At Recovery Worship this morning we continued our series on "Encounters with Jesus." The woman at the well was our topic; a woman, like many women in the Bible, is not always presented in the kindest of ways. I can remember at seminary when I listened to a classmate rake her across the coals. She was an outcast, going to the well at noon because the other women didn't want anything to do with her. After all, she had been married five times, and was now living with a man to whom she was not married. Of course, as was pointed out this morning, if a woman has been married five times in our culture we would call her a "movie star." But this isn't today. This story took place in Jesus' day, so two thousand years of Biblical tradition have pretty much made her a slut. As my favorite preacher Fred Craddock observed, "Evangelists aplenty have assumed that the brighter her nails, the darker her mascara and the shorter her skirt, the greater the testimony to the power of the converting word." Sandra Schneiders states the case more bluntly: "The treatment of the Samaritan woman in the history of interpretation is a text book case of the trivialization, marginalization and even sexual demonization of Biblical women." (Thank you Frances Taylor Gench "Encounters with Jesus")
I would think it is time that we threw away the Biblical tradition of trashing women and take a fresh look at the woman at the well. Yes, she had five husbands, and was living with a man. Well, from my perspective, if I had been married five times I think I would have taken a break. The text doesn't tell us anything about her five husbands - maybe they were jerks. Maybe they physically or mentally abused her, maybe they simply ignored her. Maybe, and I think more likely, her five husbands were brothers who simply passed her down after the death of the first one, this was not uncommon in those days. It didn't take much for a man to divorce a woman in those days. A man just had to say, "I divorce you" and that was pretty much it. There were no divorce courts, alimony, child support or pre-nuptial agreements.
I see this woman as smart, and brave, a heroine, not a slut. She gets in a dialog with Jesus and she can carry her own weight. Where Nicodemus seemed confused by Jesus' talk of being born again, or from above, this woman follows Jesus in his conversation about living water. She also sees the possibility of Jesus being the promised Messiah. She doesn't hesitate in doing what Jesus tells her to do at the end of the text, she goes back into the village and tells people what she has seen and heard.
In this story Jesus does not condemn the woman for her past, he accepts her as she is. He doesn't require her to express faith, repent sin, or any other act, other than to go and tell. This story works well in the recovery community where people are accepted for who they are today, not what they were yesterday.
For a contemporary view of this story check out this link on You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q49BbfgJbto
Vikings are coming on…..see you next week.
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