We know the story well. Jesus was travelling from Judea back
north to Galilee. He and his disciples passed through Samaria, where their
outcast cousins, the Samaritans, lived. You remember that the Samaritans were
the descendants of the people that Ezra and Nehemiah pushed out of the faithful
community, because they had intermarried with the surrounding people while the
faithful were carried off into exile. When the faithful remnant returned, they
sought a pure community and would not accept those who had compromised their
worship of the true God during the exile. [This is an over-simplified
statement. The roots of the two communities go back to the Twelve Tribes and
continue today, but this is enough to begin with. Research into the two
communities is a fascinating project.]
So Jews and Samaritans had a centuries-old rivalry: Cousins (almost,
one would say, brothers and sisters) who really could not get along. Why Jesus
chose to go through rather than around Samaria the story doesn’t say. It was
the most direct route, but the story just tells us they had to go that way. They
stopped at a place called Sychar, where Jacob their mutual ancestor [the
ancestor of the Jews and of the Samaritans] had built a well. The disciples
went into town to get supplies, and Jesus rested by the well. The stage is set
for a memorable encounter.
A Samaritan woman comes out from the city to draw water. She
is alone in the middle of the day, which suggests that she is not welcome in
the city—a bad character. Jesus asks her for water, an amazing request given
that he is a Jewish male. I have wondered if he might have been able to order
her to give him water, so that the surprise came in his courtesy. I don’t know.
In any case the request leads to conversation, in which she
reveals her outcast state and Jesus reveals his true identity as the Messiah.
Jesus shows himself as one who is greater than Jacob, their mutual ancestor,
and as one who can satisfy the deepest human needs, not just the immediate need
for food and drink. As the conversation moves into matters of the Spirit, Jesus
points beyond human worship [this mountain, Mount Gerizim, or Mount Zion—in
which exchange Jesus affirms himself as a Jew, with the true worship of God in
Jerusalem, verse 22] to worshipping God in spirit and in truth.
In this last exchange Jesus makes it clear that the answer
to her question of where they should worship God is a secondary issue—verses 21
and 23—and that the real issue is how they worship God. The real issue is their
relationship with the true God, who comes in the Messiah. The woman affirms her
belief in the Messiah, and Jesus reveals himself to her in his closing words, “I,
the one speaking to you—I am he.”
There are so many things going on this passage that we
cannot deal with, so we confine ourselves to our Lenten theme. The movement
between human thirst and divine thirst (verses 7-15) gives the theme for this
Sunday of Lent: “We thirst.” The woman thirsted for food and drink, physical
needs. She thirsted for relationships, a stable family life, for emotional
needs. She thirsted most of all for someone who understood her to the core and
accepted her as she was, for spiritual needs.
We also thirst. We thirst for physical security, for
relational fulfillment, and for communion with God.
Baptism
The passage begins with a comment on baptism: “Now Jesus
learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more
disciples than John—although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his
disciples.” These baptisms were the cause of his trip from Judea north. Somehow
the whole episode is connected to baptisms.
The connection is chronological, rather than logical. Jesus
was not ready for the full-blown confrontation that he knew was coming, so he
left the area. But baptism is still the precipitating factor: baptisms of
repentance, which would lead to the baptism of the Spirit. Further, Jesus’
disciples baptized with water, and water links the baptisms with the woman at
the well. Water from the well satisfied physical thirst. Jesus the living water
satisfies our thirst for God. We are baptized with water, symbolizing our union
with Jesus in his death and resurrection.
So baptism stands as a continuing symbol of Jesus the living
water who meets all of our needs—physical, emotional, and spiritual. But there
is a question: How to we receive this living water? The Samaritan woman clearly
received Jesus. How do we do this? How do we receive this inner well that
springs up into eternal life (verse 14)? A passage that may give us some help
is found in Psalm 1.
Two Thoughts
First thought: Psalm
1 was one of the first passages of Scripture I learned as a young boy.
1 Blessed
is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers, 2 but
whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. 3 That
person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither—whatever they do prospers.
Verse two answers our question by saying that the righteous
person is one who mediates on God’s law continually. In New Testament terms, we
could quote Jesus telling the disciples to “abide in me as I abide in you.” Verse
three adds that such abiding makes us “like a tree planted by streams of water,
blossoming and bearing fruit, and prospering in all he or she does.”
So we become this person by meditating on God’s Law and God’s
Son so that we are planted [the word means “transplanted”—taken from a place
without water and re-planted] beside the river of water that is Christ. The
Samaritan woman moved from desolation to a life of joy and fulfillment when she
met Jesus. She was planted by the river, drawing on the living water in all of
her life.
But verse 3 contains a continuing problem. We all know
someone who has walked with God and suffered greatly. “Whatever that person
does will prosper”—these are hollow words when we look at the heartache that
many in our own church family have experienced. Taken the wrong way, they
suggest that our misfortune is our own fault, which is I believe a misreading
of what Scripture says.
I first preached on this passage about 35 years ago. I was a
young pastor in Pennsylvania, and I remember sitting in my study wrestling with
this third verse. I believe that sometimes misfortunes are our own fault. We
make bad choices, and suffer the consequences. I believe that sometimes they
are not our fault. We are in the wrong place at the wrong time and something
happens to devastate our lives. I do not believe that the righteous person
simply has a good and easy life. Reality is just not that way.
As I worked on the sermon, I was unable to resolve the
problem this verse gave me, especially in light of the lives of the people in
my church—people who loved the Lord, but were struggling with the hardships of
life. I left my desk and sat down in an armchair close by to think and to pray.
I don’t know what happened then, but the next thing I remember is finding
myself beside a hillside—it was not a vision in the sense of a dream; I was
simply there. Looking up at the hill I saw three crosses with three men on them.
I came to myself again in my room, lying on the floor. I don’t remember lying
down. I just remember waking up with the sight of three crosses on a hillside
in my mind.
I have never received any other answer to the dilemma of
Psalm 1:3—only the cross. It reminds me of what the Samaritan woman
experienced. She had problems she might have wanted solved, and instead she met
a man who understood her inside and out, and who invited her to worship God in
spirit and in truth. Recognizing him as the Messiah, the anointed one sent by
God, was all that she needed. Her problems may have remained, but she was a new
person.
Similarly, when I stood at the cross with the problems of my
congregation and the words of Psalm 1, I needed only to be there. It was, if
you will, a reminder of my baptism into the death and resurrection of Christ.
We meet Jesus, and Jesus meets our thirst for life and meaning. Our problems
remain, but we are different and can deal with our problems.
Second thought: Embracing
life on the margins
Like the Samaritan woman we come to church looking for what
we need. Maybe we come in confidently, sure of our place. Maybe we hope no one
notices us. Someone might look for a time that the doors are open so they can
sit and pray without worrying about who might say something to them. We thirst for
a renewal of our baptism. We thirst for God’s Spirit to be poured out in our
lives, for the living water of Christ.
Something that impresses me in the story of the woman at the
well is the way in which God was present with two people who were so
marginalized by the larger society around them. On the one side was the woman,
coming out in the heat of the day to avoid causing more scandal. On the other side
was a Jewish man, who (if she had known it) was avoiding trouble with the
authorities in Jerusalem—the son of a carpenter heading home to Galilee. And
God was there.
I teach World Religions. Consider the founders of the great
religions.
· The Buddha was a prince turned religious leader.
· The Mahavira (found of the Jain religion) was
also from a royal family.
· Muhammad came from the family of a clan leader
in Mecca (although he was an orphan from the age of two).
Only Judaism and Christianity have founders with slave or
servant origins. Moses was a slave raised as the son of Pharaoh, and Jesus was
the son (so people thought) of a carpenter in the northern backwater of
Galilee. [Jesus was also of the line of David, but from a branch of the family far outside the city of David, Bethlehem.]
I am not arguing for the distinctiveness and truth of
Christianity, but observing something simpler and more important. Christian
faith comes from the marginalized and for the marginalized of the world. The
woman asked if the true centre of worship was Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim—the
centres of power as she knew them. Jesus pointed her directly to God, outside
the structures of power.
We are accustomed to looking to the centres of power and to
influential people for help. God normally comes to us through marginalized
people. Alfred Neufeld tells the story of a Frist Nations people in the Chaco
of South America (What We Believe Together,
104f). The Guidai-Gosode people are part of a war-loving group known as the Ayoreos.
Through missionary contact, they became Christians. When they began reading the
New Testament in their own language they discovered the Sermon on the Mount and
concluded that they must make peace with their cousins, the Totobie-Gosode,
with whom they had had many conflicts. They located them with the help of bush
pilots, and then walked into their territory as an unarmed delegation. They
decided before they left that some of them would die, because they had killed
many of the Totobie-Gosode. Neufeld describes the contact thus: “The first
minutes of the encounter were very violent. The Totobie-Gosode killed five of
the visitors and badly injured four others
from the Guidai-Gosode peace delegation. But when they noticed that
their visitors behaved in a completely nonviolent way, the killing stopped,
they made peace, and together they returned to the village … to live and learn with
their former enemies.”
I did a bit of checking in secular sources and found the
incident described, but without any awareness of the gospel of peace. The
missionaries simply “sedentarized” the nomadic Gosode peoples, who in turn
fought with each other when one group tried to make contact. Both the missionaries
and the Gosode were seen as of little worth in the eyes of the writer. But they
brought peace where there had been conflict and life where there had been
death. For us also, as we embrace those on the margins, indeed, those whom we
ourselves have marginalized, God brings us life springing up within us.
We thirst, and we turn to God, and God meets us and
transforms us. God comes to us through people we might look down on and meets
us and changes us. God makes us people who pursue peace. God makes us people
who invite other people into a radical re-orientation of our lives that does
not seek to win, but seeks rather to be reconciled with God and with each
other.
Steinbach
Mennonite Church
19 March 2017
John 4:1-26
4 Now Jesus learned that
the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than
John— 2 although in fact it was
not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. 3 So he left Judea and went back once more
to Galilee. 4 Now he had to go through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town in
Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son
Joseph.6 Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he
was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 When a Samaritan woman
came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a
drink?” 8 (His disciples had gone
into the town to buy food.) 9 The
Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me
for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.)
10 Jesus answered 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.” 11 “Sir,” the woman said,
“you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this
living water? 12 Are you greater than our
father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it
himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this
water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the
water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give
them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal
life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this
water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming
here to draw water.”
16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and
come back.” 17 “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus
said to her, “You are right when you say you have no
husband.18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and
the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite
true.” 19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you
are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped
on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we
must worship is in Jerusalem.” 21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is
coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain
nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship
what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation
is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and
has now come when the true worshipers will worship the
Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of
worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must
worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know
that Messiah” (called Christ) “is
coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” 26 Then
Jesus declared, “I,
the one speaking to you—I am he.”
