161: Tom Rundel: Where is God When the System Fails You?

Mar 11, 2026

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Follow the Drinking Gourd: A Map Encoded in Song Tom opens with his love of astronomy and the Big Dipper, tracing it to the African American folk song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" — a secret map taught to enslaved people escaping north on the Underground Railroad. The stars, the rivers, and the mysterious guide Peg Leg Joe become an extended metaphor for the kind of liberation the Woman at the Well is seeking.

Setting the Scene: Why Jesus "Had To" Go Through Samaria By the time Jesus heads north in John 4, he's already overturned the temple economy and rattled religious authorities. Tom unpacks why most Jewish travelers avoided Samaria entirely — doubling a three-day journey to seven — and why the text's insistence that Jesus had to go through Samaria signals something theologically deliberate, not logistically necessary.

700 Years of Animosity: The Jew-Samaritan Divide Tom traces the deep historical roots of Jewish-Samaritan hostility — from the fall of the Northern Kingdom in 722 BC, through Assyrian resettlement, the destruction of the Samaritan temple on Mount Gerizim, and the desecration of the Jerusalem temple — showing that Jesus was walking into centuries of compounded grievance and mutual contempt.

A Woman at Noon: Double Exile Jesus arrives at the well at midday and waits. Tom explains that women drew water in the morning — coming at noon meant this woman wasn't welcome at the communal gathering. She's already an outcast within an outcast community: doubly exiled, doubly marginalized.

Rereading the Five Husbands: Levirate Marriage and Courageous Faith Tom challenges the traditional "woman searching for love in all the wrong places" reading entirely. Through the lens of Levirate marriage law — in which a widow was passed to her late husband's brothers to produce an heir — he reframes her story as one of faithfully following every rule and finding the system failed her anyway. Drawing a parallel to Tamar in Genesis, Tom argues she isn't a cautionary tale about sin; she's asking the oldest theological question: Where is God when the system has failed you?

Worship in Spirit and Truth: Dismantling Geographic Holiness When the woman asks about the mountain debate — Gerizim or Jerusalem — Tom argues she isn't deflecting. She's asking whether there's any avenue left for someone barred from all the accepted paths to God. Jesus's answer — that God is worshiped in spirit and truth, not geography — is a revolutionary dismantling of every gatekeeping system organized around sacred buildings and in-group access.

"I AM": The Divine Name Spoken to the Most Marginalized Jesus speaks his most stunning self-disclosure — the divine name I AM from the burning bush — not to Nicodemus, not to the disciples, but to this woman at a well at noon in Samaria. Tom connects this to Moses's commissioning in the wilderness and shows how the same words now send her on an identical mission: go lead an exodus.

Photini: Light-Bearer and Spiritual Mother The Eastern Orthodox Church honors this woman with the name Photini — "light." The town that excluded her now listens to her. She has no son, yet she becomes the spiritual mother of an entire community. Tom closes by returning to the drinking gourd image: we are not the North Star, just the constellation that helps people find it.

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