Third Sunday in Lent A; 03.08.26; Dr. Matthew (Matteo) Carter, Seminary Intern
Updated: Jul 30
The American composer John Cage, who died in 1992, wrote a piece for organ entitled “As Slow As Possible”. The score is only eight pages long, but the music is so slow that most performances take between 40 and 70 minutes. There’s a church in central Germany, however, that has gone even further. The performance on that church’s organ began on September 5, 2001 in silence. The first notes were heard February 5, 2003, and the music has been going, more slowly than we can really imagine, ever since. The next note will be played on August 5 of this year. The performance is scheduled to end on September 5, 2640. You heard me right. The piece is meant to last 639 years.
I think of this John Cage piece when I think of Psalm 95, the Venite, which Christians in our tradition have the option of praying every single morning as part of the Daily Office. I like to imagine people singing the same thing all over the world, greeting the dawn; even more, I like to imagine the centuries and millennia during which our ancestors recited and sang the same prayer, celebrating the glory of creation, its heights and depths, all of us united across time in our devotion.
We can go even further, though, because before Psalm 95 became fixed in Christian liturgy, it had and still has a prominent place in Jewish liturgy. For our Jewish brothers and sisters and mxters, this Psalm is the first in a series of psalms intoned by the cantor to welcome in the Sabbath on Friday evenings. From my point of view, as a musician who loves to sing, but also as a Christian married to a Jewish woman, I find it ineffably beautiful that it is in song our two traditions are bound together. Music brings unity, doesn’t it? Even two people who hate each other’s guts can still make beautiful harmonies together. Music is a gift from God in this especially, that it can bring us together, bring joy out of sorrow, when most everything else cannot.
And this same spirit of unity, I think, can help us understand some of what is happening in today’s Gospel, the encounter between Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Two people who, according to taboo and custom, should not even be alone together, much less talking theology together, have a profound encounter that leaves the woman so invigorated, so quenched, so changed, that she leaves her water jar behind to share good news, just like the first disciples dropped their fishing nets.
A lot of the scholarly commentary on the episode shows an ugly preoccupation with the woman’s previous marital history, or rather what scholars imagine it to be. Five husbands! There must be something morally, or even physically, deficient with her! You know who evinces no preoccupation whatsoever with the Samaritan woman’s marital and sexual history? Jesus himself.
There are two ways of reading this episode, not my own, that I want to share with you, one ancient and one very modern, and they both contain important truths. After those, I want to share my own reading of it, remembering a time in my own life when I felt like an outcast.
So: the ancient interpretation. This involves what we may call reading “typologically” or reading “allegorically.” On this interpretation we need to keep our knowledge of Hebrew scripture at the forefront of our minds. And on this interpretation, it is key to notice that Jesus and the Samaritan woman meet at a well, Jacob’s well. What happens at wells in the Old Testament? They are betrothal sites! “Rebekah, Isaac’s future wife, is found at a well; Jacob himself meets Rachel at a well; Moses’s marriage to Zipporah is tied to a well.” On this reading, the woman is a symbol of all Samaria, and Jesus is the loving bridegroom, come to woo and win over one nation after another, guiding all our feet into the paths of peace. You might be skeptical that this serious and life-giving theological dialogue could be figured, even momentarily, as a meet-cute in a romantic comedy! And yet just a few verses before our passage begins, John the Baptist has indeed heralded Jesus as the bridegroom.
Now for a more modern reading, from the theologian Robert Goss, who sees the Samaritan woman as a lesbian woman who has been living in, as we say, “serial monogamy”, outside of the conventions of Jewish marriage certainly, but living in fidelity and integrity. On Goss’s reading, the woman outs herself to Jesus when she says “I have no husband”, and he accepts her without any judgment or moralizing, and in fact honors her revelation with the grand revelation of his own, the disclosure of his divine identity, his “I AM” statement again sending us back to the Hebrew Testament and the god of Moses. This is heartbreakingly beautiful to me as a queer person, the idea that Jesus’ self disclosure is a kind of coming out, and that what we read at the well is two people seeing each other more fully than they have ever been seen before, by anyone. Blessed is she who perceives the Lord!
So, both of those readings, one ancient, one modern, are fully possible from the text as we have it: one of great geographic and missional sweep, one personal and precious. I admire them both; I exclude neither. But especially given the work that we are to do at the annual meeting today, I want to offer a third way of seeing the dynamic in this episode. To me there is a lot to be said for seeing Jesus’ water of life as the drink which can bring an outcast back into community, can welcome an ostracized person into the fold again.
And the detail I latch onto when I think about these things is the detail of the woman drawing water at noon. We can already infer that the woman is poor from the fact that she draws her own water–she has no servants or slaves. But as a matter of practicality, in all times and places, one should draw well water early in the day, before the rising heat makes an already arduous task unbearable. This woman, though, comes to the well at the sixth hour, high noon. And as many have suggested, she does this in order to avoid the aspersions and the ridicule and maybe even the abuse from others who do not approve of who she is, or how she lives her life.
Some of you have noticed that my right arm is paralyzed. That’s why I hold the paten the way that I do at the rail. I suffered a stroke in utero before I was born. My hand and fingers have never worked as yours do. My hand and fingers will never work as yours do. This has been hard to accept at various times in my life, but never harder than when I was in middle school and bullied pretty mercilessly about it. In seventh grade it got so bad that, for a time, even though I had plenty of friends who loved me just as I was, I was so fearful that I would take my lunch and eat alone, on a patch of grass, hoping that a bully named Sam wouldn’t find me. But I remember as clear as yesterday when my friend Trina found me there–this was at Albert Hill Middle, just off Patterson Avenue in Richmond–and shouted at me, “Matthew! Don’t pay that fool any mind. Come sit with me.” Trina was a cool kid, a cheerleader, popular. I didn’t even know she knew I had a bully, much less who he was. Trina’s invitation was more than kind, more than legitimizing, more than welcoming. It was healing. I had never felt less a cripple than I did at that moment. It was reconciling. It called me back.
Today is a day for reflecting on the mission of the church. This church and all church. Perhaps my single best memory from seminary is one I connect to this idea of mission. This was in church history class when we were all assigned to bring in our home parish’s mission statement, and read each one, with feeling, in front of our classmates. There were about 25 of us, so it took a long time, but I heard about the most amazing ministries–feeling the hungry, visiting the incarcerated, sharing of time and treasure, being a force for justice in the world. Inspiring. But every time one of us would finish, Dr Roland would say “beautiful words, but that’s not mission.”
When the last of us had finished, Dr Roland said, “open your BCP to page 855. What do you read there?”
(I’ll give you a second to find page 855):
What is the Mission of the Church?
The mission of the Church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.
That’s it, not food pantries or outreach Sundays or well-thought out letters to the editor against the evils of war. Restore all people to unity with God and each other. What Jesus does here, exactly, with the Samaritan woman.
I’ve been a little mischievous here, I’ve saved for last what I think is the single best thing that can be said about the story of the woman at the well, from the feminist theologian Jaime Clark-Soles. Please ponder her beautiful words with me–I would invite you to close your eyes and just soak them in.
“This woman looks into Jesus’ eyes and she sees that he knows her and loves her and is, in fact, able to deliver on his promise to give life. At that moment she needs water, so he speaks in terms of giving her living water. At the end of John, the disciples need fish, so Jesus provides fish in their nets and cooks them a meal of fish on the beach. The point isn’t that Jesus is in the business of giving us water or fish; Jesus gives us whatever we most need in order to have life, literally and metaphorically. Most of us long to be truly known and loved in all our particularity, all our grime and glory, stunning successes and devastating failures. We want to know that we don’t have to have perfect lives to be perfectly loved. That’s the very way Jesus loves us.”
May it be so. Amen.
