The Samaritan woman at the well

I think we’ve seen this story before … but in the Old Testament.

­      To understand the passage in John 4 requires familiarity with the Old Testament, and with the way that setting up a marriage is presented there. Setting up a marriage is important business if you’re a patriarch. There are three passages in the Old Testament that talk of setting up a marriage that look remarkably similar to John 4: setting up the marriage between Isaac and Rebekah in Genesis 24; of Jacob and Rachel in Genesis 29; and of Moses and Zipporah in Exodus 2.

      In each of these three stories, we see a series of events that fit into a heavily stylised template: in each case, a hero (or servant) acts as a broker. He (never she) goes to a dis­tant country; he stops at a well where a maiden is working; she shows what an emi­nent bride she will be; a drink is given; the servant helps the woman by looking after her animals; she then hurries home to tell her family that she has met a person worth marrying; the servant is persuaded to go to the family home, where a meal is laid and the marriage announced; in each case, she does subsequently marry the hero.

      Each of these seven elements occur in exactly this order in the three Old Testament stories I mentioned a moment ago. Indeed, the template was as familiar to the ancient Jews as the story of Cinderella is to us today.

      In a subtle way, these elements also occur in John chapter four. Jesus enters the foreign land of Samaria — so here Jesus is the hero’s servant and marriage broker; but next, unlike the strikingly attractive virgins in the Old Testament, Jesus finds the Samaritan woman is married already, so we need to forgive her before we do anything else; next, true to form, Jesus has a gift: it’s ‘living water’; next, the woman returns to her village to tell them of the man she has met; the man stays with her family, and the villagers press Jesus to stay, and he does stay with them.

      Notice also the way that just before the story starts there is a wedding at Cana — it’s in John chapter two. Then, (in John 3:29) John the Baptist says that Jesus is the Bridegroom, which surely makes John the Baptist the best man. That’s the introduction, the context: this passage is telling us to look at Jesus brokering a marriage.

      But if Jesus brokers a marriage, what is the marriage? Forget Samaria and Palestine, the violent Kosovo and Serbia of their day. Simple: while the scriptures are littered with choice metaphors to describe our relationship with God, earth and heaven, the image of God as bridegroom and his people as bride is by far the most beautiful. Think of Revelation 21, ‘The New Jerusalem coming out of Heaven as a bride adorned for her husband’. So St John’s story sees Jesus brokering a marriage between God and sinful humankind.

      We now see what the Romans passage a moment ago was banging on about: because of Jesus, sinful humanity can at long last enter into intimacy with God, an intimacy so close we can legitimately compare it to a marriage.

      But, hang on a moment: what are we implying with all this talk of marriage?  

      Firstly, marriage is a binding promise, a contract. In the Gospel story, Jesus hadn’t merely come to save a solitary Samaritan woman. He’d come, as God’s broker — the Messiah — to reclaim his wayward bride, and remind her of the binding nature of the promise he made with his chosen people. Perhaps that’s why Jesus chose this particular Samaritan woman, who’s had multiple husbands, to make the point. And as Christians reconciled to God, we have also entered a binding contract with God: at baptism, we too were promised to him. We are his. At the cross, he paid our asking price, the dowry.

      Secondly, between announcing the marriage and it’s actually taking place, we prepare. It’s never a time of passive waiting for the future wedding. It’s a time of activity, of setting the house in order, of putting garments in the bottom drawer. As Christians we are similarly to prepare our hearts and lives for union with God, ready for that phase of our lives which starts after we die. Jesus calls it, ‘laying up treasure in heaven.’

      And thirdly, this time before marriage is the time to explore the boundaries of love, and a time to demonstrate our love: just as people engaged to be married show their mutual love in a thousand different ways, so we are to show our love for God. We don’t just to say to God, ‘I love you,’ but we show him our love with tangible gifts of time and money, anything that costs, seeking to make it utterly clear that we want him to be the centre of our everything. A future union with God means that we can and should make God the centre, the very core, of our lives.