Introduction: Our reading today is so completely rich with meaning that I am going to go through it verse by verse. I hope in this way to open the text that it might address us where we are, for Christ always comes to us no matter where we are.
Prayer: Lord God, we come thirsty. We live in a land that is overflowing with blessings and yet we are hungry. We thirst for Your living waters and we hunger for Your bread of life. Fill us with Your Word that we might be filled with Your light and life. Amen.
John 4:5-30, 39-41
So Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by His journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
We can forget that Jesus was fully human, but this text reminds us. He was tired. He was probably also warm. It was noon, midday, and He was resting. In the middle of the day, the well would have been deserted. Women came for water in the cool of the morning and in preparation for cooking and cleaning in the late afternoon. No one came in the middle of the day unless they wanted to avoid everyone else.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”
The Samaritan woman was surely an outcast. She must have been shunned and either forced to draw water in the midday heat or chose to draw water when no one else would be there. The other thing that is interesting is that Jesus addresses her directly. In this time, men seldom addressed women in public.
(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)
Jesus has sent the disciples on. It is as if He has planned for this encounter and doesn’t want to miss the opportunity to talk to this woman. Had His disciples been there, a private conversation could not have happened. (A point to remember: Jesus always goes ahead of us. We never go into any situation alone. When we come to the well, thirsty, Jesus is already there, waiting for us.)
The Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)
Jesus has broken down two barriers. First, he spoke to her, a woman. Second, he cuts through prejudice. When the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom of Israel, they carried the Jewish leadership off to exile in Babylon and resettled the land with Assyrians who married Jewish people left behind. The result was that the Hebrew people hated the Samaritans, considering them “half-breeds.” The Jewish peoples followed more strictly the rituals of the Jewish faith, including the requirements to worship at the Temple. The Samaritans considered the mountain of Shechum as the holy place for worship. Since Jews had to obey certain ritual prescriptions that Samaritan did not observe, so they could not share the same eating and drinking vessels. For a faithful Jew, drinking from a cup that was used by a Samaritan would have been like drinking from a cup that was used by an animal like a dog. The tension between the Jews and the Samaritans was ugly, even though they shared ancestry.
Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
Jesus is revealing who He is, but what does He mean by “living water?” It is the opposite of “dead water,” which is everything that pulls us away from life with Christ. It is our routines that place us in front of the television set for hours at a time. It is the same old arguments that we get into every day. Dead water is our addictions whether to food, alcohol, nicotine, solitaire, or destructive relationships. Dead water is whatever draws the life out of us.
The woman said to Him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”
Jesus is greater than Jacob, which the Samaritan woman is beginning to suspect.
Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Now the woman wants this water, but she understandings “living water” in only one sense. Like Nicodemus, she gets stuck in a literal interpretation of Jesus’ words. Sometimes we are that way, too. We want God to give us that Cadillac, or what ever else we want. She wants to be saved the hassle of having to come draw water. We, too, would like to be saved from the hassles we face.
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered Him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”
The woman has no husband. The Reverend Samuel Candler puts is this way:
She has used up husbands the way each of us uses up unsatisfactory water. We keep trying all these ways to cure our souls. We try this self-help book. We try that therapist. We try this drug. We try that drink. We try this husband. We try that wife. But, ultimately, we have no husband. Jesus knows that we have no husband. Jesus knows that our searching has been fruitless. Our well is dry. [The Very Rev. Samuel G. Candler, “Honey, You Better Believe Hs Is the Messiah!” John 4:3-42, February 24, 2008, Day 1 Ministries]
The woman said to Him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.
It will no longer matter where your ancestor worshiped God. In Christ, true worship is no longer bound to a particular location. Jesus takes His place as a Jew over against the Samaritans—but then declares that what He represents transcends both.
When Jesus says “God is spirit,” he is not defining God; He is describing a sense of worship. Those who worship God must worship in the spirit and truth. If you want to worship God, you must be willing to enter the realm of the Spirit, the Spirit that God sends through Jesus. And, if you want to worship God, you must be willing to enter the realm of truth.
Truth is willing to acknowledge that everyone gets thirsty. No matter whether you are Jew or Samaritan, or Gentile, Greek, or American, or Yankee or Southerner. No matter whether you are a man or a woman, everyone gets thirsty. That is the truth. [Ibid.]
The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When He comes, He will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am He, the one who is speaking to you.”
The woman is taking another tack. As she says, “The Messiah is on the way. Let’s let Him figure this out and tell us what to do. In response, Jesus says, “I am He.” This is the first of the “I am” statements found in the Gospel of John.
“I am” is the phrase that Moses heard from the burning bush. “I am the living water. I am the Spirit. I am the Truth, the way, and the life.” Jesus speaks to us.
We will hear Him if our ears are open to hear. He is in this moment. No matter where we are, when we hear spirit and truth, we hear Jesus. [Ibid.]
Just then His disciples came. They were astonished that He was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.
The disapproval of the disciples is strong enough to break up the conversation, but not strong enough to make the woman forget who she just met. (I think it is interesting that she left her water jar at the well. I have a friend who always leaves something when she visits. After her last visit, we found her bright red coat in the closet. She told me that she leaves things behind because then she always has a reason to return.) The woman does return, but not alone.
She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can He?” They left the city and were on their way to Him…
Something amazing has happened. Before her conversation with Jesus, she was an outcast. She was shunned, but after her conversation she is different. She is transformed. Suddenly, people are willing to follow her, to believe her, to trust her enough to come see the One she is talking about. Here’s what the text says:
Many Samaritans from that city believed in Him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to Him, they asked Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. And many believed because of His word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
This is the end of the story, or is it just the beginning? I think it is the beginning of our own stories. Everyone gets thirsty and everyone has sinned. We need the living water of Jesus to cleanse us and set us free to worship in spirit and truth.
We are like that Samaritan woman. I can’t stand before you and pretend that I’ve not sinned. I don’t know about you, but I suspect you’ve sinned, too. We’ve all sinned and with each small unrepented sin, we die a little. But notice how Jesus accepts this woman who has been rejected by everyone else. He doesn’t pretend that she hasn’t sinned. He shows her that he knows all about her sins. And yet, he shares the living water with her; He cleanses her with it. He will cleanse us, too. All we have to do is ask.
In my life there have been moments of complete despair – when I ended my first marriage, when I had to hospitalize my daughter Deborah, when everything went wrong my first year in seminary. At each of those moments, Christ reached out to me and comforted me by sending Christians friends who loved me through it all.
That is the last thing I want to say. Not only do we receive God’s living water, we have the honor of sharing the living water. In our calling to follow Jesus each of us is given the responsibility of acting as Christ to others. A few minutes ago we ordained and installed officers of Geneva. We clearly stated that they are expected to be a part of Jesus’ ministry here and beyond. I hope that they will hear Jesus’ call to them in this story to be of the spirit and the truth.
Here is the most stunning truth: it’s not just the officers, everyone here is called to reach out to the outcast, the hopeless, the lost. Jesus wouldn’t let the barriers stand and He won’t let us erect barriers either. He calls us to share the living water.
