In Journalist Phillip Yancey’s book “The Jesus I Never Knew”
he talks of being part of a group which looked at the various film presentations
of the Jesus story alongside the gospels. One comment that Yancy makes that has
always stuck with me is this. ‘AS we
watched the movies about Jesus’…”we noticed a striking pattern: the more
unsavoury the characters, the more at ease they seemed around Jesus. People
like these found Jesus appealing: a Samaritan social outcast,(which we are
looking at today) a military officer of the tyrant Herod, a quisling tax
collector, a recent hostess of seven demons.’… “In Contrast, Jesus got a chilly
response from more respectable types. Pious Pharisees thought him uncouth and
worldly, a rich young ruler walked away shaking his head, and even the open
minded Nicodemus sought a meeting under the cover of darkness.
The thing that really hit home was Yancy’s reflection on the
church today from that… “How strange this pattern seemed, since the Christian
Church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most
suspicious of Jesus on earth. What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus
day? Why don’t sinners like being around us?’ Ouch…I thought…that hurts… right.
Yancy illustrated that point by talking of a prostitute and
drug addict who when some asked her why she hadn’t gone to the church for help responded
“Church why should I go there? They’d just make me feel even worse than I already
do!”… ouch…ouch, that really hurts doesn’t it.
My experience is that while there is some truth in that comment
and illustration, it is more a caricature of Church, not the reality… people
generally find us here and this church a welcoming and healing place. However,
we can put barriers up from inside and outside the church, real or imagined…
that can keep us and others from Jesus… and as I looked at Jesus encounter with
the nameless Samaritan women I can’t help but be aware that Jesus is not put
off by the barriers, either the big social barriers or the personal ones we put
up, he is prepared and able to cross those barriers to encounter people with
love and bring life.
We are working our way through people’s encounters with
Jesus in John’s gospel and today. So far we’ve looked at encounters ‘Under the fig tree’, and ‘at night’, today we are
going to the well. They are all encounters with Jesus in the everyday life of
the everyday people of Jesus day. They show Jesus encountering people from across
the spectrum of society in his day. They all show us Jesus offering life and
love and revealing the truth of who his is to all these people, and John
retells them that we may believe and have life.
If Nicodemus was the ultimate insider at the heart of the
religious and social life of Jesus day, the Samaritan women could be said to be
the ultimate outsider. Samaria was the
old northern kingdom of Israel, when the Assyrians came and conquered it in 722bc
they took most of the population into exile and imported other peoples from all
over the empire. Those who remained in Samaria intermarried and also there was
a intermingling of the various religions that came in. In 2 Kings 17 it tells
the story of the Assyrians sending some exiled priests to Samaria to help the
people living there to worship the God of that land. But the Jews always
considered them an unclean people. They would avoid contact with them. The
narrative in John 4 starts by saying that Jesus was almost fleeing Jerusalem
for Galilee and so ‘needs must they went through Samaria, the shortest distance
to Galilee, whereas pious Pharisees would have travelled the long route. They
would not have shared an implement for food or water which is why the Samaritan
women is surprised when Jesus asks her for a drink of water.
Secondly she was a woman.
Pious Jewish men would not normally talk with women who were not family
members in public. It was a segregated patriarchal society. Like many places
round the world today it was the women’s roll to go and get water for the
family.
Lastly she had come to Jacob’s well which wasn’t the closest
to her village, at noon, the normal time for getting water was in the cooler
hours of the day. AS her story unfolds we find that she had had five husbands
and the man she was living with at the moment was not her husband. She was
ostracized for that. Maybe she came at this time and to this well to avoid the
painful jibs and down nose looks and cold shoulder silences of the other women.
Historically it’s been hinted that this was about sexual immorality, but as
Paul Metzger says in an environment where a women’s welfare was dependant on
her marriage, and divorce was easy all
we know is that she had had a tough life. He sums it up in the classic country
song “she’d been looking for love in all the wrong places” and there would have
definitely been a barrier when it came to trusting men’s promises.
Jesus is prepared to crosses all those social barriers.
Firstly we meet a very human Jesus who is tired and worn out from his time in
Jerusalem, and he is left by the well while his disciples go to find food, and he
is thirsty in a desert land without the means of drawing water. He is prepared to ask for help. I can’t help
but reminded of the parable of the sheep and the goats, where we see that one
of the ways people encounter Jesus in the world is in the least, the hungry,
the poor, the thirsty, the imprisoned.
The woman is amazed that Jesus would even ask her this. We
may have lost some of the satire in her reply… “oh now you a Jewish man will
ask me for help when you are in need.” She throws up the barrier of conflict
between Jew and Samaritan almost like a defence mechanism. And Jesus reply changes the conversation, he
tells her that if she knew who it was talking with her she would ask him for
water and he would give her living water.
The Women can’t think beyond the physical and for a desert
people living water meant running water,
a secure source of life giving water, Psalm 1 picks that up by talking of the
people who base their lives in hearing and doing the word of God as being like
trees planted by living water, a flowing stream. Jesus is basically saying the
same thing to the Samaritan women as he does to Nicodemus. That he is the
source of spiritual life, of life for the spirit. He does not say he is the
living water because later in John 9 he says the Holy Spirit is the living
water that wells up in our lives and fills us and over flows to bring that life
to the world around us. But it is Jesus who gives that living water. It’s not
that we drink it once and that’s it we will never thirst, but rather that it is
the only truly reliable and constant source of new life of abundant life, we do
not need another, but we do need to continually allow ourselves to drink from
it and let it refresh us.
Maybe some hope has been birthed in the women as she hears
Jesus offer. She says she would like that water. Weather she understood it as
talking about new life, spiritual water or weather she simply wanted a better
more reliable water source we don’t know. But Just like with Nicodemus and
Nathaniel Jesus cuts to the heart of the matter. “Where is your husband?” It’s
not condemning it’s not the mocking of others, rather as John talked about in
John 3 it is bringing light and truth to bear so healing and transformation can
happen. Living water, flowing water was preferred in Jewish religious practise
for purification and that is what Jesus offers here. The women will later tell
people that Jesus had told here everything she had ever done. Her identity and all she was had been caught
up in these failed relationships and Jesus is saying that there is life beyond
that. Just like we may build our identity round things that don’t give us life…
what we have done in the past… our education or our work our mistakes or even
our strengths… Jesus points to a life source beyond that. Being accepted and
loved by God, finding God dwelling in us by his spirit, bringing new life a
chance of the slate wiped clean, health and wholeness, sustenance in the desert
lands of our soul.
Her perception of Jesus changes, she acknowledges that he is
a prophet and almost to deflect Jesus attention away from herself, but also
because it was one of the burning issues of the day. She asks who was right
about where one should worship, Jerusalem or the mountain where the Samaritans
do. Again Jesus isn’t willing to let
that be a barrier for life giving water… he is not going to let those cultural
and religious barriers stop this women from receiving living water. His reply
is that while the Jews know who they worship and Samaritans do not that because
God is spirit that true worshippers will worship in spirit and in truth. It’s
not the place but it is in knowing God. Again the women throws up a barrier
that of time…That this will be a future reality when the messiah comes. Her
hope as with all of Israel is that God would send a saviour, a king and Jesus
breaks through that barrier with self-disclosure that he is the messiah, the
son of God and that the time is now. He is inviting the women and us into the new
reality of knowing God in Christ.
The disciples suddenly turn up at that moment and it gets a
bit uncomfortable. But we see the women go and tell what she knew of Jesus, she
changes from being outcast and ostracised to being the source of life giving
water to her community and they come and Jesus spends a couple of days in that
village. God’s love, the life Christ has to offer, new creation cannot be
contained it will always well up and over flow even the barriers we put up,
with an invitation to receive that new life in Christ and to Come and know and
worship the God who loves us.
The question that comes to mind is where do we stand in this
story?
I couldn’t help but find myself standing with the disciples,
in a sort of uncomfortable foot shuffling, reluctant way. There is that “hey
what is Jesus doing talking with that women?” there is that “what are you doing
talking with Jesus?” thing happening. I became
aware that I put up these barriers around Jesus and his love and who he lets in
and Jesus just won’t let that stand. Jesus love and grace is for everyone, it
will even overflow the barriers of my comfort zones and prejudices and
imagination and you yours. Even though Jesus disciples would have remembered
his encounter with the women at the well, in Acts it took persecution of the
church in Jerusalem for Jesus disciples to go back to Samaria, where they found
that the gospel was readily accepted. If the spirit is that life giving water
it will move us along in its flow even beyond the barriers we want to rise to
contain it.
Secondly I can’t help but wonder as the people round Jesus
that when we feel a spiritual thirst or hunger, that we think it has to do with
going to the well to find the living water, we need to dig more and more into
God, use spiritual disciples to listen and drink of what the spirit of God has
for us. There is truth in that. But
maybe also we need to sit at the well… as well. To be in unfamiliar territory
and do the will of God, share what we have found, show the grace we have been
given, be the living water and we like Jesus will find sustenance in doing that.
Maybe today you find yourselves like the Samaritan women standing
on the outside in a desert place, even in the plush suburbs of sub-tropical
Auckland, and what you have in your life does not satisfy your thirst. What you
have built your identity is dry or leaks. Can I say Jesus is wanting to meet
with you and give you that life giving water today. He’s even willing to work
through the barriers we put up.
Finally, in way of an answer to Philip Yancy’s critique of
the church… a vision of what could be, not my own but that of Ezekiel in the
old Testament. Ezekiel is taken to the temple in Jerusalem it is the centre of
a restored and new Israel and out of the temple, which symbolised God Presence
and which Jesus had told the Pharisees he would destroy and rebuild in three
days a spring bubble up. A river starts to flow shallow at first but getting
deeper and deeper as it flows from out of the city, into the desert land beyond
it, allowing the desert to bloom and grow and have life. May we as a church
allow Jesus to take the living water of his spirit and let it flow out of us ,
pushing down the barriers that stand in it way and bring life to this place and
this city, this nation and this world that God loves and has called us to
witness to.
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