Woman at the Well - First Meditation

Read John 4:3-42. When I learn how to link, I'll hook you up with the NRSV. Until then, I trust you can find the ref.

Jesus meets this woman in a place outside a town called Sychar, which is in Samaria. The disciples probably tried to talk him out of going this way, even though it cut the trip to Galilee in half. They hated Samaritans. They were the offspring of Jewish-Assyrian marriages, and had formed their own hybrid community. (For the still-Jewish followers of Jesus in John's community who were being drummed out by the purists, this story would have special bite.)

Samaria was enemy territory, but it was holy ground. This is where Jacob lived, an ancestor they were horrified to hear the Samaritans claim as theirs, too. You say "Jacob" and a host of stories pop up - favorite sons and rejected daughters, trickery and wrestling with angels. He built his well here, his bones are here, and now the ground is holy. And not ours.

I traveled to Israel last spring. In looking for a tour, I learned to avoid the ones advertised with the words "Holy Land". It usually meant Pastor Bob's Walk in the Steps of Our Lord Tour and I was having none of that. When I heard Palestinians use the term, I changed my mind. It stood for the whole, suffering holy land that includes Gaza, Israel, and the West Bank. How is the ground sacred, when more than one people wants it? Mosques were built over churches which were built over temples, layer upon layer, and at which layer do you stop and preserve? Stories of appearances by God are interspersed with historic battles and live threats. Your license plate is marked with a yellow tag if you are Israeli, lime green if you are Palestinian. Yellow could get a rock through your windshield, green could get you stopped by a teenage soldier with a semi-automatic weapon.

Traveling to the Holy Land showed me that I understood little of how hard tolerance is. How holy. It made my liberal ideals seem like the old Coca Cola commercial that showed photogenic young people of various ethnicities taking hands in a meadow and singing "I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing". Here it meant people would be killed if they couldn't learn it. Going into unsafe territory changed me. As it did Jesus and his disciples.