John 4:5-42
5 So he came to a Samaritan city
called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph.
6 Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by
the well. It was about noon. 7 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus
said to her, "Give me a drink." 8 (His disciples had gone to the city
to buy food.) 9 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.) 10 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." 11 The woman said to
him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that
living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well,
and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" 13 Jesus said to her,
"Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 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." 15 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." 16 Jesus
said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." 17 The woman
answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are
right in saying, "I have no husband'; 18 for you have had five husbands,
and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!"
19 The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our
ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people
must worship is in Jerusalem." 21 Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe
me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this
mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what
we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 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. 24 God is spirit, and those who
worship him must worship in spirit and truth." 25 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." 26 Jesus said to her, "I
am he, the one who is speaking to you." 27 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?" 28
Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the
people, 29 "Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He
cannot be the Messiah, can he?" 30 They left the city and were on their
way to him. 31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, "Rabbi, eat
something." 32 But he said to them, "I have food to eat that you do
not know about." 33 So the disciples said to one another, "Surely no
one has brought him something to eat?" 34 Jesus said to them, "My
food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. 35 Do you
not say, "Four months more, then comes the harvest'? But I tell you, look
around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. 36 The reaper is
already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower
and reaper may rejoice together. 37 For here the saying holds true, "One
sows and another reaps.' 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not
labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor." 39
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman's
testimony, "He told me everything I have ever done." 40 So when the
Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there
two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 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 Sunday morning, I want to do a
little mental exercise with you. First, I want you to close your eyes. Go
ahead; I promise there’s no funny business going on. Now, I want you to imagine
a person, but not just any person. I want you to imagine the kind of person you
first think of when I say the word “Christian.” What kind of person do you see?
If I had to guess, I’d say most of you probably see a man (most of you women
might see another woman), and that man is white, probably middle-aged, likely
wearing nice clothes (probably slacks and a button-down shirt), and even though
you can’t necessarily see it, I’d venture a guess that the person you’re
envisioning is likely an English-speaking American.
Now, without opening your eyes, I
want you to imagine a different person. This time, I want you to imagine a
girl—probably in her late teens to early twenties—with dark hair and dark skin.
Her clothes are well-worn (we’d call them rags) and there aren’t likely to be
shoes on her feet. She doesn’t have an email address or a cell phone, can’t
drive a car, probably doesn’t even have a relative who owns a car. She likely
can’t read, and she definitely doesn’t speak English. Chances are she’s the
kind of person whose face you’d only see on the international news, the kind of
person who inhabits those parts of the world south of the Equator. Well guess
what: that girl you’re seeing now, in your mind’s eye, she is what most of the
world sees when they hear the word “Christian.” She represents the majority of
Christians in the twenty-first century, and most of you will likely never meet
anyone like her.[1]
You can open your eyes now.
All of us in this room today are
products of our environment—our twenty-first century, American, Southern,
Evangelical, Christian environment. So it really isn’t all that surprising to
see someone who looks like us when we try to imagine what a typical Christian
looks like. In fact, I’d dare say that most people in this world, throughout
history, when they imagine someone, regardless of the type of person they’re
trying to imagine, they most likely envision someone like themselves. For
example, if a fifteenth century Italian was told to imagine a butcher, that
person would imagine someone very much like himself—a fifteenth century Italian
butcher. Or, let’s say a first century Jew, from the region around the Sea of
Galilee, one who followed Jesus around from the beginning, was asked to picture
another follower of Christ in their mind. I wonder what they would have
imagined. Chances are they would have pictured another man, a Jewish man, with a pretty decent
reputation, maybe even a curious Pharisee on the verge of conversion. Maybe
that first century follower of Jesus would have imagined someone not too unlike
that nighttime visitor we ran into last week—Nicodemus.
Nicodemus would have made a great
candidate for a follower of Jesus, especially given the context of John’s
gospel: he was a man (just like the twelve most notable disciples of Jesus); he
was Jewish (again, just like those first disciples of Jesus); he was educated;
he was a man of influence with his position on the Sanhedrin (the Jewish high
council); and he had a good reputation (seeing as how he didn’t risk tarnishing
it by coming to Jesus at night, in the dark). Yes, Nicodemus would have surely
been in the running for Jesus’ “next top disciple.” He fit a certain mold. But the writer of John’s gospel left us with
Nicodemus last week still covered by the darkness, still holding back from
following Jesus and accepting the full truth of who Jesus is. In the fourth
gospel, we leave Nicodemus in the dark and move on to sit by a well in Samaria,
in the bright light of the noonday sun.
In chapter four of John’s gospel we
are told that Jesus “had to go through Samaria,” but Samaria was not the ideal
place for a band of Jews in the first century. Not because it was necessarily
any more dangerous than other parts of Judea, but because it was the territory
of the Samaritan. In fact, Jews in the first century despised everything about
the Samaritans. They saw them as half-breeds; a people whose history may have
had roots in the same soil as the Jews, but whose branches were tainted with
the presence of foreign blood. You see, the Samaritans of the first century
were descendants of those Israelites who still occupied the territory of the
ten tribes of Israel that made up the ancient, northern kingdom of Israel.
After the Assyrians conquered the northern kingdom in 722 B.C.E. some of the
Israelites remained in the territory and intermarried with the Assyrians and
other people groups who were brought there. The offspring of all of this
intermarrying became the Samaritans, and since they were rejected by the Jews,
they founded their own, central place of worship, grounded in their own
understanding of the God of their shared ancestors. The Jewish exclusion of the Samaritans led to
the seclusion of the Samaritans from the Jews.[2]
Jesus “had to go through Samaria”
not only because it was a more direct route to get to Galilee, but because there was
something—someone—Jesus had to show his disciples, someone he had to show us.
Unlike the nocturnal story of chapter three, we find Jesus “tired
out by his journey…sitting by the well. It was about noon.” It’s the
middle of the day, the time of day when the sun is straight overhead and there
are no shadows to be found: there’s no darkness in which to hide, no shadows in
which to take cover. We’re told in verse
7, “A Samaritan woman came to draw water…” Great! A Samaritan! A
half-breed, and a woman no less! You see, Jewish men were taught not to speak
to women in public—even their own wives![3]
But now a woman—a Samaritan woman—has come to draw water from the well where
Jesus—a Jewish man—is sitting in the middle of the day…in the open…where they
might be seen. The disciples, we are told, have gone into the village to buy
some food, so Jesus and this woman are virtually alone, vulnerable to scandal:
he is vulnerable to being seen interacting with a Samaritan woman in public,
and she is vulnerable to be seen interacting with a Jewish man. It would be
great tabloid fodder today: “Traveling Rabbi caught in the act of conversing
with awful Samaritan woman in broad daylight!”
The culturally and socially correct
thing for both of them to have done would have been to simply ignore each
other, for the woman to either come back at a different time or draw her water
quickly and get out of sight, and for Jesus to simply look the other way or
take a lazy stroll down the road until she was gone. But Jesus—oh, Jesus—he has
a knack for ignoring what is “socially acceptable,” and beginning in verse 7, he begins a conversation with
this woman that is not to unlike the conversation he had just a few verses
before with Nicodemus. He asks her for a drink, and the first thing the woman
says to him in verse 8 is “How
is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” She gets
it. She knows the rules. But Jesus being Jesus gets to the point of this sacred
encounter and begins to tell her about the true gift of God and the source of
living water.
Like Nicodemus before her, she is a
bit confused by Jesus’ weaving of eternal truth in temporal metaphor: she wants
actual water (H20) that
can quench her thirst so she’ll never have to be seen out at the well again.
Then, Jesus tells her in verse 16, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”
Finally, it appears as if Jesus is getting with the program of proper social
mores…except for one thing…maybe five things. The woman tells Jesus in verse 17, “I have no husband.” To which Jesus responds, “"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!"
Now, I want to pause right here for
just a moment to salvage this woman’s reputation a bit. You’ve likely heard
something to the effect that this woman’s having been married five times is
somehow an indication of her poor life choices, or her immoral living. To think
in such a way, however, is to see her through the lenses of our own time and
context, a time when divorce is an entirely different thing. In the first century,
a woman had no more control over her marital status than she did over the
rising and falling of the tides; a woman could not divorce a man. Likely this
woman was either put out by the men she had been married to (an action Jesus
elsewhere equates to adultery on behalf of the man[4]),
or she was a widow several times over. If she was an adulteress, then it would
have been unlikely that she would have been remarried.[5]
Either way, her life would have been one of pain, grief, and embarrassment.
Jesus tells this woman something
about her that no stranger—especially a Jewish man—could know, and in her
amazement, she continues her conversation with Jesus, calling him a prophet.
Jesus goes on in verses 21 through 25
to tell her that God is not a God who separates the Jews from the Samaritans,
or any other nation from another. In fact, Jesus says, “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." God’s people will
not be defined by their race.
When the woman says in verse 25, “I know that Messiah is coming…When he comes,
he will proclaim all things to us,” Jesus responds with the first of
the great “I am” statements of the fourth gospel: “I am…the one who is speaking to
you” (the pronoun “he” is not in the Greek).
The disciples return, shocked, but too apprehensive to question Jesus
about the woman’s presence. She is so overcome by what she has heard that she
leaves her water jar—the very thing that brought her to the well in the first
place—to go and tell others what she has just experienced. In many ways, this
Samaritan woman became one of the very first evangelists. Meanwhile, Jesus has
this deep exchange with his disciples that, in many ways, mirrors the
conversation he has had with this woman, and before too long, “Many
Samaritans from that city believed in [Jesus] because of the woman’s
testimony.” The gospel tells us
that Jesus “stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word.”
The woman’s words, her testimony, brought others to hear Jesus’ words, and
because of her words, many came to believe.
But no one would have ever pictured this woman, this Samaritan woman,
this five-time-divorced-shacking-up-with-another-man Samaritan woman as an
evangelist, a proclaimer of the good news of arrival of the Christ.
All around us, in our community, in our workplaces, across our state,
nation, and across the globe, there are people who we would never imagine to be
bearers of the gospel. Whether it’s their long hair, shaved scalps, dark skin,
tattered clothes, tailored suits, native language, political affiliation,
nationality, gender, relationships, physical abilities, physical disabilities,
intelligence, ignorance, tattoos, or piercings we may tend to take one look at
them and dismiss them as one who needs to hear the gospel in order to change,
rather than seeing within them the truth of the gospel proclaimed. We may see
those who are unlike us—or better yet, those we don’t like as those who need the gospel, those whose lives need
to be changed by the gospel as we see
it, but they just might be our sisters and brothers in Christ already!
What’s worse (and I hate to think this, but I know it is true) is that
there are those people with whom some of us refuse to share the gospel. We see
them as too dirty, too vile, too far gone. We judge them based on a system of
rules and doctrine that we hold to be true, yet they may have never heard the
whole story. We see them as the Jews of the first century saw the Samaritans,
as second-class citizens who are better off kept on the margins, out of sight.
We prefer to ghettoize them, to draw boundaries around them and label them a
“lost cause.” Friends, this is not the way of God!
If we are to learn anything from this Samaritan woman’s story, let it be
this: God is not a God who draws lines and builds walls; God is a God who
brings people together through the saving grace of the Son, Christ Jesus. And
God calls us to be that kind of people, the kind of people who do not draw
lines and build walls, the kind of people who seek to bring others together, to
bring others into our lives, with the gospel. God is calling us to take risks,
to step outside of our comfort zones, to live and love those people whom we’d
rather just ignore.
May we be those people. May you see the gospel in others, and may you
strive to take risks, to step outside of your comfort zone, to love those you’d
rather ignore. After all, isn’t that what God has done for us? God risked the
life of Christ in order to show God’s love for us, a love that is universal, a
love that is for all of those who choose to accept it, no matter who they are. May you be one who accepts God’s unconditional
love, and may you be one who shows God’s love without condition.
Let us pray…
[1]
David A. Livermore, Serving with Eyes
Wide Open. Baker Books: Grand Rapids, MI (2013) p. 33.
[2] Deborah
J. Kapp, “Third Sunday in Lent, John 4:5-42: Pastoral Perspective” Feasting on the Word. Westminster John Knox
Press: Louisville, KY (2010) p. 92-96.
[3] George
W. Stroup, “Third Sunday in Lent, John 4:5-42: Theological Perspective” Feasting on the Word. Westminster John Knox
Press: Louisville, KY (2010) p. 92-96.
[4]
Matthew 5:31-32.
[5] Karoline
M. Lewis, “Third Sunday in Lent, John 4:5-42: Exegetical Perspective” Feasting on the Word. Westminster John Knox
Press: Louisville, KY (2010) p. 92-96.
No comments:
Post a Comment