March 12, 2023

19A Third Sunday in Lent

The Woman at the Well

GOSPEL

Jesus came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

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.”  John 4:5-42

SERMON

The woman featured in this morning’s gospel has a history.  You know, things done and left undone, some good and some not so good. She lives with guilt and regrets, fears, wounds, and sorrows.  She is a woman with a past.

Her past is one that is presented as one of promiscuity.   The evidence?  She has had five spouses and is now living unmarried with a sixth man.  She was looked at by her neighbors, but not seen.  She was labeled yet remained nameless.  She remains unknown to everyone.  Everyone, that is, except Jesus.

How easy it is to forget that women of her day had very little choice or control over their own lives. If she is divorced, it is because the men divorced her.  As a woman she had no right to divorce.  That was exclusively a male prerogative.  Maybe it was a just divorce, but often it was not.  If she is not divorced, then she has suffered the death of five husbands.  She was five times left-alone, five times nameless, faceless, and of no value, five times starting over.  Maybe some divorced her.  Maybe some died.  We don’t know.   In either case divorce or death, it is a tragedy for her life. 

So, let’s not be too quick to judge.  We don’t know the details of her past.  Maybe we don’t need to.  Maybe it is enough that she mirrors for us our own lives.  We are all Samaritan women. Are we not?

People like her, people like us, people with a past, often live in fear of being found out.  It is not just the fear that another will know the truth, the facts, about us, but that they will do so without ever really seeing us and without ever really knowing us.  And from this perch they will, with very little knowing us for who we really are, judge us, and from this same perch unilaterally define the nature of their relationship to us, if any relationship at all.    

We all thirst to be seen and to be known at a deep intimate level.  We all want to pour our lives out to one who knows us, to let them drink from the depths of our very being.  That is exactly what Jesus is asking of this woman with a past when he says, “Give me a drink.”  It is an invitation to let herself out, to let herself be known and to be loved as she had never been known and loved before.

To be found out, however, without being known, leaves us dry and desolate.  It leaves us to live a dehydrated life thirsting for something more, something different, but always returning to the same old wells.

The story of our quest for water is as old as the story of the Exodus.  God commanded Moses to strike the rock with his staff and life-giving water flowed from the rock to quench the thirst of a people wandering in the wilderness.  

We all go down to some well. For some, like the Samaritan woman, it is the marriage well.  For others it is the well of perfectionism.  Some go to the well of hiding and isolation.  Others will draw from the well of power and control.  Too many will drink from wells of addiction.  Many live at the well of busyness and denial.   Some live at the well of self-congratulations and empty pride.  

We could each name the wells from which we drink.  Day after day, month after month, year after year we go to the same well to drink.  We arrive hoping our thirst will be quenched.  We leave as thirsty as when we arrived only to return the next day.   For too long we have drunk from the well that never satisfies, the well that can never satisfy.  Husband after husband – this is the well to which the Samaritan woman has returned.

There is another well, however.   It is the well that is Jesus Christ.  It is a well whose water washes us clean of our past.  It is the well from which new life and new possibilities spring forth.  It is the well that frees us from the patterns and habits that keep us living as thirsty people.

That is the well the Samaritan woman in this morning’s gospel found.  She had intended to go to the same old well she had gone to for years, the well her ancestors and their flocks drank from.  Today is different.  Jesus holds before her two realities of her life; the reality of what is and the reality of what might be.  He brings her past to the light of the noon day sun.  “You have had five husbands,” he says, “and the one you have now is not your husband.”  It is not a statement of condemnation but simply a statement of what is.  He tells her everything she has ever done.  She has been found out.

But it doesn’t end there.  Jesus is more interested in her future than in her past. He wants to satisfy her thirst more than judge her history.  Jesus knows her.  He looks beyond her past and sees a woman dying of thirst; a woman thirsting to be loved, to be seen, to be accepted, to be included, to be forgiven, to be known.  Her thirst will never be quenched by the external wells of life.  Nor will ours.  Jesus says so.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty.”  This is the living water of new life, new possibilities, and freedom from the past.  This living water is the life of Jesus himself.  It became in the Samaritan woman “a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”  She discovered within herself the interior well and left her water jar behind.  She had now become the well from which Christ’s life flows.

It is not enough, however, to hear her story or even believe her testimony.  Until we come to the well of Christ’s life within us, we will continue returning to the dry wells of our life.  We will continue to live thirsty.  We will continue to live in fear of being found out.  So, I wonder, from what well do you drink?  How much longer will you carry those heavy water jars?  

There is another well, one that promises life, one by which we are known and loved.  Come to a new well.  Come to the well of Christ’s life, Christ’s love, Christ’s presence that is already in you.  Come to the well that is Christ himself and then drink deeply.  Drink deeply until you become the One whom you have drunk.  Yes, drink deeply until you become the One whom you have drunk.

Yes, eat His broken body and drink deeply His blood poured out, until you become the One whom you have eaten and drunk.  This heart and mind, soul and spirit satisfying refreshment is, I believe, the best resource, and a privileged healing resource.  It is available to us during every difficult and stress filled time of uncertainty.  Those times that otherwise leaves little option to death-dealing worry, anxiety, and fear. 

Although we rarely note it, a key aspect of this story is that Jesus was also one who was thirsty. This shatters the image of God as we ordinary picture Him.  We, who usually turn to God for help, are faced with Jesus, the Christ, sitting thirsty by a well without a bucket. Then, along comes a feisty Samaritan woman. The Savior of the world makes a request: “Give me a drink.”

In an inside-out image of the God who draws water from stone, the vulnerable Jesus must ask for life-giving water and acceptance, and he does it at the well that symbolizes her heritage of faith in the God of Abraham. Once they have begun their conversation, the tables turn again and Jesus reveals that the divine thirst is not for water, but for a life-giving relationship with humanity.  We remember that Jesus repeats this passionate desire and request as He hangs upon the wood of the cross and cries out, “I thirst.”  Yes, we thirst for a God and discover that the God for whom we thirst, is a God who thirsts for us.

March 12, 2023