In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed!
John 4.5 – 42
At that time, Jesus came to a city of Samaria, called Sychar, near the field that Jacob gave to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and so Jesus, wearied as he was with his journey, sat down beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food. The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans. Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw with, and the well is deep; where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well, and drank from it himself, and his sons, and his cattle?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw.” Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and he whom you now have is not your husband; this you said truly.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain; and you say that Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for such the Father seeks to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that the Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ); when he comes, he will show us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” Just then his disciples came. They marvelled that he was talking with a woman, but none said, “What do you wish?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar, and went away into the city and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the city and were coming to him. Meanwhile the disciples besought him, saying “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him food?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work. Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see how the fields are already white for harvest. He who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labour; others have laboured, and you have entered into their labour.” Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony. “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard ourselves, and we know that this is indeed Christ the Savior of the world.”
Our Gospel reading today presents us with the story of the Samaritan Woman whom our Lord meets by the well near the town of Sychar in Samaria. And it is interesting indeed how her understanding of Who Jesus is develops over the course of their conversation. When they begin talking the Fathers tell us that she considers Him to be some kind of a lax Jew. Why? Because it is obvious to her from the start that He is a Jew from His dress and speech; and yet He speaks to her, a Samaritan woman, something that no proper Jew would do. More, He asks to give Him water to drink. As He has no vessel Himself, this means that He would have to drink from her water jar, something unheard of for a Jew.
So, not surprisingly she concludes He is someone Who doesn’t take the faith of His people very seriously. But then He begins to speak with her about the living water He offers and her opinion clearly begins to change. Then He miraculously tells her about her own past, how she had been married to five different men before and is now living with another man who is not her husband, living in what the Fathers describe as an ‘irregular’ relationship, and what we might call ‘living in sin’, to use an old-fashioned term.
This convinces her that this is no ordinary man, that He is a prophet at least; and this prepares her to accept that He is even more than this, so that when He tells her that He is the promised Messiah, she believes Him at once. And she rushes back to the city to tell others about Him, so eager to do so that she even forgets to take her water jar with her, leaving it by the well.
Let us return to what Jesus told her about herself, for, as she put it herself, He told her all that she ever did. Because it tells us a lot about what is going on in this woman’s life.
To begin with, it should strike us as odd that she is there at the sixth hour. This is noon, the hottest time of the day. This is not the time when women would go to the well in the ancient world. They went in the morning and the evening, when it was cooler. And they did not go alone, as this woman did. They went in groups, they went to meet the other women of the village, town, or city. It was a time to socialise, to talk and spend time with the other women, to share their stories and catch up on the local news and gossip.
So why is this woman there alone, in the full heat of the sun? Why has she chosen to be there at this time? It is because, as Jesus said, she has already had five husbands and is now living in sin with another. She is a woman who lives outside the social norms, a woman who goes through husbands, a woman who may well be looking for another, a woman who may well not care if her next husband already has a wife currently. As a result, she is not a woman that other women to spend time with, something she knows only too well.
We learn many important things from the story of this women. To consider three: first, people may come to faith gradually. In this case, it is over the course of a single conversation, which may seem quick – but that is a conversation with Christ Himself. And we must remember that this woman was a Samaritan and already a woman of faith. The Jews, to put it in Christian terms, regarded Samaritans as heretics and despised them for it; but nonetheless they had a great many beliefs in common, including the fact that God would one day send a Messiah. It is also noteworthy that even though she was a Samaritan, once the evidence was set before her, she accepted immediately that Jesus was the Messiah; whereas a great many Jews rejected Him, despite having far more evidence set before their eyes.
That she believes on the basis of evidence is also noteworthy. There are those who claim that those who have faith believe blindly, with no proof for what they believe, or any rational basis for their beliefs. Not so. We need only look at the world around us to understand that God exists; and we need only look to the evidence presented to us by the faithful witness of Holy Scripture and Sacred Tradition to know that our Orthodox faith is true. And it is part of our Christian duty to know why it is that we believe and be prepared to explain it to others. For as St Peter tells us in the third chapter of his first letter, we must always be ready to give a reasoned account of our faith to others.
The final point I wish to make is that we have in this woman an example of the fact that is possible for a person who was a great sinner to repent and become a great saint. For while we do not know the name of this woman while she was a Samaritan, the Fathers tells us that after the Resurrection she was baptised by the Apostles, and was given the name Photini, which means enlightened one. She went on to bring so many people to the faith that she was honoured as being equal to the apostles. So zealous was she in bringing others to Christ that she ended up being brought before the Emperor Nero, that great enemy of the faith, who had her tortured savagely; and when she would not deny Christ he had her martyred.
This should remind us that no matter how steeped we are in sin, it is never too late to repent. It is all too tempting to despair, remembering all the evils you have done in your life, and think the sins are too many, that they cannot possibly be forgiven. But that is the demons whispering in your ear. The path to repentance begins where you are, not where you would like it to be, and not where others tell you it should have begun. Many of those who ended as saints were deep in the snares of the world, the flesh, and the devil in their lives before repentance; and even if you think you sins are even worse than theirs ever were, the same path to holiness lies open before you, just as it did for them, just as it did for St Photini. I pray that you will take it.
Christ is risen! He is risen, indeed! Amen.
