Jesus Came for the Outcasts, Especially the Outcasts of the Outcasts.

Our Scripture Lesson is John 4: 5-42, Jesus speaking to the Woman at the Well:

 ⁵ So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶ Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

⁷ A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸ (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹ The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) ¹⁰ 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.” ¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” ¹⁵ The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

¹⁶ Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” ¹⁷ The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” ¹⁹ The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰ Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵ The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

²⁷ Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” ²⁸ Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ²⁹ “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” ³⁰ They left the city and were on their way to him.

³¹ Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. ³⁶ The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

³⁹ Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word. ⁴² They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

         While the woman at the well is not named in the Scriptures, in the Eastern Orthodox tradition, her name is Photini (or Photina), meaning ‘the luminous one’.  And Photini is an outcast person amongst an outcast people.  To take the last part first, she is a Samaritan. “Good Jews” don’t mix with people from Samaria. 

          Why are she and her people outcasts?  She says it in the passage, they do not worship at Jerusalem.  That’s a mark of a True Jew.  In the time of Jesus, True Jews lived in two sections of the Promised Land.  They lived in the southern region, what was the tribal land of Judah.  And they lived in the northern end, around the Sea of Tiberius out to the Mediterranean along the Jezreel Valley.  We know this area as Galilee.

          These regions are connected on the east side by the Jordan Valley.  But between them is the Hill Country of Samaria.  These people are ‘Jewish-ish’, but not ‘pure-bloods’.  In the time between the Assyrian Conquest of the Northern Kingdom and the Babylonian Exile of the Southern Kingdom (defining moments in the history of the Old Testament but WAY beyond the scope of this post…BUT well worth further study in the Scripture), other peoples were imported.  Because that is how things operated then, entire populations were uprooted, moved around, and swapped.

          These outsiders stayed and married into the remnant Jewish families in the region of Samaria, only to be subsequently outcast by the ‘pure-blood’ Jews who marked their purity by a few metrics including where God was to be worshipped. 

          Why was Jesus even in the territory of the Outcasts?  The ‘pure’ Jewish leadership was already plotting to kill Jesus.  Makes sense that they were watching the road to the Jordan, watching the route to Galilee in an attempt to intercept Him.  But it was not His time.  So Jesus took ‘the long way’, up through the Hill Country of Samaria, through the land of the Outcasts.

          But even the Outcasts have Outcasts.  We get the first hint of this at the time Jesus met Photini.  Noon.  The heat of the day in a heat-filled climate!  People of good repute came for water at cooler moments, like dawn and dusk.  Outcasts came in the heat of the day, when the odds of meeting others were at their lowest-unless the Lord had a meeting in the works.

          Bad enough that she is an Outcast, but she is a SHE.  Photini is a woman.  At the time of Jesus, in the popular culture, women are second-class at best, exploited property at worst. 

Photini is an Outcast among the Outcasts because she has been married five times and is presently living with a man who is not her husband.  That actually sounds tame by today’s standards, but in the time of Jesus, this was scandal upon scandal.  Enough that she could not mix in polite company for the activities of everyday living, but had to come out at midday to get water.

          Where she meets Jesus.  And her life is changed. 

          It has been argued that her ‘outcast’ status should be made worse by the fact that she lied to the face of Jesus when she said she was not married (without any of the ‘juicy’ bits).  That feels like overkill to me.  Do we really expect her to admit all her sins to the Lord Jesus?  Well, when we put it that way, yes.  But she didn’t know who He was, at least not in the moment.

          But it was precisely her ‘outcast’ status that was Jesus’ way into her life and faith.  He walked her through her life choices that led to this status, but not to condemn her or make fun of her, but to lead her to the truth.  Note, Jesus begins by speaking to her of the living waters, the promise of new life, of salvation.  Then they discuss her life choices, which leads to a discussion of the differences in worship styles between the Jews and Samaritans-not shock nor condemnation over her lifestyle. 

          Jesus meets her respectfully in her place, an Outcast from polite society as well as a Samaritan Outcast from his place, as a Jew, and guides her to know that something bigger is in the works.  Then she makes the leap, admitting that there is a Messiah who is coming who is supposed to share all things with them.  Only then, when she is in the right place, does Jesus share the reality of His own identity as the Messiah.

          And the Outcast is brought in from the cold fringes of polite society.  She is so overwhelmed by the loving truth spoken by Jesus that she ignores her own status as shunned outcast and goes to proclaim His presence to the rest of the Outcasts, her fellow Samaritans. 

          In the meantime, the disciples come back and are taught an important life lesson on the place of Outcasts in their work.  They are people, just like everybody else.

          Then back comes the Outcast with her fellow Outcasts and over the next two days, there is a revival meeting the likes of which had not yet been seen in the ministry of Jesus.

          Because, as they share the truth, Jesus is the Savior of the world and all the Outcasts to be found within it (and WE are all Outcasts as sinners against God).  Thanks to Photini, a living lamp of Jesus unto her own people.

 

Peace

Pastor Pete