(Another thoughtful sermon from my liberal provocative friend, Harry Cook).

Beyond All That

By Harry T. Cook

John 4: 5-42

When one reads or hears John’s story of the Samaritan woman who encountered Jesus at the well, it is necessary to remember that there was a centuries-long, malevolent animus between Samaritans and Jews.

The Samaritans of the north were thought by the Judeans of the south to have fouled the political bloodline by intermarrying with Assyrian conquerors 700 years before New Testament times, as well as having built their own temple to their version of Yahweh. In short, it was customary for Judeans (or Jews) to hate Samaritans and vice versa.

That is the reason the woman at the well could not comprehend why Jesus would even speak to her (a Samaritan, and a woman, no less), would ask her for a drink, a drink from a Samaritan well and then actually drink it. She even knew that he was supposed to believe that Yahweh could only be worshipped on the temple mount in Jerusalem and certainly not a foreign deity on Mt. Gerizim in Samaria.

What in John’s story-telling imagination she did not know was what John thought Jesus was, i.e., the human embodiment of the source and organizing energy of all life.

The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well seems to have been crafted to make several points:

1) That Jesus was god in human form, proven by the fact that he knew everything (for example, he somehow knew that a woman he had just met for the first time had no husband because she had already had five husbands and the man she was living with was not her husband). That revelation caused her later to exclaim, He told me everything ever I did;

2) That water as a creation of that source-orderer was water wherever it was, and therefore that water from a Samaritan well slaked the thirst as satisfactorily as water from a Jewish well or any well;

3) That a man could converse on an equal basis with a woman, even make a request of her that she was free to withhold, making John’s Jesus a feminist;

4) That being a Samaritan was no less worthy than being a Jew, for one thing because they were both Semites and, in this case, Palestinians — just as people from Michigan are neither more nor less American than people from Mississippi, Montana, Missouri or Minnesota, or, for example, just as Muslims in Pakistan are no less human than Hindus in India;

5) That building temples on any mountain — Jerusalem or Gerizim — or on any plot of land anywhere does not equate with the reverent acknowledgement of any deity. Deities are acknowledged, John’s Jesus is made to say, in spirit (that is, by attitude and disposition) and in truth (that is, in palpable acts and deeds that reveal the nature of the actor’s or doer’s highest loyalty).

Of those five points, only the first is really debatable, that is, John’s assertion that a First Century itinerant street speaker was actually the creative power and genius in human flesh. No one can know anywhere near enough even to begin to settle it, so it’s an issue best left alone. Points Two through Five, however, are vital to take if life on our planet is to be just, peaceful and secure.

If water is water, and soil is soil, and both are governed by laws of nature that obtain everywhere on Earth, then there is no such a thing as Samaritan water or Saudi oil or Iraqi or American soil. They’re Earth’s water, Earth’s soil, Earth’s oil. With that understanding, the organization known The United Nations or an entity like it looms into view as humankind’s best hope.

If human beings everywhere possess the same genome anywhere, then they are finally citizens of Earth, not of China or Poland or Estonia or Nebraska. Of Earth.

If women and men are equal partners in life, then the latter are not permitted in any way to deny the former their place, or their rights or their partnership.

And finally, if there be some greater or higher power beyond the grasp of human senses and reason, it is not possible that such a power can be claimed in any way as favoring Samaritan over Jew, or Jew over Arab, or Catholic over Protestant, or Hindu over Muslim, or Methodist over Mennonite. All those distinctions and the dividing walls they have built crumble before the understanding that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

The story of Jesus and the woman at the well is a call to get beyond all that to a global perspective and an appreciation for diversity of all kinds, accepting that those diversities, while wondrous in their individual expressions, are together a manifestation of one and the same human, earthly reality.

Almost 90 years ago, a man named Clifford Bax looked out on that part of the world ravaged by the First World War and wrote the following text that was later set to a hymn. For all I know, he could have been pondering the points of that same story:

Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways.

Old now is earth, and none may count her days.

Yet thou, her child, whose head is crowned with flame,

still wilt not hear thine inner God proclaim,

“Turn back, O man, forswear thy foolish ways.”

Earth might be fair, and all folk glad and wise.

Age after age their tragic empires rise,

Built while they dream, and in that dreaming weep:

would folk but wake from out their haunted sleep,

Earth might be fair and all folk glad and wise.

Earth shall be fair, and all her people one:

nor till that hour shall God’s whole will be done.

Now, even now, once more from earth to sky,

peals forth in joy man’s old undaunted cry —

“Earth shall be fair, and all her folk be one!”

Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.