Wondering with the Word: well!
What are people thirsty for? Perhaps it is release from a sense of isolation - from community and from God - that has lived rent-free in their heads for too long.
John 4:5-42
5 He came to a town in Samaria called Sychar. It was near the piece of land Jacob had given his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there. Jesus was tired from the journey. So he sat down by the well. It was about noon.
7 A woman from Samaria came to get some 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. I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” She said this because Jews don’t have anything to do with Samaritans.
10 Jesus answered her, “You do not know what God’s gift is. And you do not know who is asking you for a drink. If you did, you would have asked him. He would have given you living water.”
11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you don’t have anything to get water with. The well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Our father Jacob gave us the well. He drank from it himself. So did his sons and his livestock. Are you more important than he is?”
13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again. 14 But anyone who drinks the water I give them will never be thirsty. In fact, the water I give them will become a spring of water in them. It will flow up into eternal life.”
15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water. Then I will never be thirsty. And I won’t have to keep coming here to get water.”
16 He told her, “Go. Get 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 live with now is not your husband. What you have just said is very true.”
19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our people have always worshiped on this mountain. But you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
21 Jesus said, “Woman, believe me. A time is coming when you will not worship the Father on this mountain or in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know. We worship what we do know. Salvation comes from the Jews. 23 But a new time is coming. In fact, it is already here. True worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth. They are the kind of worshipers the Father is looking for. 24 God is spirit. His worshipers must worship him in the Spirit and in truth.”
25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah is coming.” Messiah means Christ. “When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
26 Then Jesus said, “The one you’re talking about is the one speaking to you. I am he.”
The Disciples Join Jesus Again
27 Just then Jesus’ disciples returned. They were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want from her?” No one asked, “Why are you talking with her?”
28 The woman left her water jar and went back to the town. She said to the people, 29 “Come. See a man who told me everything I’ve ever done. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 The people came out of the town and made their way toward Jesus.
31 His disciples were saying to him, “Rabbi, eat something!”
32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”
33 Then his disciples asked each other, “Did someone bring him food?”
34 Jesus said, “My food is to do what my Father sent me to do. My food is to finish his work. 35 Don’t you have a saying? You say, ‘It’s still four months until harvest time.’ But I tell you, open your eyes! Look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest right now. 36 Even now the one who gathers the crop is getting paid. They are already harvesting the crop for eternal life. So the one who plants and the one who gathers can now be glad together. 37 Here is a true saying. ‘One plants and another gathers.’ 38 I sent you to gather what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work. You have gathered the benefits of their work.”
39 Many of the Samaritans from the town of Sychar believed in Jesus. They believed because of what the woman had said about him. She said, “He told me everything I’ve ever done.” 40 Then the Samaritans came to him and tried to get him to stay with them. So he stayed two days. 41 Because of what he said, many more people became believers.
42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said. We have now heard for ourselves. We know that this man really is the Saviour of the world.”
This coming weekend marks the third Sunday in Lent and we continue the Lectionary Gospel journey to Jerusalem with a story that only occurs in the pattern of readings once every three years on this day: year A, Lent 3.
It is one of my favourite stories but as I try to follow the Lectionary most of the time, I have to resist preaching on it every Lent. It’s a corker of an encounter.
Last week we met Nicodemus: male, Jewish, and a religious authority. He is the insider who had an inheritance in the promises of God through Moses and the Law. Had to understand that God’s love wasn’t limited in the way he believed.
This week the Samaritan woman is everything Nicodemus wasn’t. She is, well, a woman, a Samaritan so a complete outsider. That probably explains why she came to draw water at noon, the worst time of day for that tiring task but the time when you are least likely to encounter others.
There was a solidarity in coming with others to collect water at the start of the day: protection, conversation and community. But while this woman woman lived in a community, she wasn’t fully a part of it. Whatever the rift was, she came to collect water at the least sensible time of the day and without the companionship of other women.
Why she is an outsider even within her own people isn’t fully spelled out but there are hints about her morality.
This takes place in what the commentator Gerard Sloyan calls ‘enemy territory’, at Jacob’s well. For years the Jews would not consider the Samaritans as another nation: they were just alien people.
John tells us the enmity was so deep-rooted that Jews and Samaritans wouldn’t share the same drinking vessels (better than “have no dealings with”). One of the early shocking details of this conversation is that Jesus asks to do just that … and from a woman.
As ever, the writer treats the encounter with a wonderful sense of comic timing:
The Samaritan woman comes to draw water but ends up asking Jesus asks for a drink (v7).
She reminds him (v9) of the long-standing rift between Jews and Samaritans while (v10) Jesus tells her that if she knew who was asking for a drink she would have asked him!
He introduces the theme of living water, which throws her completely.
Hang on a minute, says the woman (v11), you haven’t got a bucket and it’s a deep well; still not getting where this conversation is going.
Then she asks a crunch question, even though she doesn’t know it is: ‘are you greater than Jacob?’
Then there’s a conversation about the quality of the water (vv12-15), but which water exactly Jesus: That water won’t satisfy you for long anyway. I’ve got a richer source, ‘a spring of water welling up to eternal life.’ Oh, in that case, says the woman. I’l have that water instead.
It’s pure sitcom writing - two people speaking past each other with all sorts of stuff being unsaid while we look on with all the benefits of knowing the script and the outcome.
Sloyan says: ‘John’s main concern is the heavenly authority of Jesus the speaker and the gift of life he holds out. “Living water” at a literal level is a running spring or stream as contrasted with well water in John’s by now familiar contrived ambiguity.’
Another commentator - Matson - suggests that the woman’s inability to understand what Jesus meant by ‘living water’ is this story’s equivalent to Nicodemus failing to understand what being ‘born from above’ meant.
Both Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman get bogged down in the literal - the business of birth and the presence of a well of water - and fail to catch the spiritual riches that Jesus is offering.
Nicodemus cannot see beyond the earthly (physical birth) to the spiritual (birth from above) and we don’t know for certain how much he ever moved from that.
The woman does move in her understanding but slowly. She seems to get that it is not ordinary water Jesus is offering but doesn’t yet understand in what way. As the story develops we see how radically she changes her point of view: she sees him as a man, then a prophet and finally asks ‘could this be the Messiah’.
The encounters, for Nicodemus and the unnamed woman, are powerful in themselves but it is what follows in this episode that is so striking.
We discover that encountering Jesus can radically change people’s worldview.
How do people encounter Jesus today? What is it they are thirsty for? Is it security in their own identity; is it companionship; is it a place in a community. Perhaps it is release from a sense of isolation - from community and from God - that has lived rent-free in their heads for too long.
Remember the old chorus: Whosoever will may come?
The encounter with Jesus draws her into a place she never expected to be in: meeting the Messiah, the one come to reconcile all things to God. She discovered that she does not need to live outside: there is a way in.
In our epistle today - Romans 5 - Paul reminds the church that “if, while we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, having been reconciled, shall we be saved through his life!”
The woman was part of what Jews considered an enemy people but, by the time Jesus and the disciples left the area, she and all her neighbours had come into a new experience of life because Jesus offered her new life and, in turn, she held out an invitation to others.
Nothing changed until she discovered she had a story to tell about acceptance, being ‘known’ by Jesus and understood. Then she was able to invite the whole community to experience the same.
People’s longing for community is still damaged from Covid’s ‘social distancing’ and fear about what they may catch from getting close to others. For some it has changed their whole approach to the world.
We say we are a community of faith. The church aims and claims to be a place where anyone can experience hospitality - whether it’s for coffee, or a lunch provided for them, or a gathering point for them and their children, or a safe place when isolation begins to play on our mental health.
We have the power to introduce people to the Jesus they think they don’t need and to build up people in their faith or condemn them to a life outside
If we have claimed for ourselves the story of how Jesus met us to show us himself, how do we then help others begin to make it their own experience?
As Paul says, while the death of Christ is the door to salvation, it is the life of Christ in us now that will be the key to people finding faith for themselves.
Surely our story must be a declaration that even in illness, brokenness, uncertainty or being pushed to the margins, Jesus continues to come to where we are - even in our isolation - and loves and calls each one to new life.
At the end of the passage, the Samaritan women sees the community she has brought to meet Jesus find faith for themselves.
What is the story you could share of being found by Jesus? Where can you share it to break through the isolation and uncertainty?
The offer of living water is still there from the one who tells everything we had ever done - and still invites us to live in his love.