical to bother to keep talking.

Because that’s what humans so often do. In our culture, women, people of color, young and old, people with disabilities are pre-judged such that their actual lives are never revealed. So often, curiosity ends as soon as the initial story is constructed, and as a result, we get stereotypes leading to sexism, ableism, racism—all the interlocking -isms that form systemic oppression, all the conditions that allow people like Jeffrey Epstein to operate in plain view for so long. We don’t want to change our initial stories, because it’s so energy intensive to square the logic we use to walk through the world with new, more complicated information.

But something different unfolds at the well. A door is opened. Jesus mysteriously offers the woman a way to stop having to come to the well at noon. The offer is outlandish, but the woman doesn’t call Jesus crazy, when so many others in John’s gospel do. And when Jesus reveals that he knows the woman’s marital history, he doesn’t judge her. And he throws aside their religious differences to point to their common belief in a God that cares for, that animates them both.

As their interaction ends, each character’s true self has been revealed. Jesus is more than a sweaty foreigner looking for a handout; he is the Messiah. The woman is more than her questionable past; she is a disciple, the first in John’s gospel to hear Jesus say that he is the Messiah, the one who models to the other disciples how to reap what has been sown, how to bring the hurting and thrown away of the world into the good news of God’s love and their own belovedness.

Our Lenten questions are these: can we see past the stereotypes to truly see who is in front of us? Can we release our desire for neat, repeatable narratives and leave space for God to reveal Godself to us in the messy newness of every face? And can we unlock ourselves from our self stories, the ones painfully internalized based on the assumptions others make about us?

In this season when our Minnesota weather forces us to deal with what is rather than what we want to be, this Lent and beyond, may we hold onto our curiosity and wait for the blessing that lives in every snowdrift and every person, no matter what stories our brains may tell based on what they see on the surface. Amen.