I read somewhere that today’s passage contains enough material for a lifetime of preaching. I bet I could write a 100 sermons on today’s lesson and never scratch the surface of the truth that abounds in this story. In addition to being the longest conversation that Jesus has with anyone in the gospels, every verse packs a punch. And to make matters a little more cumbersome, today’s lesson cannot be properly understood without holding it alongside the scripture we read last week – the story of Nicodemus.
To refresh your memory –
Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish establishment, seeks Jesus out in the middle
of the night and engages in a conversation.
Like the Samaritan woman who struggles to understand what Jesus means by
“living water,” Nicodemus struggles to understand what it means to be born
again. But unlike Nicodemus, Jesus’
conversation with the woman at the well happens in broad daylight for all to
see.
Unlike Nicodemus, the
Samaritan woman is not given a name. And
unlike Nicodemus, we can assume, based on her marital history, she is not
respected in her community. Even more,
this Samaritan woman is representative of a people who have been at odds with
the Jewish people for centuries.
And
unlike the story of Nicodemus, it is Jesus who initiates the conversation. It is Jesus who goes out of his way to encounter
the woman at the well. While Jesus is
certainly attentive to religious people like Nicodemus, he is most concerned
with those outside the religious community – like this Samaritan woman.
Jesus is most concerned
with those who the religious people have left out of the salvation story. And as followers of Jesus, we are called to
do likewise – to learn that names of those who society has left out of the
story.
Jesus starts the
conversation with this woman when he says plainly, “Give me a drink.” And this is the point when the woman looks up
from the well, looks to see if anyone is behind her, points to herself and
says, “You talkin’ to me? Sir, I’m a
nobody. No one wants to talk to me – let
alone a Jew who despises me and my people.”
I imagine the woman at the well must have thought Jesus mistook her for
some else.
But Jesus assures the
woman that he is well aware of who she is.
He tells her that she has been married four times and the man she is
with now is not her husband. At this point
the woman is blown away. But she doesn’t
hide like Adam and Eve do when their sin is uncovered.
Rather, she is quite
impressed and is drawn into a deeper conversation. How wonderful?! Instead of being ashamed of herself when her
sins are exposed before God, she is drawn closer to God. I think this is something we religious people
can learn from. I hope your recitation
of the Decalogue during Lent serves to draw you closer to God.
Because Jesus knows
everything about the Samaritan woman, she starts to recognize Jesus as some
sort of prophet. And like one does when
they meet a clergy person, she asks a religious question. She asks, are we supposed to worship on this
mountain or in the Temple in Jerusalem?
Again, Jesus moves the conversation in a new direction.
Jesus tells her about a
day when all will be able to worship the Father in spirit and truth. Jesus tells her that true worship isn’t about
who has the best religion, true worship isn’t about whose church is in the best
location, true worship isn’t about who has the prettiest building. As former Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold
said, true worship is about “an openness to love at every level of our being.”
And just when Jesus
finishes his teaching on true worship, on being open to love at every level,
his disciples come back and wonder why Jesus is even talking to someone
like that woman. Meanwhile, as the
disciples are steaming over Jesus' apparent lack of concern for social customs and
cultural norms, the woman at the well rushes back to the city to tell her
friends about Jesus.
She is so excited she
forgets her bucket of water; she leaves behind what she thought she needed to
live. The outcast Samaritan woman is
doing the work that Jesus called his disciples to do – to drop everything and
follow him. Like the disciples, how easily
do we forget that we, too, were once on the outside looking in? And this woman serves as a powerful reminder
of what it was like to discover that nothing
– gender, race, sexuality, nationality – can separate us from the love of God.
What happens next is
perhaps the biggest challenge for me in today’s lesson. After the woman at the well invites the
people to meet Jesus she says, “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” What?
How can you be a messenger of the gospel when you aren’t even sure who
Jesus is?
All she knows about Jesus
is that he knows everything about her.
But this is enough for her to get excited about telling others about
Jesus. When her friends inquire further,
she simply says, “I can’t really put Jesus into words, but I want you to come
and see this Jesus.”
What if evangelism was
that easy? What if evangelism wasn’t
about having it all figured out so you can download your program onto someone
else? What if we didn’t make talking
about Jesus so complicated? What if we
simply said, “my encounter with Jesus has changed my life, and I want you to
experience what I’ve experienced?”
As we have been studying
in Episcopal Church 101, our Anglican witness to the gospel doesn’t require
that you have it all figured out before you make a commitment to follow Jesus. The idea here is that even our best words can
never fully capture what we experience when we follow Jesus, our best words
fall short of describing the infinite truth found in God.
But there is good news. Our
salvation doesn’t hinge on how well we can articulate our faith in Jesus. Rather, our salvation begins and ends with
the truth Jesus knows us and loves us fully – the good parts, the messy parts,
the confused parts, the bad parts, the sad parts, the happy parts.
And the truth of God’s
unconditional love in Christ is what gives reason to our faith. Our commitment to follow Jesus grows out of
our knowledge that God loves us right where we are and for who we are. We are compelled to tell others about Jesus
because Jesus knows us and loves us fully for who we are right now.
Ours is a faith where God
restores us not by demanding that we change and be more like Jesus. Rather, ours is a faith where God changes us by
becoming like us – humanity is redeemed through the image of Christ in us. God restores us by entering into our human
experience to show us how humanity was made to love. As Athanasius said, “God became what we are
so that we might become like God.”
A parishioner shared with
me a conversation about a friend’s preschool aged daughter who was dealing with
the death of her little brother. The daughter
began by saying that she doesn’t miss her little brother because she sees him
in her dreams and knows that he is always with her.
And finally she said
this, “I never really knew my little brother, but I know he knows me.” That’s it!
This simple sentence from a child captures the mystery of our
faith. Our faith is not so much rooted
in how well we know Jesus as much it is rooted in how well Jesus
knows us.
Beloved, this mystery of
our faith is the living water that Jesus is talking about. Even though we often fail to recognize the
source of our life and salvation, we can put our trust in the truth that the
source of our life and salvation knows us and loves us more intimately that we
can ever know and love ourselves. This
is living water because this is a truth that we mortal beings need to hear
again and again in order to live.
Through Jesus, God
reveals to us that we are fully known and fully loved – not for what we have
done or for what we have left undone – but for who God made us to be. Like the Samaritan woman, we can appear
before God in broad daily light – not hiding any of our undesirable parts or
boasting about our good deeds – and trust that God will love what he sees.
Beloved, when you hear
Jesus say to you, “give me a drink,” I hope you hear Jesus saying, “I want you
to give your life to me. I want you to
give your life to me so that you are filled with the unchangeable truth that
you are fully known and fully loved.”
Amen.
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