Last night at Bible study we turned the page to chapter 4 of John’s Gospel, the famed story of the Samaritan woman at the well, who had previously had five husbands and was now apparently intimate with a man who was not her husband. A lot of people have looked at this and supposed that Jesus turned a blind eye to sexual sin. That is hardly the case, but his answer to sexual wrong-doing is not condemnation but spiritual re-direction.

Nonetheless, the story is embedded in John’s Gospel to remind us that Jesus “stepped over the line” on a lot of issues or public propriety. Later he will stop the religious street mob from killing a woman who had been caught in adultery. He will intervene for a man who had been born blind and was supposed by the religious “groupthink” of the day to have either been a terrible sinner or his parents had been, for him to be punished with blindness. Repeatedly Jesus deflects the religious judgment of petty minds and points to a broader, more compassionate answer to human failings.

The sexual issue is not the first line in this story, however, that Jesus steps across. The first is that he even entered into the region of Samaria. In his time, Samaria was not part of the Jewish homeland. Its people accepted the authority of Moses, and the patriarch Jacob’s well was there on the edge of town. But to the Jews, Samaritans were considered half-breeds or outsiders whose bloodlines were far from pure, and whose religious practices were not “orthodox.”

Samaritans had come to accept this prejudice from the Jews, in a way not too different from how African-Americans accept that white Americans harbor a lot of prejudice today.

When Jesus enters Samaria (which he didn’t have to do except that he felt the necessity to go there for the sake of his mission), he stops at old Jacob’s well and he is thirsty. When a woman comes by to draw water, she accepts the prevail prejudices: that this Jewish man should not even be in Samaria, that this stranger would not approach a woman in public, and certainly that he would not ask her for a drink of water.

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.) 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 no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?”

The fact that Jesus has no bucket is significant for two reasons.  One is that he is talking about spirituality welling up from within one’s soul.  But the situation supposes that the woman could draw water and offer it to him to drink, either from the bucket or from a cup or ladle.  Except that “Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.”  The underlying racism of this scene smacks us in the face. It was unthinkable to the Samaritan woman that a Jewish man would want to drink from her bucket or her cup when the two ethnic groups (with a common ancestor) shared nothing in common. The town well was the virtual equivalent of a drinking fountain in our culture.  It was expected and accepted that Jews and Samaritans would not share the same drinking fountain.

So it is not a stretch to see the racial tension in this story.  And it is not difficult to see that Jesus voluntarily steps over the line of common cultural prejudices:  he ignores the fact that men were not to approach women in public, that Jews were never to be involved with Samaritans (or worse, with Gentiles a.k.a. pagans), and especially that they would not share drinking implements. 

With a little prodding and study, Christians can at least “get it” that Jesus breaks down barriers, overlooks or overturns rules, customs, habits, prejudices.  What I do not get, however, is that if Jesus is Lord and he clearly shows that he is no respecter of race or ethnic prejudice, or gender prejudice, how and why can people who claim to follow Jesus (a.k.a. Christians) ever harbor prejudice based on gender or ethnicity (or many other prejudices which we harbor)?

The bottom line is that in all of his teaching—whether with words or by example—Jesus did everything to show his disciples that we must get over our sense of privilege and entitlement.  Until Christians really and fully “get” this, and admit to their own foolish and evil ways in being racist or sexist, etc., they will not get why homophobia is also completely wrong for Christians.  Clearly, there is no way to rationalize away our sense of entitlement or privilege if we follow Jesus, because he will not go there. If we are seeking the path of entitlement or privilege sustained by prejudice, bigotry and hatred, we have taken a different path than the one Jesus is on, and we are no longer his disciples.

—Pastor Dan Hooper