SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2011 - "A Big Drink of Living Water"
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. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 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 the Samaritans.) 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." "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 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?" Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 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."
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." He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back." "I have no husband," she replied. Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. 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." "Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." "Woman," Jesus replied, "believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 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. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth." The woman said, "I know that Messiah" (called Christ) "is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us." Then Jesus declared, "I, the one speaking to you - I am he."
John 4:1-26I really love this passage. It's got several huge themes including prejudice (against the other gender and against lower classes and foreigners) and the literal and metaphorical significance of water. It deals with the Samaritan woman's failure to grasp Jesus' meaning and her intense effort to change the subject when Jesus addresses the fact that she's shacking up with a guy who is not her husband. But most of all, it shows us how Jesus dealt with the tough issue that he had of trying to get people to think "outside the lines," get out of the box of religious familiarity and deal with the real nature of God: not an easy task, as we see.
Let's tackle a couple of these and see how we do.
Jesus ran into this woman resting by a well in Samaria. This local woman came to her well for water with no idea ahead of time that everything she understood about life was about to change. To understand this story and also the Parable of the Good Samaritan, you have to understand that the Jews looked down on Samaritans derisively as "second class" at best, more completely as "half-breeds" born of the forced inter-breeding of Jews and Gentiles by the Babylonians during the Babylonian Captivity. It had been the effort of the Babylonians to destroy the distinctiveness of the Jews by doing this, just like to Chinese Communists have occupied Tibet and forced the inter-breeding of Chinese and Tibetans to try to destroy the Tibetan identity. So Jews rarely interacted with Samaritans and did not talk to them if it could be avoided.
That said, Jewish men also did not speak to women they did not know and rabbis or religious leaders did not ever speak to women. So here we have Jesus matter-of-factly breaking all of these restrictive rules. The Samaritans also had a religion, very similar to Judaism but with few texts and the practice of religion centered on their mountain rather than Jerusalem - easy to understand because they weren't welcome in Jerusalem. Now Jesus did what He was there to do, talk about the faith, relationship with the Father, and blow open the woman's limited understanding. He used the metaphor of water, first because they were at a well getting water, second because water is central to life and very precious in a desert community, much more so in the days before public works brought water to every home. Jesus tells this dear gal that if she drinks from the well of living water she will never get thirsty again. Sounds good to her, literally - this would be a great labor-saving device!
Jesus takes this opportunity to further confound her, often necessary to break up old ideas. He tells her to call her husband. She says she has no husband and Jesus notes that her statement is true, she's had five husbands and the guy she's with now is not her husband. She tries to dodge the question by telling Jesus she sees He's prophet. Now Jesus proceeds to declare to this woman that a whole new order is opening up in front of her, an order where it doesn't matter if you're a Jew or Samaritan or gentile, a man or a woman, where you worship because worship comes from inside, worship in Spirit and in truth. This is a whole new order, totally disconnected from all the rules and standards of religion that are designed by man, totally attuned to the living knowledge of the Creator, totally based in truth - not on an agreed upon "truth" of human consensus but the "Truth" of knowing God from the inside out. Jesus later said that He is the Truth.
In next week's message we'll go to John chapter 7 in which Jesus speaks about "rivers of living water" pouring out of us - a continuation between water as a life-source and the Holy Spirit as the life source.
