Thomas J Parlette
“The Woman at the Well”
John 4: 5- 42
3/8/26
Perhaps you are familiar with the short poem by Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody.”
“I’m nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there’s a pair of us – don’t tell
They’d banish us, you know.”
“How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog! (1)
Written around 1861, “I’m Nobody” wasn’t published until 1891. Emily Dickinson seems to relish in being a nobody. In fact, she seems to dread the idea of being somebody, to be forced to live a public life. She has no desire to live in that bog.
I don’t know if that was true for this woman at the well we meet today. But I do know, she would have been considered a nobody as well.
In John’s Gospel we have just heard the story of a prominent “somebody” – Nicodemus. He is the polar opposite of this nobody from Samaria.
To start with, Nicodemus has a name – the woman at the well does not. Nicodemus is a man, an educated man, a teacher of Israel. While we have no indication that the Samaritan woman is educated at all beyond household work skills. Nicodemus is a Jew – the woman at the well is a Samaritan. He is a respected moral leader – she has a questionable past. Nicodemus meets Jesus undercover of the night, at midnight, to be precise - while the woman at the well meets Jesus at high noon, in the middle of the day. Nicodemus has a very short encounter with Jesus, while the woman at the well has what seems like a debate. They could not be more different. Perhaps we remember Nicodemus’ story because Jesus’ most famous saying comes out of that conversation – John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” Verse 17 is just as important – “God did not send the son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.”
So after that encounter, Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee. But in the verse immediately preceding our passage for today, we hear that Jesus “HAD to go through Samaria.” He had too. Why?
No self-respecting Jew would be caught dead in Samaria, they were arch enemies, under no circumstances did you go through Samaria – it wasn’t wise, it wasn’t safe. Jews would travel miles out of the way to avoid going through Samaria – kind of like many of us who have to travel east will do anything we can to avoid driving through Chicago.
So, why did Jesus HAVE to go through Samaria? Was there traffic, was there road construction? No, as always in John, there is a theological reason why Jesus had to do this. To demonstrate the truth of what he had just said to Nicodemus – that the Son had come into the world to save the world, meaning everyone in the world, he had to go to the place where the unsaveable, the unloved, the nobodies lived. And that was Samaria. So Jesus takes a detour through Samaria to demonstrate that he had come to save ALL people – even the hated Samaritans.
Back in 1953, former President Harry S. Truman was taking a car trip with his wife, Bess, from Independence Missouri to Washington DC and on to New York City. At that time, the secret service only protected the current President, so it was only Harry and Bess.
They stopped along the way to have some lunch, and a local Democratic Party leader stopped by their table and asked the ex-President if he would be willing to visit his elderly, bed-ridden mother. She had just broken her hip and she had been a life-long republican for all of her 92 years. Truman said sure, and he and Bess detoured two miles out of town to see her.
Truman said, “We had a nice chat. That little detour may not sound like much, but it was the high point of the whole trip.
On that trip, he would have lunch with 44 senators at the Capitol, a lunch in New York with the editor of Life magazine, and visit the United Nations. But the high point, he said, was that visit with a bed-ridden 92 - year old lady. (2)
Sometimes the best things happen on detours.
That was certainly true for Jesus’ detour through Samaria.
In this encounter, Jesus revealed two important things about himself.
First – He is “living water.” He is the water that brings new life. I like the way Eugene Peterson puts it in The Message: “The water I give will be an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life.”
The story has been passed down about a slave who tries to escape Missouri, a slave state, to reach the freedom of Illinois, a free state. Late in the day he arrives at the edge of the Mississippi river – the boundary between the two states. He is unsure of the water that lies before him, so he decides to sleep by the river on a narrow neck of land, still in Missouri, that juts out into the river and undertake the crossing in the morning.
While he sleeps, a storm whips up in the night and the river cuts a new channel, right through the neck of land on which he lay sleeping.
When the slave awoke the next morning, he found himself not in Missouri, but on the other side of the river, in the free state of Illinois. The rushing water had freed him! (3)
Such is the case for this woman at the well – the water Jesus brings frees her and offers new life – an artesian spring within, gushing fountains of endless life.
Just as Jesus brings new life as the living water that refreshes forever, Jesus also reveals that as the Messiah, he crosses all boundaries that seem to divide us – all boundaries that we may erect or sometimes society does that for us. Jesus crosses them all.
Michael Lindvall writes about the time he met an archbishop named Father Chacour, a multi-cultural man who ran a school and college in Israel where Christian, Jewish and Muslim students are invited to study side by side.
One evening, says Lindvall, “we were walking and talking on his rooftop overlooking the hills of Galilee, the very hills Jesus had once walked. He told us that when people in that part of the world first meet, they often ask each other a routine question, “What were you born?”
It’s a big question, and you are expected to answer, ‘I was born a Christian”, or “I was born a Shia… or an Israeli… or a Lebanese.”
Chacour told us that when people ask him this question he always answers the same way. He always says, “I was born a baby.” He said it that night on the rooftop – “I was born… a baby.” He paused a moment and caught our eyes… the he laughed, and laughed and laughed until the tears came.
His point was obvious – there is no “us” and “them” in the love of God. We are all born children of God. (4)
It’s the embodiment of what Paul talks about in Galatians, the words we say during our baptisms – “there is neither Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free – we are all one in union with Christ Jesus.”
The Messiah, the Son of God, comes to us all – not to condemn, criticize and vilify – but to save, redeem and reconcile. For we are all born a baby – the child of God.
Jesus reveals two very important things to this un-named woman at the well in Samaria. First – he is the source of living water, a water that frees us and offers us eternal life. And second – the love of God knows no boundaries, we are all children of God, worthy of redemption, forgiveness and grace.
And that, my friends, is Good News indeed.
May God be praised. Amen.
1. Emily Dickinson, “I’m Nobody” retrieved online 2/26/26
2. Homileticsonline, retrieved 2/26/26
3. Ibid…
4. Michael L. Lindvall, Connections, Year A, Volume 2, Westminster John Knox Press, 2019, p75-76.
