Text: John 4:3-42
Jesus invites us to draw our life from his Spirit of Living Water.
Introduction
Last week’s reading was about a conversation with Nicodemus, a Jewish leader, in the middle of the night. We’re sort of kept in the dark, so to speak, as to how Nicodemus responds to Jesus.
Today, we also have another conversation with Jesus, one that takes place in broad daylight. This time, we see plain as day how the conversation plays out and the shocking invitation to draw our life from his Spirit of Living Water.
Living Water flows across boundaries
Jesus is travelling between Galilee and Judea, with Samaria lying between them.
The Samaritans were descendants of the old Northern Kingdom of Israel, conquered by the Assyrians, who ran a mass resettlement programme across their empire. This left Samaria as a cultural and religious melting pot — including some who still worshipped the God of Jacob. They had their own temple at Mount Gerazim, destroyed about 130 years earlier by the Hasmonean ruler John Hyrcanus.
So Jews and Samaritans didn’t get on. Despite both claiming descent from Jacob, the ideological and theological differences ran deep — deep enough that Jews wouldn’t normally use anything a Samaritan had touched, like a water jar.
Jesus chooses this route anyway. The disciples head into town for food while Jesus rests at a well, where he meets the Samaritan woman. That history alone explains her surprise at being asked for a drink.
But there was also a cultural gender divide. In the first century, a man speaking to an unknown woman was at best contested, at worst off-limits — which is probably why the disciples return to find the two of them deep in conversation and say nothing, but think plenty.
When he speaks of living water, Jesus could also be referring to running water, a stream or a river.
Living in Gore, we were often aware of the Mataura River. Was it running high, or low, clear or dirty? Was it safe to swim in at certain times?
The thing with a river is that over time it shifts and changes, depositing sediment here, carving out a channel there. To stand and look at it you wouldn’t know, but when you look at survey maps that show historical property boundaries, with one farm on one side and a different farm on the other, and compare that with new aerial photos, you see how the river has changed course and now part of one farm is on the other side of the river and vice versa.
Living water is not contained by our human-defined boundary markers.
So it is the Spirit of Jesus. Jesus sees the world differently than we do. The world he loves is a big place.
We Kiwis like to think of ourselves as a reasonably egalitarian bunch; we don’t have a formal social hierarchy, as such. But maybe that belief about ourselves makes it harder to see some of the boundaries that do exist.
This story means we have to ask ourselves, who are the people I’d prefer not to associate with? What cultural or historical boundaries may I have that Jesus want’s to bridge?
That could be as insidious as racial bias that we’ve never been challenged on, unconsciously stereotyping people. Or without thinking, we assign different value on a person’s skill based on their gender.
It could also be as innocent as a lack of confidence or drive to build a relationship with someone much younger or older than ourselves.
It could be theological, like for the Jews and Samaritans. That maybe, subtly, we may think that God is more pleased, and therefore, more present with a church that looks and thinks like our church as opposed to others that worship very differently, or even believe parts of faith quite differently.
We are not to let our differences with others, whatever they may be, get in the way of what God wants to do.
She came to the well to draw water, but instead, found living water that flows over boundaries
Jesus draws us out of our wells of pain and hurt
As we watch the conversation unfold, the woman is on a journey of understanding. Like Nicodemus and others in John’s Gospel, she at first misunderstands Jesus — where exactly was he planning to conjure this living water that quenches thirst forever?
Then Jesus shows his hand. He is greater than Jacob, but not in the way she expected. With prophetic insight, he reveals that he knows her story: five husbands, and the man she lives with now is not her husband.
Here we need to be careful. It is Jesus who knows this woman’s full story — we only have what John has given us, and there is much we don’t know.
There is a long history of reading scandal into this moment, as though five husbands make her morally bankrupt, or coming to the well at midday marks her as an outcast. I’d suggest the scene is dramatic enough without it.
Wells were visited as and when needed, and given ancient life expectancy, it is entirely plausible — probable, even — that her husbands had died, and that she now lives under a benefactor’s care rather than in disgrace.
Jesus is the only one who truly knows any person’s story. We should be slow with our assumptions.
Notice too that Jesus doesn’t reveal her past to shame her. He never calls her to repentance, and he never mentions sin — remarkable for someone who elsewhere never shies away from it. What he does instead, I think, is give voice to her brokenness. Her story is one of pain, heartbreak, grief and loss. And that is the true need Jesus has come to meet.
Teresa and I are friends with a couple who were, for a time, missionaries in a place where infant mortality rates have historically been very high. So high that new mothers were not sure it was worth putting all the effort into bonding with their infant, only to have them die.
So they wouldn’t. They would make sure they were fed and nourished, but would do everything they could to keep them at arm’s length emotionally. This sounds shocking to us, but for them, it was survival.
People can have their fill of pain, so much so that it changes who we are as human beings, further fracturing our already cracked image of the divine.
We all carry a story. A story that at times has more than its fair share of brokenness, pain, shame and loneliness. We go about our lives, frayed, cracked, maybe shattered.
Jesus meets us at the well; he sees our story. He sees our brokenness and offers to pour the living water of his Spirit, the loving, healing, abiding Spirit of God, into the cracked and crumbling vessel of our lives. To transform us, to lead us into a deeper understanding of who God is, and who God is forming us to be. Living water, new life, is here now.
She came to the well to draw water, but instead, Jesus drew her out, giving voice to her brokenness.
Jesus draws us into the worshipping community
Far from being a problematic figure, John presents her as a model disciple.
Like Nicodemus, she was on a journey of understanding, but she is quick to catch on. Ephraem the Syrian, who lived about 300 years after Jesus, said this:
“First she caught sight of a thirsty man, then a Jew, then a Rabbi, afterwards a prophet, last of all the Messiah.”
She leaves her jar at the well and hurries off to tell the townspeople about her experience. She came looking for something she thought she needed, but she found something of far greater value.
This is what I love about the picture we chose to study this week in our Lent Reflection Group. It focuses on her response to the revelation.
She becomes the first evangelist, carrier of the Good News, in John’s Gospel. As a result, the Samaritan community is drawn into the story.
Gone is the old practice of not sharing things in common.
The conversation that quickly debated the right way and the right place to worship God was put to rest when all gathered around Jesus to eat and drink.
A community worshipping God not in the Jewish temple, not on the Samaritans’ mountain, but in the Spirit of Christ.
The Communion Table is a great leveller. The first-century Roman Society was very obviously class-based. There were nuances, of course, but Caesar was at the top, often the object of worship, then down through politicians, nobles, administrators, ordinary people and slaves.
People from nearly every layer of this hierarchy were drawn to the living water offered by Jesus. They followed the practice of Jesus and subverted this hierarchy by eating and worshipping together, radically disturbing the social and cultural order.
It doesn’t matter if you’d had faith for fifty years or fifty minutes, if you’ve wrestled with the writings of sharp theological minds or wrestled with the simple truth that God so loved the world that he gave Jesus.
All of us are equal at the Lord’s table.
When we come close to Christ at the table, we are also drawing near to every other person he’s inviting.
When we gather at communion, we join with the church, universal, and across time. Not just with those who do things or believe things similarly to us.
From Pentecostal to Catholic, from Eastern Orthodox to Adventists and all across the theological spectrum.
As much as our different practices, theologies, and structures matter, they are not the centre or what defines us.
Jesus is the centre, he is what holds us together.
At the table, we are all hungry and thirsty for what only God can give: Grace, belonging, healing, renewal and transformation.
She came to the well to draw water, but instead, Jesus drew her into a worshipping community.
Closing
Jesus invites us to draw our life from his Spirit of living water, which flows across boundaries, draws us out of our wells of pain and hurt, and into the worshipping community around him.
Amine