From Darkness into Light
Third Sunday of Lent
Darkness isn’t always a “bad” place to be - and being in the “light” isn’t always without its complications. This week’s reading from John 4:5-42 seemingly brings us out of Nicodemus’s night and into an unnamed Samaritan woman’s day. I’m not so sure I’m ready to leave Nicodemus yet this week - or maybe I’m just not ready to leave the night that protected him from prying eyes.
Nicodemus, like many of us, feels more comfortable if his faith activities aren’t on display for those around him to see and judge. Sure, we can march and vote and engage in community service - those are easy. At least compared to telling folks in our progressive neighborhoods and city councils and friend groups that we love Jesus and our churches (who says love has to be simple?). We do enough hiding of our own that we don’t need to critique Nicodemus - especially when we realize that in John 3:1-17 Jesus invited Nicodemus to be born again because he needed to emerge from God’s womb this time. And that when he emerges from God’s womb, God will smile down on him with rapturous joy because God so loved him. The problem with Nicodemus may not be that he is hiding in the dark (especially if the dark is God’s womb) so much that he is refusing to be born, to grow, to take the next step in faith.
When we get this week to John chapter 4, we find that it’s no longer night; the sun is actually quite high in its daily path. With Jesus resting on that hot dusty day by a well without a bucket (not the best journey preparation, I dare say), John moves us into the light. The bright light of a hot day, it seems. There Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at the well. A woman lacking the social status of Nicodemus. A woman whose name John did not even record. And a woman who has been interpreted over and over as a sexual scandal case. A woman. According to George Beasley-Murray, she is five-times divorced and now living with a man unmarried. I wonder who among us has heard a preacher tell the story that she showed up at noon so as to avoid all other folks, who would have come at the beginning of end of the day. Preachers who have labeled her a whore or serial adulterer, or some other version that has her steeped in well-earned shame.
There are plenty of ways to throw her back into the night. But I am not convinced the text actually lets us do that! Gail O’Day reminds us that John never says the woman has been divorced five times - only that she has had five husbands and a current partner who perhaps refused to marry her. Maybe this woman had been divorced five times because she had had five husbands who cheated on her. Maybe she had been widowed five times. Maybe she had been abandoned five times. Maybe the man she lives with now, and is financially and socially dependent on, refuses to marry her. Perhaps, given the romantic nature of well meet-ups in the Torah, it was iffy for Jesus to be at the well with any woman. But, not necessarily so because of her relationship history.
Nicodemus had power and prestige, but not the courage to follow Jesus in the light of day. Jesus had to chastise him and tell him that eventually he was going to have to leave the womb and be born. This woman didn’t get to keep her name, had a relationship history full of loss and pain, and given her gender and religion, was nothing compared to Jesus and his male disciples. Yet, she followed Jesus with courage in the broad light of day. She engaged Jesus in theological dialogue, she advocated for her Samaritan folks, she served as a loud and proud witness of him to her neighbors. She grew in her faith and as a result so did those who came and sat with him for two days to hear his teachings (v. 40).
The miracle is not that a floozy woman was transformed to a faithful woman, but rather that a woman with a painful history served as an evangelist in the broad light of day when a man with prestigious history could not. We don’t need to make this woman less than she was by interpreting her along misogynistic story lines, throwing her back into the dark to once again serve as a scandal to our prying eyes.
Sure, sometimes we are Nicodemus and sometimes we are this Samaritan woman. My encouragement to us as we live into this third week in Lent is to not throw faithful disciples back into the dark because we do not understand their stories. This unnamed woman shines light on all those around us whom we regularly silence but whose witness to God’s faithfulness is the goodness of the Gospel.