John 4:5-42
Lent 3 - Year A
To be told everything you've ever done is one of those George Bailey revelations from It's a Wonderful Life. We seem to go along getting caught up in everydayness and frustrations of living and in so doing lose track of the body of work that is "me."
To be told everything from the past reminds us of the possibilities still left open to us. When we stop to think, who would have ever guessed so much good was in us. When we stop to think, who can refuse the good that still might come forward because of us.
There is not a way to avoid reenergizing hope if we look back. Or is there? Might we not get even more discouraged than hopeful over all the ugly stuff that has also accompanied us along the way?
Here, in regard to husbands, it feels like Photina has already been caught in her Adam&Eve avoidance real conversation. If that were the end of the story discouragement would continue to rule the day. But we hear the "rest of the story" as Jesus tells who she is (has been and is intended to be) and life again flows on.
Let's not fail to tell the whole story, which will have a major component of "You are Beloved!" With this reminder, that everything we have ever done has been done in the context of a loving and merciful GOD, Photina and you and I can truly invite others to come hear their context.
http://www.kairoscomotion.org/lectionary/2005/february2005.html
"Give us water to drink," quarreled the people with Moses.
"Salvation is present in rocky ground!" rejoices the Psalmist.
"Peace with G*D," is Paul's lifeblood.
"Give me a drink," focuses Jesus' challenge.
An old standard is 6-8 glasses of water per day. In a world of increasing ecological disaster and civilian-oriented warfare, even 1 glass a day is a challenge in many places.
A next war may be fought over water rights. Quarrels have already begun about water's availability. It may be that where folks literally thirst for life - they will rise to take the life of those who withhold such a basic necessity.
Such physical realities have cosmos-wide implications. We can't separate water gushing up for eternal life from water gushing up for daily life. These are not just religious, theological, doctrinal passages, but political and prophetic ones. If you have not already been called to use your gifts and resources in some other arena of life, this would be a worthy place to engage to see if this is for you and your life-giving community.
- - -
water
water everywhere
drinks on the house
bottoms up
filled to the brim
water
water everywhere
rights to be wrangled
dams to build
levees to rebuild
water
water everywhere
and yet thirst
and yet division
and yet ignorance
water
water everywhere
water in rocks
water in wells
water in star dust
water
water everywhere
ho, come to the water
dive deep
until a spell is snapt
water
water everywhere
watering prayers
watering love
with sips and gulps
water
water everywhere
and not a god to drink
then a little vesper bell
rings out a change
water
water everywhere
staff to rock
voice to ear
salvation saved[suggested by a Wikipedia article Info about The Rime of the Ancient Mariner]
Fulford, Tim, "Poetry of Isolation: The Ancient Mariner," Coleridge's Figurative Languages (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), 62-73.
Fulford analyses the composition of the poem's discourses in the context of the assumptions of the historical biblical hermeneutics with which Coleridge was familiar. Fulford argues that the poem's discourses disrupt the hermeneutic circle of believers posited by biblical hermeneutics, and illustrate the isolating freedom provided by an exegesis discontinuous with tradition. Historical biblical hermeneutics attempts to deal with the problem posed by the finitude and historicity of interpretation. By positing a grand unity of perspective in God, historical biblical hermeneutics can deny the inerrancy of scripture (an embarrassingly untenable notion) while placing each sacred text in a cirle with other spiritual interpretations of existence authority, a circle which progresses toward though never reaching the circumscription of truth. Spiritual authority thus rests in a continually reinterpreted tradition of spiritual texts. McGann and Butler argue that Coleridge organizes the multiple levels of discourse in his poem to create such a hermeneutic circle: the Mariner interprets his own experience; his interpretation is affirmed but reinterpreted by the poem's narrator, the balladeer; the narrator's reinterpretation is deepened by the scholarly author of the gloss, who typologically integrates the poem into the tradition of Christian hermeneutics; critics such as Warren perpetuate the circle with their interpretations of the poem, which are modernizations and expansions upon the gloss. Fulford argues that the poem is more problematic than either McGann or Butler perceive it to be. The poem brings together, not in unity but in collision, radically discontinuous hermeneutic discourses; the poem breaks the hermeneutic circle. The Mariner's interpretation of his experience cannot be reduced to the narrator's moralizing or the glosser's typological interpretation. As in "The Wanderings of Cain," in "The Mariner" traditional interpretations of guilt and punishment are destabilized by the poem's sympathetic treatment of the Mariner. The tension thus created between the Mariner's tale, the narrator, and the gloss is left unresolved. Furthermore, the Mariner himself breaks with hermeneutic tradition when he denies the Christian interpretation of the albatross and shoots it. His interpretation of the consequent events disconfirms the hermeneutic circle: through imagination the Mariner creates an interpretation of reality as chaos which is incompatible with the unifying assumption of the hermeneutic circle. His fate as a misunderstood prophet outside of society expresses the radically isolating consequences of the dissolution of the hermeneutic circle into the babble of competing discourses. Even the glosses are fissured by the incompatibility of the various interpretive discourses the glosser draws from the hermeneutic tradition and puts into play in the poem. The unity of the poem's hermeneutic circle is on the verge of collapsing into the fragments of a forced appearance. The poem does not capitulate entirely to radical discontinuity, but suffers intensely from the strain, created by the movements toward unity on the one hand and dissolution on the other, which is inevitable in all hermeneutic endeavors.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2007_03_01_archive.html
The disciples of Jesus, those baptizing ones, had gone into Sychar, for they were feeling a little eleven-o-clock-ish. When they came back, they brought no one with them (and were still not strengthened enough to ask the questions on their hearts). Apparently they had not yet connected Jesus' "food" with food for the stomach and used their feeding opportunities to expand their hunger to compassionately connect with the "hunger" of others.
Contrast this with Photina (the traditional name for the Samaritan woman at the well) who was the post-modern of her time and who was able to raise leading, expansive, questions of her neighbors and brought many out to visit with and invite Jesus in. In 1:41, Andrew states, "We have found the Messiah" while here Photina says, "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" Are these evangelistic techniques simply a difference between male and female sensibilities, or the difference between how you speak to the privileged versus the unprivileged?
In some sense the visit to the well was her being led into the wilderness by the spirit, there encountering the "other" that allowed reflection upon present constructs and set a direction for reentering life from a changed perspective.
[Side note to self: Try tracking through John to see how the identity temptations were worked out in longer conversation blocks with people:
- "Here is the Lamb of God" and "Can anything good come from Nazareth" -- "If you are the Son of God"
- "Turn this water to wine" -- "Turn these stones to bread"
- "Stop making my Father's house a marketplace" -- "All the wealth of the world can be yours"
- "How dramatic does renewal have to be, rebirth?" -- "Jump now, reveal angels"
- Etc.]
Do note the lack of rebuke Jesus gives Photina and how non-creedal her testimony. Does that give you permission to tell your insights based on your experience?
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Connie (Reader) said...
At first, the woman at the well was asking in different ways, "Who is this guy?"
When she said, "GIve me this water," she may have thought that Jesus was nuts, but she thought the living water was a good thing. She was open to what would benefit her.
That gave Jesus the chance to get into her business. When she realized that Jesus knew her situation, and was relating to her anyway, she acknowledged that he was a prophet, a speaker for God.
With his broad answer about worship, she asked of the Messiah "who will tell us all things."
How does Jesus come to us?
In those who ask for a favor? those we may think are a little strange? sometimes they can tell us who we are.
Wesley (Blogger) said...
I appreciate the mutuality you note. It seems to be the process that allows a deepening of a whole relationship. To simply tell folks a theory of everything without that mutuality returns us to a "divine right of kings" and hierarchical religion of authorized tellers and a mass of tellees.
This conversation with a "foreign" woman around water leads to the woman being told who she is. A conversation with another "foreign" woman about healing for her daughter leads to Jesus being told who he is.
Thanks for the reminder of mutuality.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2008_02_01_archive.html
Imagine a worn out Jesus, tired from his journey. No, really, imagine a thirsty Jesus without even a little water to turn to wine.
Now remember that wells are traditional places where intimate and covenanted relationships begin. Dan Brown may have gotten it wrong in his speculations about Jesus and Magdalena Mary. Perhaps Jesus so honored his traditions that he had multiple beloved disciples and modeled G*D's expansive love with at least two - Mary, well-described in the Gospel of Phillip as able to see spiritual realities, and Photina of the Well (initially playing Nicodemus and quickly moving beyond).
Imagining and remembering help us clarify what is it that we experience for ourselves. So, imagine well and remember well. We engage best when holding an imagined future and a remembered past together and also respect their limits.
This scene translates into the unknown just around the corner. Who would have expected the lack of evangelistic results by the disciples and such great ones through Photina. Being born from above is surprisingly simple - see people as people - a woman seen as a person, not as woman, sinner, half-breed, etc. becomes the first evangelist in the fourth gospel.
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/03/john-45-42.html
coming arrived
tired and thirsty
a deadly combination
water in a well
but not a drop to drink
these depths are plumbed
by outcasts
outcasts
beneath one's station
money won't make it
past achievements won't either
neither will happy talk
or righteous faithful actions
this calls for a new way
beyond discipleship
here we need to know
one another
understand the depths
in another
reconciliation takes two
to make a new way
this new way
binds together
a never being the same
and moving on
http://kcmlection.blogspot.com/2011/03/coming-arrived.html
Imagine Jesus tired—too tired to draw a drink. Was that act beneath him (disciples had gone on to get food, women had often waited upon the whole group—where were the groupies this time) or was he simply tired?
Jesus’ demand of a drink points in the direction of privilege (Male and Jewish trumping Samaritan Female). His play on well-water and living-water points toward a teaching opportunity. Tricky business, this business of engaging after-the-fact scriptures.
Adding to the trickiness and to emphasize that this is one of John’s theologically based vignettes is this from The New Interpreter’s Dictionary on Sychar:
Although this area is rich with natural water resources—a detail that is relevant to John’s story—the location of ancient Sychar is problematic. Since Shechem was destroyed in 107 BCE, it is difficult to directly associate Sychar with a city in ruins in the 1st cent. CE. The city of Napolis, built near the end of the 1st cent. CE, is not a viable candidate either. Since the mid-19th cent., Khirbet Askar has been considered a likely location for Sychar because of its location a half mile from the well, but no archeological evidence supports this identification.
One thing this does is to open up this story to all times. How does this shed light (traditional name of the woman is Photina [light]) into your life and how do you shed light into the lives of others?
Has your life finally been revealed to you? Are you interested in still waters [harbor] or living, roiled [a-sea], waters? Yes, both are needed in a long journey, but where is your passion?
One last comment about the two days Jesus stayed with the Samaritans (creedally like descending to the dead). If the third day is a resurrection day, then then the two-days are a Lenten season and it is the people who are raised to new life on the third day as Jesus journeys onward to a next harbor.
How do you spin this story into your current time and place?