John 4:4-42
Main point: Jesus brings a new age in the way people relate to God: he gives us living water and spiritual renewal that transcends place and race so that all the true worshippers may worship in spirit and in truth.
Unexpected Conversations
When I inherited my classroom at school, there was a movie poster on one of the walls for some Disney movie with Denzel Washington called “Remember the Titans”. I thought, well maybe I should watch it to see what it’s all about if my predecessor thought it deserved a place on the wall. I thought it would just be another of those corny American football movies where some pack of incompetent idiots who can hardly walk let alone play sport are miraculously turned into world beaters because their coach gives a nice pep-talk or two – but it actually had a bit more depth to it than that. It’s a film that’s mainly about race and prejudice and the bridging of those divides. The premise is that the high school football teams in this particular American town in the sixties have always been divided on racial lines. There’s no racial mixing. So when it’s decided that they should be joined together, many people have a problem with that. But one scene I especially remember is when this great big fat guy with blonde hair (no, it wasn’t me) walks into this training session. The blacks are standing their talking to the coach and the white players have so far refused to turn up. In he strolls (lumbers would probably be a better word) and with this pretty goofy grin on his face, he walks over to the group of black players and casually announces, “I want to play football.” All the black players are stunned. The white guys then just walk in and are just as stunned to see one of their own in with the black kids. That’s just not the way these thing work, it goes against common sense and ingrained social expectations.
Well, that’s what Jesus does here. He’s walking through Samaria – an usual thing for Jews in itself – and he comes to a town called Sychar and rests in the middle of the day at Jacob’s well. As you’d expected, he’s tired and thirsty from his long journey. But the thing he does next is like the fat white bloke slumming it with the black footy players – worse actually. He strikes up a conversation with a lone Samaritan woman by asking her for a drink. The well is deep, and he doesn’t have anything to draw water out with, so on the surface it seems a fairly normal thing to do. But, as vs. 9 tells us, Jews do not associate with Samaritans. Moreover, Jewish men do not strike up conversations with lone women, either. Look at vs. 27 – Jesus disciples come along and are surprised not by the fact that Jesus is talking to a Samaritan, but that he’s talking with a woman. In this conversation, Jesus is already down on two counts, and the Samaritan woman knows it, that’s why she says “how can you ask me for a drink?”
Unexpected Answers
The answer Jesus gives doesn’t seem to be to the questions she’s put to him. It’s like his conversation with Nicodemus from last week, and there’s a lot of comparisons that we can make with that. Both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman come in with a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings of who Jesus really is. And, as we’ll see, the ways in which Jesus answers them have a lot in common as well.
But the woman asks in vs. 9, “how can you ask me for a drink” and Jesus answers her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
Clearly, the woman at this stage has no idea who it is she is talking to, for she replies by asking how he could possibly get any water because he hasn’t even got a bucket to get it out with. Where is this strange Jewish man going to get this living water from? Is he even greater than the patriarch Jacob who built the well?
Well, Jesus responds by saying that, yes, I am greater than Jacob. “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again”, he says. “But whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst.” Jesus gives water that will last forever. It will well up inside of us to eternal life. What is this water, though?
We could spend ages thinking through exactly what in the realm of Christian theology this living water could represent, but it’s far simpler just to skip a few pages ahead and look to John 7:37-39: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him. By this he meant the Spirit whom those who believed in him were later to receive.” The living water is the Holy Spirit whom God pours on those who believe. If we have this living water we will no longer thirst for relationship with God because God will be indwelling us, he will be inside us, our bodies will be his temple. And think also of Ephesians 1:14-15. This points out that the Spirit is the seal guaranteeing us our place in heaven, guaranteeing our inheritance. So when the Spirit of God is there inside of us changing us and remaking us and writing the law of God on our hearts, it’s also there guaranteeing our inheritance in heaven, it’s there welling up to eternal life.
That’s Jesus answer to the Samaritan woman. I can give you this living water, the Spirit of God, which will grant you eternal life.
Hardly surprisingly, the woman doesn’t really understand what he’s talking about. She’s still stuck with her physical understanding of water. She wants this living water, but only so she won’t have to keep coming back to the well and carrying bucketloads of the stuff back to her place. She’s looking all around her for the water, but she still can’t quite find it, even though it’s looking her right in the face. It’s like the ship in the Atlantic just at the northern part of South America many years ago that was in distress because it’s supply of fresh water had run out. Some crew members had already died from dehydration. When hope was almost gone they sighted another ship and hoisted the distress signals, but the only response they got was to tell them to throw a bucket over and bring up some of the water. They thought they were being mocked – being told to drink salt water. Finally, in despair, they lowered a bucket and were amazed to find that it was fresh water. They didn’t know it, but they were at the mouth of the mighty Amazon river, whose fresh water flows far out to the sea. They had had the water that they desired all around them, but they didn’t recognise it! And still the Samaritan woman doesn’t recognise Jesus, the font of living water.
It’s the next thing that Jesus says to her that cuts her right to the bone, however. “Go, call your husband, and come back” to which she replies, “I have no husband”. But then Jesus gets personal: “you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you have now is not your husband. What you have said is quite true.” I’m sure it’s not only me that hears a quite biting sarcasm in this response from Jesus. It’s clear that he strongly disapproves of this lifestyle the woman is leading. We don’t know why she left five husbands behind – maybe they died, maybe she was unfaithful, maybe they just got fed up with the way she whinged when she had to get some water from the well, we don’t know – but the fact is, she is now with a man who is not her husband.
She realises that this man in front of her can see to her very heart. I’m not sure about you, but this knowledge that God knows all our secrets is a very scary thing. I think there are things about all of us that we desperately don’t want other people to know. We’re too ashamed. We’re too afraid of what they’ll think about us if they know. Dick Lucas, a much-revered English preacher was once delivering a sermon in Melbourne and he began by telling the congregation, “If you knew my heart, you would not listen to me” and that’s the way I feel when I get up to speak to you. I bet Owen and Jason and Neil and Ian feel that way sometimes too. What would they think of me if they knew the way I looked at that woman yesterday? If they knew the way I sometimes treat those closest to me, they wouldn’t listen to me. If they knew the temptations that I face and sometimes give in to, they wouldn’t want to know me. Jesus knew about this woman’s adultery and promiscuity. He knows of the secret sins we struggle with, too. He knows when we’re at work with non-Christians and we gossip and slander like the rest of them. He knows when we’re alone in front of the computer looking up those internet sites that we know we shouldn’t but it’s just too tempting and nobody will find out….But it’s like they’re on a big screen before God. We all have secrets we hide. Secret thoughts, secret deeds, secrets we’re ashamed of. Secrets we’d hate if other people knew. But however good we are at hiding, our hearts are laid bare before God.
And yet God still accepts us. The amazing thing is, God still accepts us. He knows all this about the woman but he still says to her, come to me and I will give you living water. It’s not that it doesn’t matter, but it’s no barrier to her coming to Jesus and saying, give me this living water and wash me clean. Give me this living water and let it well up in me to eternal life.
Unexpected Worship
After this, the woman acknowledges that Jesus is a prophet. But she is still caught up in the fact that she is a Samaritan and Jesus is a Jew. The Samaritans said that you must worship on Mount Gerizim in Samaria, but Jews said it had to be in Jerusalem. But Jesus says, there’s something better coming. A time when you won’t need to be in a particular place to worship God. You won’t need to be of a particular race to worship God. The Samaritans, he says, worship what they do not know. They restricted themselves to the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, so they didn’t fully know the God whom they worshipped. Salvation is from the Jews – simply because Jesus is a Jew. But a time is coming and has now come when that won’t matter. Jesus was making that statement when he came and spoke to this Samaritan woman and asked her for a drink. Just like when the fat football player went over among the black guys and said, “I want to play football”, he was saying, race doesn’t matter. But here Jesus is saying it crystal clear – it no longer matters that I am a Jew and you are a Samaritan. Because now the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. God will not dwell in a temple or on a mountain, but he will live in the hearts of those who truly believe because to them will be given living water, to them will be given the Spirit of God.
Jesus was saying exactly the same thing to Nicodemus when he told him that he must be born again of water and the Spirit. God is not restricted by physical geography. He is Spirit, and hence must be worshipped in spirit and in truth.
Owen referred us last week to Ezekiel 36, and it’s appropriate that we return there. EZE 36:24 " `For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. 25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. 27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.
That’s this new worship that Jesus is referring to. Where the true worshippers worship the LORD in their hearts and by his Spirit.
Unexpected Person
In the mind of the Samaritan woman, one questions remains, though. Who is going to do all this? Who is going to make all this happen and explain it all? It will be the Messiah, called Christ, she says. She knows he is coming, and she’s confident that he will explain all this to her.
I know a woman whose daughter went to an expensive private school. She wasn’t too happy with the school because she felt that it wasn’t catering to her daughter’s education needs – or something like that. She caught the train into the school one day to have meeting. She sat next to someone going to work and struck up a conversation. She told her why she was on the train that morning, and gave the other woman the whole spiel about how the school wasn’t doing it’s job and even made some personal comments about the deputy principal. When she had finished her rant, she asked the woman, “so what do you do?” and the woman answered, “I’m the deputy principal at your daughter’s school”.
The Samaritan woman is in a situation a bit like that, because in the whole conversation so far, she hasn’t known who she’s really talking to. At first, she thought he was just a Jewish man. Then she realized there was something more to him – maybe he was a prophet. And in vs. 25, she says that she knows that the Messiah is coming. Then in vs. 26, Jesus comes out with another of his “blow-you-away” lines: “I who speak to you am he.” He’s told her before in vs. 10, but she missed it and so he tells her again: I am the one who can give you living water. I am the one who will bring in this new worship, I am the one who will grant the Spirit of God to those who truly believe. Or, as the Samaritans themselves acknowledge in vs. 42, “I really am the Saviour of the World.”
Unexpected Harvest
After hearing this, the woman goes and tells her people about this man who knew everything she ever did and who had claimed to be the Christ. The disciples want him to sit down and eat something, but he tells them that spreading the word of God is more important than earthly food. Whether they were telling people the good news – sowing the seed - or being there to welcome people into the kingdom – those who reap – the sowers and the reapers can be glad together because people are coming to know Christ. Jesus knows the gospel has gone out to the Samaritans that day. He knows they are ripe for the harvest. No doubt, the disciples weren’t expecting this: these people were Samaritans, after all! But vss. 39-42 demonstrate the truth of Jesus claims about a new way of worshipping that is not caught up in place or race, but which is in spirit and truth. Many Samaritans believed because of the woman’s testimony - in one sense, she’s done the hard work spoken of in vs. 38 - and even more come to know Jesus because of the words of the Christ himself. “We no longer believe just because of what you said,” they told the woman, “now we have heard for ourselves and we know that this man really is the Saviour of the world.” They were transformed by the word of God.
Well, how is that you respond to God? Do we recognize when he speaks to us? Do we appreciate that he knows our hearts, that we can’t hide things from him? Do we really know that true worshippers have changed hearts and worship God not just by saying a creed in church or by reciting the Lord’s Prayer everyday but by being true believers whose hearts are focused on the Christ? Jesus brings a new age in the way people relate to God: he gives us living water, the Spirit of God, that will well up in us to eternal life and he gives us a spiritual renewal that transcends place and race so that all the true worshippers may worship in spirit and in truth.
