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June 11, 2006
An Unexpected Refreshment
Psalm 19; Genesis 29: 1-12
John 4: 5-15
June 11th, 2006
We have come this morning to one of the most beloved stories in the Gospels. A favorite song of some of you no doubt was stimulated by the story of the Samaritan woman at the well.
Like the woman at the well I was seeking
For things that could not satisfy:
And then I heard my Savior speaking:
Draw from my well that never shall run dry.
Fill my cup Lord,
I lift it up, Lord!
Come and quench this thirsting of my soul;
Bread of heaven, Feed me till I want no more
Fill my cup, fill it up and make me whole!
Oddly the song seems to express prejudice against the woman. Who says she sought things that could not satisfy? Who says she was responsible for having five husbands in a row? When one divorced her, perhaps for a trivial reason, she was chosen for her good looks by another man, and rejected for some reason by him. And the same by another, and another, and another, until she was no longer so beautiful, and gave up on marriage and lived with someone who would provide her a roof and a meal. She’ll do the hard work and endure the advances of a far lesser man than she started with in exchange for security. So it seems to me.
From her story we get the picture of a thirst that Jesus seems to say should no longer be there if we have drunk of Him. The water He promised the woman was a kind that would quench thirst forever. But our spiritual thirst keeps on and on, does it not?
I have often thought of this paradox. Jesus offered water that would continually satisfy, yet what one of us does not have a persistent spiritual thirst. I read the 42nd Psalm as my own testimony, “As the hart pants after water brooks, so pants my soul after Thee, O God. . . I thirst for God, for the living God.” I like these lines best in the old KJV where I first read them. Or the 63rd Psalm, “O God, Thou art my God, early will I seek Thee. My soul thirsts for Thee; my flesh longs for Thee as in a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”
In this troubled life, when the church as well as the world is often a source of distress, how can we keep from feeling such a thirst for God even though we believe every word Jesus said—that the water He gives takes away thirst completely?
So let’s look again at the wonderful story from which we read a snippet this morning. Jesus arrived at noon at Jacob’s well near the little village of Sychar located in the region once belonging to the tribe of Ephraim. Ephraim was Joseph’s younger son. Manasseh, the tribe descending from his older son, got land on the other side of the Jordan. Jacob’s well, beloved for its connection to the place where the great patriarch met his beloved wife, Rachel, was in the region given to the younger son.
This in itself is noteworthy and bears on this story. In ancient times it was the eldest son that expected the special blessing. Younger siblings got the scraps left after custom made sure that the first and strongest seed of the father got preference in a sort of Darwinian rule of primogeniture.
But time and time again in the Old Testament the younger son gets chosen—Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph, the youngest for a while, over Reuben in Jacob’s family. A modern Jewish writer notes that this pattern may be reflected in Christianity seeming to be favored instead of Judaism, its ancient source. We are Gentiles, the non-chosen people, now seemingly favored over the Jews by history if not by God.
And thus God continues to show His care for the one that would be neglected naturally. This you and I need to remember who may often feel of little importance in our day that favors the strong, the wealthy, the brilliant, the privileged, and the well-known.
Now Jesus arrives at Jacob’s well where He meets this very neglected woman, so insignificant that we don’t even learn her name. Here we begin to see the boundaries of God’s love expand for the world. God’s love embraces the known and the unknown.
In John 3 we saw Jesus focus His attention on a man whose name we know, Nicodemas. He was one of the favored among the favored people of God, the Jews. Now we meet an unnamed woman among the dis-favored few, the small sect of Samaritans—from whom Jesus drew an example of what it is to obey the law of God, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” The Good Samaritan was a Samaritan too.
God embraces those whom people no longer love—even a Samaritan woman, loved and married five-times, divorced five times and living with someone she’s not married to. I have noticed how society naturally thinks little of people who have had troubled lives.
This woman was in this class. She is so despised by her own people for her troubled life that she is reduced to coming to draw water from the deep, old well in the heat of the day. I picture her letting down that long rope with the bucket at the end until it arrives at the water, way below. She pulls up that long rope under the beating sun. Perhaps she hauls up two buckets to save the walking, carrying them home while the sun beats down on her. And she sweats profusely and her back is bowed with weariness.
How opposite was the picture we saw last Sunday. The contrast is significant in the message of God’s love for the WORLD found in this Gospel.
Last Sunday we saw Jesus deep in conversation late at night with Nicodemas. The Pharisees would study late into the night when it was cool. Nicodemas came to Jesus in the cool of the night. He was a member of the most highly esteemed of the Jewish sects, the one Josephus chose to belong to after sampling the rest of them. He was a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, the Israeli supreme court. Nicodemas was the crème de la crème among the Pharisees. He knew the law well—and kept it. But Nicodemas thirsted after God still. And his thirst for God brought him to Jesus. Jesus said to this good man, “You must be born again.”
Today we see Jesus in a very opposite conversation. It is high noon, the hottest time of the day. He is with an unnamed woman of low esteem, part of a religious group despised by the Jews. She said to Jesus, “The Jews don’t have anything to do with Samaritans.” She knew this from sad experience as she was doubly treated with the disdain—by Jews and by other Samaritan women who rejected her company when they drew water in the cool of the morning.
I find it interesting that Jesus did not repeat to this woman the words he said to Nicodemas, “You must be born again.” She needed this too, and knew it. He phrased His offer to her more gently. He offered her a drink from which she’d not thirst again.
But we wonder what did He offer her? What is this “living water?” It is a phrase found in Genesis 26: 19 and Leviticus 14: 5, at least in Hebrew. But there it only means “running water.”
The Samaritans didn’t accept the prophets of the Old Testament. If they had they would know that the prophet Jeremiah sadly wrote for God that “my people . . . have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” The later prophet Zechariah promised more cheerfully that at the fulfillment of the promise of the Feast of Booths, “living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem . . . in summer and in winter.”
Some have proposed that this living water is knowledge that grows. But the more knowledge we have, the more we want. The more we know the more we realize we don’t know. And we come to the limits of what we can understand.
Others think Jesus offered a new kind of religion, a kind that doesn’t need the old fashioned traditions of worship, but only to worship God in spirit and in truth. But do we not see how much variety people have in their views of what it is to worship right—so that worship itself becomes a means by which we push one another away? Away from God, it seems, when away from self-approved Christians. Tradition may be a wonderful avenue of worship, a humble acceptance of what we have received from beloved forebears. But in all of this something is lacking. It is not the source of living water.
Jesus Himself is the living water. Isn’t this what John is telling us when he described the wedding at Cana of Galilee? There Jesus turned lots of water into lots of the best wine. And wine, we learn in the Gospels is the sign of the blood of Christ.
In John 6 Jesus said something that was so scandalous that He lost some followers as a result. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” At Cana he changed water into wine and wedding guests drank it and were surprised how good it tasted.
Do you see what Jesus was doing? In this encounter with the Samaritan woman he does not change the water into wine, but gets right to the point. He offers her living water that will once and for all quench her thirst. He is this water—something Jesus says far more graphically and shockingly to great interpreters of the law in John 6. She asked Jesus, “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst,” thinking about all she knew to think, that then she wouldn’t need to come draw water in the middle of the day. But Jesus meant much more—as He always does in His promises to us.
From Jesus' conversation with Nicodemas we learn about being born again. From Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman we learn about drinking of the water of life, a drink that provides endless satisfaction for a thirst that goes beyond our need for H2O—of which our bodies are principally composed.
Each time we take the Lord’s Supper we take just a little bit of wine. It is never enough to satisfy someone who is thirsty. Our Catholic brothers and sisters believe that when believers drink that wine it is a renewed taste of the blood of Christ, the living water that satisfies. We think along the same lines, but defined differently, that in the Lord’s Supper we are reminded that Jesus has satisfied the deepest thirst of all.
What is this deepest thirst? Thirst drives human society. Why do we think so much and work so hard for money? What’s the appeal of numbers on a bank ledger or green backs in the wallet or now plastic cards that say—“I’ll pay later.” We can’t eat money. We can’t drink it, or build houses with it, or cars, or speed boats. In itself money is totally useless except to start fires. Money is a sign of our endless sense of need. And it fails us when we come to the end of the road and realize we are going to die. There are no luggage racks on funeral cars, and no trailers.
What we need is far, far deeper than anything money can buy. The woman at the well needed more than to be freed from having to come draw water in the heat of the day.
It is not beside the point that the One from whom she received this wonderful gift looked like a human being and was a human being. Sure, Jesus was God made flesh—but she didn’t know this. She thought He was a prophet, that’s all, a great man, because He told her all about her sorry story. It mattered that she was offered this living water by a Person. She could not understand the theology of the Incarnation or of living water, but she sure could understand Jesus’ look, the tone of His voice, the body language of His gestures, his posture as He spoke with her. Look at how much space in this chapter is devoted to Jesus' encounter with her. He gave her time. He gave her every gesture she needed to trust that there was something more He had to offer, something she knew she needed.
The prophet Isaiah wrote: “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings.” The physical apparatus God has given to us to communicate His love for the world is a conduit we often short-change. God has given you and me the apparatus to communicate the Gospel—our bodies, our hands, our feet, our faces, our eyes, our speech, our attitudes—all of which are agents with which we embrace the unloved, the hungry, the thirsty, the wounded souls that God so loves that He gave His beloved Son—that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.
Paul asked, “How shall they hear without a preacher?” What is a preacher? A preacher is a reproduction of the Incarnation. A preacher is a human being, any bodily representative of Jesus,--who spent time with a rejected woman as well as with an exemplary religious man, offering Himself as the vehicle of the Gospel to each. You may be the only preacher someone will ever hear. The only Gospel they see. Each of these people, Nicodemas and the unnamed Samaritan woman, went from their encounters with Jesus changed. Each saw into the face of God and noticed in His eyes that He loved them.
People need to see into your eyes, into your face, and to notice the love of God staring out of your eyes and mine. It is this love of God that Jesus not only poured out from His eyes, but from His veins, that is the source of everlasting satisfaction of our deep thirst. We bring this thirst to the community of faith on the Lord’s Day and if it is working right, we are reminded how Jesus satisfies us here, in this place. That is the welcome of this place. I pray this happens here.
Then let us go from here devoted to that One who loves us, from whose face and veins we have drawn this profound acceptance, this life-giving approval and forgiveness and a invitation to remain in His company—that is, to “follow me.” If we are with Him we have the living water. Let us live as though we believe this pertains to my life, and to yours.
The story ends with many Samaritans believing in Jesus because of the witness of this woman they all thought so ill of. They asked Jesus to stay with them. He stayed two more days. I wonder how those two days must have been. I wonder if from that day on the Samaritan woman was welcomed into the company of other women who drew water in the cool of the morning or evening. I wonder if the man with whom she lived married her, and from that day on cared for her and loved her so that she was never divorced again. I wonder if in one city of the Samaritans anyway no one thought of worshiping on Mt. Gerazim as the big issue of life.
Both those days Jesus no doubt got up early to pray. And perhaps they watched Him pray, and indeed, perhaps they were welcomed to pray with Him, and heard Him address God, “Abba, Father,” and knew that they too, though rejected by the Jews as Samaritans, were accepted in the beloved by their heavenly Father.” And so are you and so am I in Christ. And so let us live out our gratitude to Jesus who made this known to us.
Let us pray: O Lord God, creator of all things, father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and our heavenly Father too, we thank You for the drink after which we never thirst again, that flows from Jesus Christ Your Son. Amen.
Pastor Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at June 11, 2006 09:30 AM