Sunday, March 23, 2014: John 4:5-42

What if we gave up division for Lent? I wish we could let go of those things that divide us. Last year was a signal moment as many commemorated the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I spoke on several occasions about the still necessary hope for racial unity where there is instead a devastating divide and about how so many wish desperately that we could let that division go. I suggested that a package deal would be nice. We could take other divisions that trouble our social and political attempts at unity: regional, gender, sexual orientation, economic, religious, and ideological. Then we’d harvest them into one magnificent, writhing bundle and just let them all go. What a season of Lent it would be!

But we don’t do this. Perhaps we lack the will. Perhaps we lack direction. We need guideposts and leaders to show us the way. The author of the fourth Gospel understands. In his account of Jesus’ ministry he takes care to include an incident that models the bravest of efforts at letting go of a human division that has created deep social barriers.

Jesus is on a journey from Judea to Galilee. Because he has to walk through the ethnic minefield that is Samaria, he might as well be on a trip from the past (the world as it is) into the future (the world as God intends). Jesus has to make this trip. The necessity is not geographical, as Warren Carter points out; it’s theological. “[The necessity] reveals God’s inclusive love for all.” It reveals God’s attempt to lead us away from our drive to divide.