I’m getting married today.

Generally if someone told you that, it would conjure up in your mind a picture of a young couple joining their lives together and sailing off into the happy waters of married life, learning its ups and downs together.

But it’s not like that for us.

Neither of us is new to marriage.

My wife to be, Shufrina, has been married five times before: widowed once, and divorced four times.

My marital history is similar.

When we met, we were both unattached – at least in our own minds.  I’ll say more about that later.

Shufrina was 34 years old at the time, and I, 35.  We were both jaded with the idea of marriage.  It just hadn’t worked out for us.  We found each other attractive, but we weren’t going to get tied up with another marriage.  After all, we were both used to the idea that relationships don’t last.  So we decided to live together without the formality of marriage.

In Judea, that could easily have got us stoned, and even here in Samaria it caused many raised eyebrows and meant that many people no longer talk to us.

We didn’t care – or not much, anyway.  We merely dismissed our critics as old-fashioned fuddy-duddies or religious cranks.  We were happy to live our way and let them live theirs.  Why wouldn’t they do the same?

Life continued, and our relationship would probably have lasted another year or two if it hadn’t been for Jesus.

Yes, it was Jesus who changed things for us.

I’d never heard of him until Shufrina came home from the well one day and said that she had met a man who told her everything she had ever done.  Well, that didn’t sound good to me, but she was very impressed by it.

Shufrina told me that she had found a Jew sitting quietly beside the well.  He didn’t look dangerous, so she went to draw water.  Then, just as she began to lower the bucket into the well, he asked her for some water.
“What, a Jew asked you for water?” I interrupted, amazed.

“Yes, he really did, and when I questioned it he said that if I had known who he was, I could have asked him for water.  In fact, a bit later he told me to go and get you too,” she said, laughing her gurgling laugh.

I shook my head and replied, “You’re talking in riddles, Shufrina.  Explain yourself.”

“Well, he basically told me that our religion is a confused mess, whereas the Jews actually know what they are worshipping.”

“He could be right about the first part,” I said.  I’ve never had much time for our religion – it seemed to be more a patchwork of bits of other people’s religions than anything genuine.  But I also knew that I was no judge of what would be good or bad in a religion!  At the same time, I knew that Shufrina was actually quite religious in her own way.

“At first I thought it was just Jewish arrogance, so I guess I started looking for an argument.  I think he could tell, and that was why he told me about myself – just to shock me and slow me down.  You know, trying to get me to listen.”

“What do you mean, ‘told you about yourself’?”

“He told me to go and get my husband.”

“Ouch!  A Jew asking that?  Did you admit the truth about us?”

“Sort of.  At first I said that I had no husband.”

“I suppose you don’t, legally, although surely our relationship is something like marriage?”

“You know that neither of us wanted the restrictions of marriage, just the….”

“Yes, yes, yes,” I interrupted again.  “Well what did he say then?”

“He said that I was telling the truth, and that I had had five husbands and that the man I had now was not my husband.”

“How did he know that?  Had you been talking to anyone before he came?  Had he heard you?”

“No, it wasn’t like that.  There was no-one there when I arrived except him.  He was just some random Jew as far as I was concerned.  I can tell you that it was a bit embarrassing to have it stated out loud that the man I was living with was not my husband.  I was glad there wasn’t anybody else there.”

“Sounds like a typical judgemental Jew to me!  What has it got to do with him?”

“I felt the same way, and that’s why I decided to ask him one of the questions that are always causing fights between Samaritans and Jews: where should we worship?  He told me that there was a time coming when we wouldn’t worship God either here or in Jerusalem, and he went on to say that God was looking for true worshippers.  But he didn’t call him ‘God’ most of the time, he called him ‘the Father’, which intrigued me.”

“You’re way too worried about religion,” I answered.  “Can’t you see that it’s just a way for people to try and control you?”

“I’m sure that you’re right about a lot of religion, but somewhere there has to be a God who created us; humans can’t make that up!”

“I suppose not.  So what did he tell you?”

“He told me a lot about worshipping the Father in spirit and in truth.  He seemed to be suggesting that this worship needs to replace the sort of worship that is based on having a big argument about where we should worship.  I think his point might have been that how we worship is more important than where we worship.  He was saying that God – sorry, ‘the Father’ – wants us to worship him because we understand him, not just for appearance.”

I laughed a bit at that.  “That won’t go down well with either our priests or the Jewish priests,” I said.  “The way they parade around in their fine clothes with their noses in the air makes it pretty clear what their worship is all about.  They like showing off and looking down on people like us.”

“Well, this man wasn’t like that.  After all, he was willing to talk to me.”

“And why shouldn’t he be?” I asked aggressively.  “It’s not as if you’re a prostitute or a murderer!”

“No, and he didn’t comment any further about us not being married, but the fact that he knew it made me feel guilty.  After all, I know the Ten Commandments and other things.  Remember: ‘You shall not commit…’ ”

Yet again, I interrupted.  You see, I wasn’t completely comfortable with our situation either, despite the fact that we had both gone through – many times – all of the logical reasons why it wouldn’t make sense to get married when we had each had so many failed relationships.  “What else did he say?” I asked.

“Well, after he’d talked briefly about the time coming when we would all worship in spirit and in truth, I wanted to show that I knew something – and I suppose I wanted to keep him quiet too – so I said that when the Messiah came, he would explain everything to us.  And then he said that he was the Messiah.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, in some relief.  “Everyone knows that the Messiah will be a king, not a strange Jew who talks to silly Samaritan women.”

“Silly?”  Fire flashed in Shufrina’s eyes, and I grabbed her wrists quickly before she could try to slap me.  Her third husband had divorced her because she slapped him once too often.  I always made sure that I didn’t give her a chance.

“Yes, ‘silly’,” I said, laughing.  “What else could you call someone who says she wants to be religious and then tries to slap her husband all the time?”

“But you’re not my husband.”

“Ah, we’re back to that again.”

“Yes.  We should get married.”

I was surprised.  “Why?” I asked.

“Because living together when we aren’t married is wrong.  It’s sin.”

“Whoa.  Since when have you talked about sin?”

“The fact that I don’t talk about it doesn’t mean that I don’t think about it.  After all, you don’t talk about it either, but you know that us living together like this is wrong.”

“Do I?”

“Yes.  You do.”  She put her hands on her hips and looked at me challengingly.  “Don’t you?”

I pursed my lips and stood for a moment, staring at her.  “I have been a bit concerned at times,” I admitted at last.  “You see, I met my first wife last week.  She’s married again, of course, but now she’s having problems with her new husband, so she was sounding me out about things.  Life as we live it is just a mess.  It can’t be right.”

I let go of her wrists.

“Do you want to go back to her?”  Shufrina didn’t look happy.

“No.  That would be wrong too.  A woman can’t go back to her previous husband after marrying another man.  That’s one of Moses’ laws that I do know.”

“So what should you do?  What should I do?  What should we do?”

“I don’t know, Shufrina,” I replied, shaking my head.  “I need to think.  Maybe I need to stop avoiding religion and start looking for answers through it.  And maybe this Jew of yours is where I should start looking.”

Shufrina gave me a big smile and held out her hand.  “Come,” she said, and led me out of the door.

We spent the rest of that day listening to Jesus.  He’s an amazing man.  He’s not afraid to say what is right and what is wrong, but he also doesn’t condemn people who are willing to change, however thoroughly they may have messed up their lives before they met him.  Instead, he offers hope – as long as we follow through with the necessary change.  His message to anyone who would listen that day was that the kingdom of God is near and so we need to repent now.  He was very urgent about it, and very convincing too.

There were so many people wanting to listen to him that it was hard to justify trying to get any private time with him, but Shufrina and I were eager to ask him about marriage and so on, since he had brought up the subject with her in the first place.  He still didn’t condemn us, but he did tell us that divorce wasn’t intended in the beginning, at creation,[1] and that it was permitted now only because of our stubbornness.  I had to admit to myself that my previous relationships probably would not have broken down if I had been humble instead of stubborn.  He reminded us of God’s laws about marriage and faithfulness, and we were both utterly convinced that we needed to do something to repent; change.  But what?  When you have messed up one marriage after another, is any real solution possible?

We only had a short time with Jesus, and didn’t really get any clear direction as to what we should do, apart from that guiding principle: “repent”.  When we left him we went home together, still unsure what to do in the long term.  One thing I was sure of, though, was that we couldn’t keep living together when we weren’t married, so as we reached home, I opened the door for her and explained that I would go to my father’s house and see whether he had anywhere for me to stay.

Over the next few days we discussed the matter and wrestled with our consciences, unable to find any easy solution to our problems.  We had lived as though married; should we just separate?  We were both terribly sorry for what we had done.

Our previous broken marriages we could not fix, as our partners were married to others now anyway.

What was the best way forward?

Finally we decided that the best solution was to marry and continue our relationship as best we could.

Would Jesus be happy with our conclusions?

We don’t know.  All we can do is change our ways and hope for forgiveness from God.

So now today is our wedding day, and we plan to live quite a different married life from anything either of us has known before.  I do love Shufrina, and we’re both working hard on keeping our stubbornness under control.

Life would have been so much easier if we hadn’t made all of these bad choices in the first place.

 

 

 

[1] Matthew 19:3-9