A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, February 24, 2008
John 4:1-42
There was every reason in the world for Jesus to avoid her like the plague. He was a Jew and she was a Samaritan. He was a man and she was a woman. He lived a morally upright life while she’d been married five times and now was living in sin with a man who wasn’t really her husband.
He had every reason to avoid her but he didn’t. He actually stepped across the barriers that society and religion had placed between them and risked an encounter with her. He looked through the taboos and past the labels. Jesus met her and knew her as a real person, face to face.
Why? Because Jesus came to teach us in word and deed that he can transform lives – her life, my life, your life. He had little patience with the self-satisfied and upright, with the smug and confident people who are the cream of every society. He wouldn’t dismiss them but hadn’t seen much evidence they wanted to change, as in the story of the rich young ruler who worshiped his power and possessions and didn’t have much energy left for worshiping God. Jesus showed him how to take hold of new life but the young man walked away because it cost too much to follow.
Jesus clearly said he was sent to the lost sheep and the outcasts. Decent people turned away from the beggars at the gates of the city, while Jesus ignored their open sores and jaundiced eyes and actually touched them.
Respectable people threw stones at women who sold their bodies for another’s pleasure but Jesus said, “sin is sin, just a matter of degree. Which one of you hasn’t sinned?”
When the Pharisees demanded to know why Jesus went to a banquet at the home of Levi the tax collector and sat with a whole host of sinners, Jesus answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.”
So if he’d been a typical religious leader he would have taken the long route from Jerusalem to Galilee, just outside the border with Samaria. Everyone knows there are certain places you just don’t go, because those people are bad and dangerous. Like the Hatfields and the McCoys, we may not remember why we’re enemies but we know we are.
In the earliest days Samaria had been inhabited by observant Jews. This was the land that Jacob, a Patriarch, had given to his favorite son Joseph. So, Samaritans were cousins of the Jews. But in the 8th century BCE the Assyrians invaded and the people intermarried with their occupiers. They were now mixed-race and not pure blooded Jews. In the third century BCE the Samaritans built their own temple on top of Mount Gerazim in their home region, and said that this was sufficient and there was no need to make a pilgrimage to the Jerusalem temple. The Jews destroyed that Samaritan temple in 128 BCE, and the mutual hatred deepened.
So when Jesus went from Jerusalem back to the Galilee he took the most direct route – right through the heart of Samaria. There he stopped in the village of Sychar at a small oasis that was remembered as Jacob’s well, and there he met a Samaritan woman.
We can surmise a little about her because good, upstanding women came to the well early in the morning. Women who were held in low regard were expected to wait until the heat of the day when all the good women had found refuge from the burning sun.
She was just doing what she had to do — dragging up the spilling bucket from the deep well, pouring it into two clay jars, then schlepping it back to the little house on a yoke carried across her aching shoulders. It was hard work – and like so much hard work it was considered woman’s work. She couldn’t afford the luxury of lofty thoughts and deep conversations, and most people wouldn’t even acknowledge her.
Then along came this interesting, engaging man she’d never seen before. Jesus said: “Let me show you how you can drink Living Water, so you’ll never be thirsty again.” She was ready to listen. Here was a chance to make life easier … you know, like the infomercial that tells you how to lose 30 pounds by eating only chocolate cream puffs! You don’t believe it, but you’re willing to listen.
Of course she was talking water, H20, while he was talking about a deeper thirst. She was talking about water that made life possible and he was talking about the water that makes life good. She was talking about backaches and tired feet. He was talking about everlasting life and abundance. So for several verses they were talking different languages.
She acknowledged that she didn’t have a husband. Then suddenly he showed his extraordinary knowledge of her: “Not only do you not have a husband; you’ve had five husbands and you’re not married to the man you’re now living with.” She knew instantly that he was a prophet. If he knew this, what else did he know about her? Now she was really listening. And then she realized that he was talking about her real thirst, her real spiritual dryness and brittleness.
He seemed to see her in all her vulnerability, but didn’t judge or reject her. Instead, He told her more about the coming of Messiah. Then he added that soon the argument about the Jerusalem temple and the Mount Gerazim temple wouldn’t matter at all. For with the coming of Messiah all the old barriers and boundaries would crumble. Those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.
This is an important story in the Gospel. Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman longer than to anyone else in all the Gospel record. She is the first character in the Gospel of John to whom Jesus fully reveals himself. And her heart is changed. She becomes a missionary, an evangelist, a speaker of the Good News.
[See Barbara Brown Taylor “Reflections on the Lectionary,” Christian Century, February 12, 2008, pg. 19]
Then the story gets even bigger because this woman went and told others about this man she had met, and then John tells us (verse 39-42):
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”
• because Jesus dared to walk across the border and come to them – foreigners and outcasts that they were;
• because he met the woman at the well and guided her,
• because she believed and told others, and
• because they then met him face to face, many were welcomed and the Gospel was spread.
That’s really what happens when we find the “living water.” We go and tell others, we show others, what we believe. And they show others and they show others and so the Gospel spreads. The Gospel is about transforming our hearts. And when our hearts change so do our passions, our priorities, our prejudices, our pastimes, maybe even our policies and our politics. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote:
Only through an inner spiritual transformation do we gain the strength to fight vigorously the evils of the world in a humble and loving spirit. The transformed nonconformist, moreover, never yields to the passive sort of patience which is an excuse to do nothing.
By this he means – when your heart is changed you can’t sit still. You have to get up and do something to show what you believe. You can tell when someone has met Jesus face to face. Because that encounter turns your world upside down. Scripture speaks with one voice: you go out and act in love – act in love – toward your sisters and brothers. The author of the first letter of John says bluntly: those who say they love God, whom they haven’t seen, but don’t love their neighbor, whom they have seen, are liars. (1 John 4:20)
Sometimes our hearts are changed by something we read or something we see from a distance. Sometimes our lives are transformed by something we hear on the radio or see on the television. But not often.
Instead we’re changed when we encounter another, face-to-face, who seems to see into our soul, who challenges our assumptions, who embodies God’s tender concern.
You may be familiar with the National Public Radio segment called “Story Corps,” a series a real life stories recorded all over the country. Just last Friday the story came from George Hill, a Marine Corps veteran who became addicted to drugs and alcohol, and found himself homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, homeless for a dozen years. He said he would watch people get on buses and think, “Those are normal people.”
One day he was sitting on the plastic bag in which he carried all his possessions and along came another homeless man who had rags tied on his feet. And his hair was matted in two big, nasty dreads. Then, Hill said: “Out of all the people on skid row, he looked down at me and reached in his pocket and pulled out a dollar in change. It’s all he had and he gave it to me and said, ‘Here, man. I feel sorry for you.’ And he shuffled away.” Something about that moment changed everything for Hill, he says.
“I just said, ‘Oh, no, no. I’m going to get some help.'” With the money the man gave him, Hill says he took a bus to a hospital psych unit. And his life was transformed – saved, really. Hill has now been off the streets for 10 years. He has a job with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and is pursuing a degree in computer information systems at Cal State University. (Click here)
I’ve thought about George Hill since Friday. Seems to me he’s a lot like the Samaritan woman at the well – hungry and thirsty and broken.
I’ve thought even more about the man who wrapped his own feet in rags and gave George Hill enough change for bus fare. Seems to me he’s a lot Like Jesus.