Not deep enough!
Samaritans were distant cousins to the Jews, traceable to the Israelites (peasants?) who remained in Palestine around 587 BC when the elite Jewish priests, aristocrats, scholars and bourgeoisie of Judea were carried off to Babylon. The physical distance then between these exiled Jews and their fellow tribesmen who remained behind led to changes in attitude toward each other. Those left behind succumbed to the pagan influences of their invaders, while the Jews who went off into exile (under pressure to strengthen their identity in a foreign environment) gave birth to the more durable Judaism we know today. So when these exiled Jews were later allowed to return to Palestine, rivalry broke out between them and the local hybrid Jews (now called Samaritans) and continued right down to the time of Jesus so that the Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel can say to Jesus, “How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Samaritan . . . for a drink?”
Jesus and the Samaritan woman meet at a cistern, that arid region’s way of capturing rainwater to drink. Right away the Gospel sees here an opportunity to lift the dialogue between Jesus and the Samaritan woman to a highly symbolic level – to allow the cistern to symbolize how stagnant, shallow Samaria’s hybrid religion had become due to pagan contamination. She doesn’t catch on. For when Jesus offers to quench her own thirst, offering her the living, flowing water of his Gospel, she remains stuck at a literal rather than symbolic understanding of his offer: “Sir, you do not even have a bucket and this cistern is deep . . .” To which Jesus, still trying to stimulate her imagination, to guide her to a deeper level of conversation, says: “It’s not deep enough – since you have reduced your once profound tradition to something sectarian, nationalist, exclusive, a tempest in a teapot, de-energized it by your parochialism. Everyone who drinks from this cistern, who imbibes this tradition gone stale, stagnant, wearisome, worrisome, so familiar as to be bereft of all relevance to daily living, will be thirsty again – whoever drinks the water I give, who takes up my Way of seeing and behaving, my version and vision of the World – it shall become a fountain within her, making her fully alive.
We are that woman; this Sunday Jesus is in conversation with you and me, each of us Samaritans, trapped in the routine of lowering a bucket into stale water day after day, bored, parochial, incapable of the poetic vision that runs through the Bible and even great literature and great music. And we thirst, nor do we feel capable of quenching other people’s thirst. Until Jesus, as in this episode, asks us for a drink and in doing so awakens us to how parched we are – and awakens us to the fact that we ourselves can become each a wellspring – overflowing with love and life.
Postscript: There is evidence that even while the Jerusalem Temple leadership tried to suppress the Gospel after the death of Jesus, the deacon Philip had great success with the people of Samaria of whom it is said in the Acts of the Apostles 8:8: There was great joy in that city. And let’s not forget that Jesus chose a Samaritan (the good one) to illustrate what it means to be deeply Christian in the generous, gracious manner of Christ himself.