John
4:5-29
Lent
3
March
23, 2014
William G. Carter
"Come and see a man how told me everything that I had done. You don't think this is the Messiah, do you?"
It
is always risky to end a sermon with a question. The preacher can ask something
and leave it dangling in the air, like a piece of fruit hanging from a tree.
The curious will come close, survey what they see, and declare, “It looks like
a piece of fruit.” Others will keep walking by, unwilling to stop, going
wherever they thought they were headed. It’s only the hungry who reach out,
grab the fruit, and take a bite. Everybody else passes by.
This
anonymous Samaritan woman is the first female preacher in the Gospel of John.
She leaves behind her water jar, goes back to her village, finds some
townspeople and asks, “You don’t think this could be the Messiah, do you?” Her
question stays dangling in the air.
Now,
if you know the rest of the story, you know it’s enough for the whole hungry
town to search for Jesus and ask him to stay with them for a while. They come
to trust that he is the One who satisfies every human longing. But we never
learn what happens to this woman. She is quickly dismissed offstage. Her job
was to ask the question of neighbors who will move on beyond her. To this day,
nobody ever remembers her name.
What
we remember is the conversation. That’s what John gives us. It is the longest
conversation that Jesus has with any single person in the whole Bible. He talks
longer with her than any conversation he ever has with Peter, James, or John.
He speaks with her longer than his backstage conversation with Pontius Pilate.
I
can’t tell you what a remarkable conversation this is. He is a Jew, she is a
Samaritan. She is a woman, he is a man. They step over the barbed wire of racial
differences and religious divisions, to say nothing of the cultural rules that declare
men should never talk to women in public.
Jesus
starts the conversation. “Give me a drink.” She is astonished that he speaks to
her, and she is feisty enough to tell him so.
Jesus
pushes back. If you knew this is, he says, you would ask him for living water.
She replies, “Where’s your bucket?”
Leading
her into the depths, he speaks of the gift of living water which gushes up into
the life of the eternal God. She says, “I’ll take it.” She’s tired of being
thirsty and weary of going to the well.
What
she doesn’t know is this is John’s version of Jesus. According to the Gospel of
John, Jesus knows everything. He knows she has been discarded by five husbands
in a row. That’s how it worked back then. The husbands had the authority to get
rid of their wives, even if it was the smallest matter that prompted the dismissal.
Jesus knows this woman’s wound. He knows her pain, he knows her disillusion
with one marriage after another. More to the point, he knows her. He is the One
who will later say in this book, “I am the truth” (14:6) and he knows the truth
about her. He comes that close and he stays there.
Well,
it’s a little too close, so she steps back and puts up a barrier. She decides
to pick a fight about religion: “This Samaritan mountain is our holy mountain,
but you Jews say the holy mountain is in Jerusalem. We’re different, you know.
We have separate temples on separate mountains.”
Jesus
says, “Lady, God is not bound to a mountain nor a city. We’re talking about
God, the Source of all life. God is Spirit, free like the wind.”
I
can see her pausing to consider this. Then she says, “I know that Messiah is
coming.” Jesus looks at her and, with the full weight of the Old Testament, he
says, “Yahweh! I am.” It’s a holy moment, a holy holy moment. . .
.
. . So leave it to the twelve disciples to bumble in at that precise minute, to
interrupt the whole thing, and to murmur among themselves, “Why is he talking
to her?!?” She is a Samaritan, she is a woman. She’s standing by the well at
high noon with none of the other villagers around, so they can only guess what
kind of person she is – and Jesus is talking with her. Surely they murmured, “What’s
going on here?” and they missed that Jesus has revealed to her who he is.
Please
note this is a conversation. Not a one-sided speech. Not a defensive statement
of theology. It’s a conversation. It
moves from the shallow end of the pool into great depths. We never actually
find out if Jesus got his cup of water. That’s not the point of the conversation.
The point is that the woman came for water and she left with the well.[1]
Even
so, as she scurries off to spread the word to the townspeople, the thing she
talks about is the thing she can’t totally possess. “There’s a stranger who
told me everything about myself.” She can only invite others to “Come and see.”
Then she dangles the really big question in the air: “You don’t think this
might be the Messiah, do you?”
We’ve
heard a conversation about faith, about the kind of faith that gives us life
and trust. That’s the living water that Christ gives. To hear other people talk
about it, faith should never have any questions, just an orderly stack of
answers. God says THIS. Jesus is THAT. There should be no discussion, only the
description of correctness, what we should and ought to believe.
Ever
hear anybody talk like that? I’m afraid what they are missing is what John says
about God, both in this story and the story last week of Nicodemus. God is
Spirit. The Spirit blows where the Spirit blows. That is how God is – free,
unbound, wild, life-giving to whomever God provides such abundant life. It’s
going to be frustrating for anybody who confuses faith with certainty,
especially anybody who handles the things of heaven with a lot of their own control needs.
Faith
is what comes as a gift, like living water from a Savior who has no bucket.
Faith can blow in on the Spirit’s wings, and for the minute we may see
everything we need to see. We trust the Source. We experience the kindness of
heaven. But just as quickly it comes, it can slip away. That’s the nature of
faith, at least as the Gospel of John describes it. Faith is not something we
convince ourselves into believing. Rather it’s the evidence of God’s Spirit blowing
freely upon us, bringing us to moments of understanding, filling us with trust.
You
know something? Other than Jesus, in the Gospel of John there is not one person
whose faith is finished and complete. Not one. Last week you heard about
Nicodemus, the night-time Pharisee. He slips in and out of this book three
different times, and by the last page there is no evidence he has memorized the
Apostles’ Creed.
There
are people healed by Jesus all throughout the book. But usually, right after
the healing they slip back into the crowd, or Jesus does. We never do hear much
more about them, whether they go off and start churches, or whether they keep
believing into the next week or month. Jesus heals them, and it is one more moment
of grace and truth in their lives. They will have to keep working out what it
means.
Or
the twelve disciples - they are certainly a work in progress, every one of them
unfinished. This is the book that speaks of Doubting Thomas, after all. The
Risen Lord asks him a dangling question: “Have you believed because you see? Well, blessed are
those who do not see yet come to believe.” (20:29)
In
the Gospel of John, everybody’s faith is in process. God is still working on each
person bit by bit. Just like this conversation with the woman at the well. It
starts so simply: “I’m thirsty” – “Where’s your bucket?” But then it goes deeper.
She first calls him “a Jew,” later says “Are you greater than Jacob?” Then she says
“I perceive you are a prophet,” then she names the “Messiah.” At the very end
he is “Savior of the World.” Her understanding increases as the revelation
grows larger and larger during the conversation. Meanwhile it is missed by
those who wonder, “Why is he talking to her?”
The
point is simply this - - faith (if is real faith) is something that lives and
grows. Faith is never once and done and finished. Faith ebbs and flows because
it is the life of the Spirit within us. Sometimes it explodes in a burst of
understanding. Other times we have to hang in there like an impossibly long
February.
I
like how some of the church kids have explained it to me over the years. I’ve
written these down. One middle school boy said, “If God told us everything at
once, we couldn’t understand it all. Our hearts are too small.”
Or
there was the teenage girl who blurted out, “I said my prayers every night, just
like I was told, and then one night I realized somebody was listening.”
Or
that wild kid who came back from the national youth rally. He said, “Rev, now I
know what you’re talking about! My parents don’t get it, but I do.” I had to
explain that’s how it is with all of us. And I added that’s the best reason I
know for sitting in church and listening to sermons week after week. Some morning
you might actually wake up.
Remember
what the Samaritan woman said? “Come and
see a man who told me everything about myself. You don’t think this is the
Messiah, do you?”
I
like how she says it. It is an invitation, to come and see. It is within the
range of her experience, so she’s not manufacturing any extra words. It is
honest with her own uncertainty, so she doesn’t have to prove anything. There
is nothing judgmental or superior about it; in fact, the Jesus who knows about her
life does not judge for it, but brings the truth into the open so it can be
healed. How refreshing!
Before
she slips away into her town, let me affirm what she does. She is not a parrot
mimicking what other people told her to say. She does not hand out packaged
answers to questions that nobody is asking. She doesn’t declare, “You better
believe or you’re going to hell.” Oh no, she avoids that kind of arrogance. In
the end, she simply asks the question about Jesus, and gives the necessary
space and time for everybody to answer it on their own.[2]
And
they do. The people in her town say, “We believe this is the Savior of the
World.”
Have
you ever had a moment when you believed that is true?
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