he Woman At The Well

AWIP

In keeping with the examination recently in this column of the true role of the Samaritans in Israel - a defeated and broken people, of whom only a handful are left in our day, along with the ruins of their Temple that was destroyed by the Judeans of that day, Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan carried a sting and dynamic that has been largely sidestepped all these centuries by the "legit" Gospels and their keepers.

The same goes for the story of the Woman At The Well, as I try to search out some more of Jesus' tactics, and hidden messages contained within what on the surface only looks like Jesus' acceptance of a tired old whore, telling her that God loves her anyway. Not that that's bad, or undesirable, but, as ever, Jesus is looking into the depths of this person, quietly urging her to become what she is not - a self-respecting person.

One point of Jesus' address to her is that the woman, like Good Sam, was Samaritan. One can easily imagine a replication of Jesus' listeners being upset in the parable of The "Good" Samaritan. That is, they were upset, even shocked that Jesus would use such an example to try to get them thinking about what God's vision (God's domain) might be for them.

Faced with the knowledge that it was a Samaritan who did all those compassionate things for the poor (Judean) guy who got beat up and robbed on the road to Jericho, the Judeans listening to Jesus bristled at the possibility that their God would even have such a thing as a Samaritan in mind, let alone have him endowed with such compassion and generosity as to challenge the listeners to go and do likewise.

There is a 20 th century event in America that parallels the Good Samaritan story, except in the outcome. That is, back in the early 40s, an African-American man in Georgia had discovered how to collect blood for use in transfusions and other emergencies. The welcome given the process was overwhelming, and was used extensively for our wounded soldiers in WWII, as it does today as normal medical routine, in the nation and in the entire world.

The discoverer of the process was driving home late one night, to Atlanta, Georgia, if I remember correctly, and had his auto go off the road and crash into a tree leaving him badly injured. He was discovered later by a State Trooper, who, on seeing that the man was black, didn't pick him up and take him to the hospital just down the road that had the blood transfusion process in being, or call for help. He simply let the man bleed to death.

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Later Biblical interpreters put the label "Good" on the Samaritan story, thereby blocking out at least one deeper meaning of what Jesus was trying to get at - that Samaritans were loved by God just as much as the Judeans.

Thus, by calling forth the Samaritan image again in the case of the Woman At The Well, Jesus bluntly was telling the listeners or observers that their understanding of what God's Vision (Domain) was for everyone was severely limited, and off target, at the expense of those who were in need of compassion of many dimensions, including simple acceptance.

One can imagine the impact on the listeners and observers, let alone the state of mind in the Woman at the Well, who after a lifetime of prostitution and its low state of being in the minds of the upright community, and her only way o/f earning a living, was now being told that God loved her just as much as anyone else, regardless of what she had done with her life.

And that the community should be loving her.

As an aside, this is one of those stories that also illuminates the hypocrisy of the ruling priests in the Temple (mainly, the Sadducees) who were puppets of the ruling Roman Empire , for strictly speaking, any woman (not men) caught in what is loosely labeled "adultery" is subject to being stoned to death by the community.

The Woman At The Well, as with the woman dragged from her bed in another incident were well known to everyone in Jerusalem , including the priests. The point is that both women were not stoned to death as the law insists, which means that the priests were at least selective about the enforcement of the law, a not unknown religious and legal practice to this day.

Connect this story with the prostitute being thrown at Jesus' feet in another episode by which those priests were trying to trap Jesus, and cancel His influence with the lower class, and one can get a feel for the incredible spread of Jesus' influence among those lower class folks. Jesus was actively loving those folks, and they knew it; the Romans ruled solely by fear.

It is that influence that had both the ruling priests and the Romans uptight about Jesus' presence and message.

For that matter, Jesus did and said the same thing with all the lower outcasts of the upright community in His time. The story of Job in the Old Testament figures here: the reader may remember that Job was portrayed as a faithful and upright man, who prospered because he was faithful and upright. In our time, he would be said to be "ethical", a matter lost to far too many of our politicians and TV preachers and TV and other "opinion makers" these days.

But then, the miseries and woes descended on Job, which confused him, because he thought there was a direct relationship between being "good" and prospering in God's eyes. That is, if you behaved yourself, you were rewarded with prosperity and good health. If not, you were struck with miseries and woes.

Confused, Job was asking around his community how come the miseries and woes when it was obvious that he was a good man, and had been for his whole life? His friends, according to the story in the Old Testament, could do no better than suggest that somehow or other Job must be a "secret" sinner in his heart. Therefore, God was punishing him. With friends like that, as an old saying has it, who needs enemies?

The story ends with Job being restored to health, with the reason for God's decision to punish him being God's testing of Job to make sure he would stick to his faithfulness to God. The ending of the story destroys the beginning because it makes God into One who toys with human beings and is capricious and callous about the suffering of God's creations, which is hardly a loving exercise.

Jesus takes the miseries and woes of the people He was addressing, and turns them into two new things: a continual challenge to those who are not into miseries and woes to do something about the state of those so afflicted, and accepting those people back into the mainstreams of the life of the community.

At one point, He notes that "…the poor are always with us." This is generally accepted by the orthodoxers as an escape hatch from being very responsible for the poor; that is, responsible at a distance. That is, no matter what you do, there will always be the poor, so why try? Or if you do try, make sure that you throw them only crusts of bread and other leftovers that fall from your tables. This is known in some quarters as an "off-hand treatment", one of the more biting judgements of history.

As another aside, if that sounds familiar in this day and age, I ask the reader to contemplate the hideous and grotesque treatment of the survivors and the dead of Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast this past Fall.

Washington was blaming the local people for their tragedy after it was revealed that it was Washington which had taken the money earmarked for improving the levees and dikes and put it elsewhere. Of course, this tragedy was also turned into a farce by the conscious ignoring of that situation by the Executive branch of the federal government until said ignorance was turned into shock and disbelief when the nation learned of the government indifference.

Then, busy Executive types, including the President of the United States , were doing cartwheels all over the Gulf Coast area, getting their pictures in the newspapers and TVs of the nation, saying they were doing their best to be compassionate to those poor people. Trying to play catch up, as we used to say.

And those efforts all turned out to be lies of major proportions.

It has lately turned out that the present Republican leadership has made enormous efforts to communicate with their political base nationally about the problem by insisting that the reason the levees collapsed was that Louisiana as a state has been corrupt for over two hundred years. In other words, they could have fixed the levees long ago but chose to steal the moneys for other matters, such as casinos, gambling boats and all that.

But the levees were federal, and in the federal budget. What Bush and company did upon assuming power was take the entire levee budget away from Louisiana , and put it elsewhere in the budget. Thus, the l

So the federals blame the helpless and destroyed for what was their own indifference, not only to possibilities of chaos and disaster, but for over a week for what was actually happening in New Orleans - the floods, deaths, and illnesses, for three issues, let alone any visible hopes of reconstruction, given the ineptness of the federal government's leadership.

As an aside in this discussion, it may come as surprise and shock to the uninformed, but Louisiana State University was founded by…General William T. Sherman, he who wracked the South in the infamous civil war in the 1860s. His effort was to help repair the wreckage of the post-war South, a matter of some irony in view of the indifference and incompetence of the federal government of today toward Louisiana .

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Anyway, the standard at the time of poor old Job was that if you did get into miseries and woes, you were banished from the community in which you lived. You were classed as a sinner, and the community turned its back on those so afflicted.

Woes? Ignorance, diseases, starvation or near starvation, no work, little or no access to medical care, high death rate of children, stunted lives of adults, little decent housing…the list goes on endlessly.

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Thus, the "Good" Samaritan, and the Samaritan Woman At The Well.

May God bless the reader.

Frank A. Halse, Jr.
15 Kimberly Lane
Apt. A2D
Mexico, New York 13114
1-315-963-8401
fhalse@twcny.rr.com