White Stone Baptist Church, White Stone, VA
John 4:7-38
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."
He knew he needed to be doing something else.
As most college students do, he had a small mountain of reading waiting for him in his room, and at least one paper to start working on, but he found himself wandering aimlessly around the house where he and his 5 roommates lived. It was September, classes had just started the month before, and it was still hot. The clanking window unit in the Living room of the apartment barely managed to keep it and the adjoining bedroom cool. He stepped out into the hall, and walked up to the front door, and saw Greg, the roommate he knew the least, sitting on the porch swing. He slowly opened the door, stepped out, and walked over and sat down in the glider next to him.
“Hey,” he said quietly, smiling.
Greg stared back at him, wide-eyed.
After a couple of minutes of slightly awkward silence, and not knowing what else to say or do, Greg’s roommate stood up and walked back into the house, planning to begin his reading, but he ended up wandering from room to room again. The first bedroom on the left, then the second on the right, then into the living room, through his own bedroom, into the kitchen, that seemed to have been attached like an afterthought to the back of the house. It leaned a little, and the small refrigerator and smaller stove would both have been at home in an antiques shop.
He felt unusually restless, unsettled, and soon found himself walking back through the apartment and back to the front door, with Greg still sitting on the swing. Again, he opened the storm door, stepped out onto the porch and over to the glider and again sat down, just as he’d done a few minutes earlier. Again, he nodded at Greg, smiled,
“Hey.”
Greg still looked at him in that odd way, wide eyed, at a loss for words.
They sat silently on the porch, occasionally Greg’s roommate looked over at him, but mostly he just let his eyes wander up and down the street. Still, not a word crossed between them.
After a few minutes, Greg was the one who stood up and walked back into the house, leaving his roommate more than a little confused about what had just happened, wondering as to Greg’s lack of people skills, sitting on the porch, in the heat of the afternoon.
…
Turning to our passage, we find Jesus in the middle of the day, sitting at the first-century equivalent of a front porch: the community well.
He is heading home, weary from walking, resting at the well, having sent his disciples into town to fetch some food, when the Samaritan woman shows up.
It is noon.
Not the normal hour to be drawing water for the day. By that alone, we learn some of the woman’s story. She is not comfortable, and most likely, not welcome to join the rest of the women of the village, who gather at the well in the morning, when it is cooler. She would rather bear the noonday heat and solitude than the taunts and cold shoulders of her neighbors, who were not beating a path to her door to ask her to join them at the next Mt Gerezim annual Spring Banquet.
One wonders what thoughts were racing through her head as she approached the well and saw the stranger sitting there. There may have been some comfort in the knowledge that he probably didn’t know who she was, or the history of which the entire town was already well aware. She may have crossed paths with the disciples looking for food as she headed out of town, and, seeing that they were Jews, made the connection between them and the man, and felt sure that a Jewish man would have nothing to do with her. On the other hand, heading into another un-chaperoned encounter with a man, she knew that if anyone from the town saw them, word would spread like wildfire again.
Jesus surprises her by doing just the opposite of what she expected him to. He does engage her in conversation, as a man, tired and thirsty from the journey, asking for a drink of water.
Her response is both surprise and alarm. Surprise that this Jewish man would actually speak to her, and alarm at why he would be talking to her anyway. To give herself time to gather her thoughts, she deflects his request by asking a socially and religiously loaded question -
"How come you, a Jew, are asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink?"
There is a note of exasperation in Jesus’ answer, as if he’s saying, “I was just asking for a drink, for heaven’s sake, but if you need to make it an issue, let’s talk:
“If you only knew who you were talking to, you’d be asking me for a drink of living water.” …
Our three year-old, Judson, has, in the last couple of months achieved a goal for which Leslie and I are REALLY thankful: to get himself dressed, including putting on his own shoes. And, sometimes, he gets his shoes right. He excitedly runs into whichever room we are in, and proudly, breathlessly announces, “I did it, I did it!!” On one of those occasions, unthinkingly, I glanced over and commented, ‘you’ve got your shoes on the wrong feet’ … he got this look on his face, paused, and then replied, “No they’re not, Daddy, they’re MY feet!”
I need to be constantly reminded that what I am saying, especially with him, is processed in very concrete terms. At that age, he still hasn’t quite developed a capacity for abstract thought …
It seems the same was the case for the Samaritan woman. Her ears caught ‘water’, but missed ‘living’. Standing next to the well, her thoughts were still very much on the task at hand.
“This is a deep well, how can you draw water with no bucket?
Jesus answers with that beautiful image of a well of life, springing forth from our very souls, satisfying our thirst like nothing else will.
Her reply is telling. She is beginning to get it. She wants the water Jesus is offering her. Her thirst is that same thirst we all share, for being in relationship. “If drinking the water he’s talking of will mean that I never have to come back to this well ALONE, then please, give me some!”
How often have we cried for that companionship, that relationship, that connection? That is what draws us together; it is why we are in relationship with God and with one another. God calls us to be in community.
When Jesus asks her to go bring her husband, she immediately replies with the truth – that she has none.
“You’ve had five husbands, and the man you’re with now isn’t your husband. Congratulations, you got it right.” What Jesus is acknowledging is her HONESTY. She knows what she has done and who she is, and doesn’t try to hide it from him.
It is in that moment, when we recognize our brokenness, our failures and our shortcomings, and bring them before God, bring our selves, with no pretense, to the Holy Throne, that Jesus steps in and says, “I know, and I love you.”
The fact that this stranger at the well knows who she is and what she’s done, and still speaks to her, brings to her mind the Messiah, the chosen one of Israel. Her question may have been a rhetorical one, “I know the Messiah is coming, I’ll just ask him when he comes” …
Here Jesus goes back to being concrete, as real as flesh and blood: “I am he, you don’t have to wait any longer or look any further”.
Can you imagine what she must have felt? To see before her a dusty, sweat-streaked man, dressed in a simple robe, with sandals on his feet, and to look in his eyes and see the Messiah, the long-awaited one. To understand that she had been talking to him and, more astonishingly, that he had been talking to her.
And she finds her voice. In her excitement, she leaves her water jug and runs to tell the townspeople. She finally has something to bring to the table, and it is an invitation from Christ himself to drink the water of life.
When the disciples finally show up, they’re not portrayed in all that positive a light. First, they are bigoted, though, to their credit, they didn’t come out and say what they were thinking when they saw Jesus talking to ‘that woman’. Next, they don’t ‘get it’ when Jesus tells them about the food he has that they don’t know about. He tries to explain, and finally, when he sees the crowd of people coming from the town to see him, prompted by the reports of the woman he’d just been speaking to, he motions to them and says, “Look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting”…
The other three roommates came back from their afternoon classes. After they’d eaten supper, as evening fell, Greg called them up to his room. He explained that he had found out a couple of days earlier that his fiancé was expecting their baby. His life as he had known it was collapsing around him. He knew he and Linda would get married, but he had pinned his hopes on completing his college education and just didn’t know how that was going to happen now that he had a family to support. He told them that that afternoon, he’d gone so far into a tailspin that at one point he’d contemplated suicide. While sitting on the porch swing, he had prayed silently, asking God to send Jesus to him, and God answered with the one who opened the door, stepped out, walked over and sat down in the glider next to him. A few minutes later, just to be sure, Greg prayed again, asking God to show himself. And for the second time that afternoon, I stepped out on that porch, sat down on that glider, looked Greg in the eye and said, “Hey.”
What happened outside Suhar is what can happen in each of our lives. Christ meets us where we are. In the middle of our parched yearning, he sits next to the well we thought would quench our thirst, and offers us his living water. If we’ve received that water of life from him, his invitation to us is to go tell others and bring them to him. If you’ve not yet encountered Jesus beside the well, then your invitation is to enter into relationship with the one who knows you better than you know yourself, and welcomes you with open eyes and arms.
Let’s pray.
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