Materials
Real World Encounters with Jesus in the Gospel of John
The Savior Of The World
John 4:1-42
by R. Todd Bouldin
There comes a moment in all of our lives when we have to face the truth about ourselves. But you can never find yourself by looking at yourself – you just can’t bear that much truth. But God can -- That is why you will discover that there is a certain grace in knowing a God who knows all about you.
As you read the first few chapters of John's Gospel, you slowly become aware that he is presenting you with a series of contrasts to make a series of points about who Jesus is and what it means to "believe in Him." Today's passage gives us a huge contrast with last week' story about Nicodemus.
Nicodemus represented all that was held to be the best in 1st century orthodox Judaism: he was educated, a Pharisee, part of the religious leadership as a member of the ruling council, the Sanhedrin. He comes to Jesus quizzically, almost academically, and learns to his surprise that what he needs to do is "to be born from above," to be "born of the water and The Spirit," if he is to enter a true relationship with God. The Samaritan woman at Jacob's Well is as different as you can get from Nicodemus. She had, says one commentator, "three strikes against her already: she was a Samaritan, a woman, and a sexual sinner" (L. Morris, The Gospel According to John, NICNT); whereas Nicodemus, we might say, thought he was 3-0 and was about to walk into The Kingdom. The woman represented everything that good orthodox Jews like Nicodemus "wholeheartedly despised." Jesus crossed every barrier of racism, gender, nationalism and religious distinction to reach this Samaritan woman.
Samaritans were ethnically only half-Jewish, what remained after the Northern Kingdom of Israel was repopulated with transplanted immigrants by the Assyrians after they over-ran the area 700 years earlier. And when the remnant of the Southern Kingdom of Judah returned from Exile in Babylon around 450 BC, Ezra and Nehemiah rejected any contribution by the Samaritans to the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple. So the Samaritans went ahead and built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, 30 miles to the north near the ancient shrine of Shechem. The relationship between Jews and Samaritans reached rock bottom around 108 BC when one of the Hasmonean kings of Judea destroyed the Samaritan temple.
So in Jesus' day, no good Jew had any more contact than needed with Samaritans: they were ritually unclean, their worship was polytheistic and highly suspect, and the more fastidious Jew would not travel through Samaria to get from Judea to Galilee, but would cross the Jordan River and travel up the East Bank instead.
Jesus, by contrast, “had” to travel through Samaria and stops to rest at Jacob's Well at noon. Jesus needs water, and He shows no hesitation in asking the woman for a drink. This request is significant on several levels. It first is noteworthy that Jesus begins His ministry with this woman by affirming that she has something to give to Him. He asks her for something. Jesus also is doing something quite unusual here – He, a religious leader, is speaking to a woman and a Samaritan in public. The rabbis would not speak to women in public, even their own wives, more than absolutely necessary. But what is more, Jesus is ready to drink from her waterpot, and to break down racial and gender barriers that had existed for centuries.
Jesus will cross any boundary, meet anyone, anywhere, to bring them into relationship with God. He will not be put off by ethnic distinctions, gender differences, religious disputes, or moral deficiencies. This woman is probably an outcast even in her own village, given what we learn of her marital history - which probably accounts for her being alone at the well at noon, instead of coming with other women to get water in the cool of the evening. But to Jesus she is no threat, just another person in need, and John wanted the church to be perfectly clear that Jesus is willing to cross any barrier to know and love people.
The great news of the Gospel is that life in relationship to God is open to any and all of us; there are no personality types or behavioral histories that rule us out. In every case Jesus is prepared to come and meet us where we are, to speak our language, to find just the right metaphor for our situation, so that we can find life, real life, abundant life, spiritual life.
If Nicodemus needed to be led out of his confusion and to find humility, the woman needed to find the satisfaction that had eluded her in all her human relationships, which only Jesus and The Spirit could bring her. So to her, the metaphor Jesus uses for life in relationship with God is different from Nicodemus' "new birth;" for her it is to drink "living water" and never thirst again (John 4:10-14).
The woman seems confused at first, reacting as Nicodemus did in an obtuse way, taking literally what Jesus means metaphorically. But His meaning is simple: to "believe in Him" is like receiving from Him a gift of life; as water is essential to life in a desert land, so what God offers us through Jesus is essential to spiritual life - life in relationship with God. The gift is "living water" - meaning not only "running water" (which is how the woman takes it literally), but an ongoing source that does not dry up, a spring that wells up continuously. Jesus responds, “Everyone who draws water from this well has to keep coming back for more, but whoever drinks the water that I have to give to him shall never thirst. It will be a spring inside him welling up to eternal life.” “Sir,” she says, “give me this water so that I can stop making this trip and never thirst again.”
We all are more like this woman than we might think. We all have our moments when we so deeply crave something that will satisfy our thirsts but will leave us dry later. I love Chinese food, but I often find that I can have the three entrée special at Panda Express with rice and be hungry an hour later. That’s how it is with so many of the things we crave – we all have indulged and still come up starving.
The promise that goes with the water, then and now, is that those who drink from Jesus will "never thirst.” Some of them are buried so far down that we are totally unaware of them. It is to these thirsts, buried deep within us that keep coming back, that the stream of God now flows.
Jesus then redirects the conversation and we discover why she makes this trip alone and not with other women from the city. “Go get your husband and come back here,” Jesus says. She responds, “I have no husband.” Jesus reveals a bit more of His divine nature by saying, “Yes, I know that. You’ve been married five times before and now you have a live-in partner without a marriage license.” We usually assume that this means she has been married and divorced five times. It is possible, I suppose, that she is the original “black widow” that buries everyone she marries and this last guy is afraid to get married. More likely, however, our assumption is correct, in which case she clearly has violated all the norms of honor and shame and the sanctity of marriage. When the rabbis spoke of divorce, they allowed that it might be possible for a woman to remarry as many as two or three times—five is outrageous, as is the circumstance of a sixth man who is not her husband.
One of the first claims John makes about this Jesus who is Messiah is that He knows the heart of people. Nathaniel is the first person to call Jesus The Son of God in this Gospel, and he does so after Jesus calls him a person “in whom there is no deceit.” Nathaniel replied, “Where did you get to know me?” (John 1:48). John then goes on to say in John 2:25 that Jesus knew all people and knows what is inside of them.
That again is the testimony of this woman that causes the whole town to believe – “He told me everything that I have ever done” (John 4:39). Jesus can peer right through the religious self of Nicodemus and see that he needed a spiritual transformation, and Jesus could peer right through to this woman’s unquenched thirsts and know she needed more than a drink of water – she needed an ongoing, ever-flowing stream.
Jesus too can peer right through to our hidden shame, and loneliness, and tragic sin. He knows everything that I want to hide, and He can bring those deep things to light and deal with them. With the Samaritan woman, in a couple of brief remarks, He brought out her history of broken marriages and her current "living in sin." How much of a mess must her inner life have been after six men? How much did she need to find someone and something that was real, reliable, that would not fall apart, that would satisfy her needs? Jesus implies that she was far from blameless, but she undoubtedly knew that; she also knew she was lonely, suspicious, that she bristled at being questioned, that she tried to change the subject when it became too personal and uncomfortable.
All great literature has this moment when the character realizes who they really are. We see the shock of recognition over and over again in the novels of Joseph Conrad. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz lays dying, and he realizes the person he has been, and cries out, “Oh the horror! The horror!” Jean Valjean in the musical Les Miserables sings out when he is convicted of his guilt, “Who am I? I am Jean Valjean, 24601.” The classic movie The Wizard of Oz is basically a story of a journey of four people to find out who they really are.
But you can only discover who you really are when grace has first discovered you. Jesus offered the woman the living water before the woman admitted the truth about herself. That is how confession and repentance happen. God finds me long before I can find myself.
Even when the water is offered, knowing yourself as God knows you can be quite frightening. The clairvoyance of Jesus leads her immediately to want to change the subject again. “’Let’s not talk about me, let’s talk religion,’ she says. ‘Your people say, only in Jerusalem does worship count, ours says worship is just fine here on Mt. Gerizim. What do you say?’” Jesus wants her to know that the old question of location really isn’t the right question. He says, “The hour is coming and now is, when the true worshippers will worship The Father in Spirit and in Truth, for such The Father seeks to worship Him. God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth.”
We too easily hear these words without understanding that Jesus is still using double-talk language. The interpretation of this passage has always been that worship is no longer about performing religious externals at a temple or church building somewhere. Worship is now about internals—it’s about correct attitude, it’s about the heart of the individual. Or for some, this emphasis upon worship “in Spirit and in Truth” means right attitude and right thinking. Truth means being doctrinally correct when you worship. I suggest that such an interpretation of Spirit and Truth still leaves the whole business of worship on the side of human performance and that’s precisely what Jesus is arguing against. This is not a trade off of religious externals for religious internals.
Jesus is talking about a whole new understanding of the location of God in worship. “Worship in Spirit and Truth” is capital S, capital T. God is Spirit, Jesus declares. True worship is a participation in the nature of God as Spirit. But remember, Truth is also personified in John’s gospel. Jesus is the true Light in chapter one. He declares, “I AM the Way, and the TRUTH, and the Life” in chapter 14 and in that same chapter refers to “The Spirit of Truth.” Worship in Spirit and Truth is a declaration about God’s new level of Presence and participation in and with us, not a warning of worship not performed with heart and doctrinal correctness.
Don’t you find it interesting, so say the least, that centuries after Christ’s coming, people still want to make worship a matter of time and place and human performance? People still want to choose up buildings and times and doing it right and then fight among ourselves over who is better than whom? I believe this passage illustrates that some people who get so caught up in questions about the right places and locations, the right worship and the right church, pretending to know where God is and is not, may just be trying to change the subject. It’s a whole lot more comfortable to talk about attending where the right worship is than where your heart is. The invitation to worship in Spirit and in Truth is an invitation to be in The Presence of God, this God who shows up with people we would never expect, even people who are different than us.
Where is The God-Presence this morning? He is wherever The Spirit blows, and wherever The Truth as Person is present. Something about what Jesus just said rang true at a very deep place. The woman began to ask, “Can He really be The Messiah?” And then, in one of my favorite moments in the Gospels, Jesus looks at her and says the most startling words she had ever heard, “I AM (is) the One speaking to you.”
And to you. The Messiah who looks into the hearts of people and knows them also is speaking to you and knows you. He knows the truth about you. He can see right through to all the pain, the loneliness, the confusion, and the unquenched thirsts. But Jesus also knows a deeper truth about you: that you are forgiven and eternally loved. No matter who you are, Jesus wants to abide with you. Not your gender, nor your race, nor your sexual confusion, nor your divorce, nor your loneliness, nor your sin – none of these are your identity. Your identity is now caught up in one eternal fact: The God who made you also knows you, and even knowing what He knows, loves you, and now He wants to abide with you.
When the woman went back into the city that day, she was a changed person. They all knew she was a sinner, but she had withdrawn to a lonely life where she hoped no one would notice or care. But now her testimony was that she had met a man who “told me everything I have ever done” (John 4:39). On the surface, that is an odd testimony. Because of the way Jesus told the truth about her life, many others came to believe. Why? What is so great about a person who knows everything about you? That is kind of scary! But here was a Man in whom there was both truth…and grace (John 1:14). And despite the fact that He knew what was in their secret drawers, and in their hearts, they invited Him to abide with them. Something about a person who knows you completely and yet loves you completely always does draw us.
More importantly, the Messiah is drawn to us. Jesus stayed two days with a bunch of Samaritans. Here was The Son of God eating, drinking and sleeping among people who had gotten it all wrong. Their worship was all wrong doctrinally. Their lifestyles were all wrong morally. Their blood was all wrong racially. And Jesus did not look over any of this – He knew them better than they knew themselves. But here He was, The Messiah of God, not down in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, but here in their midst. And when He left, they all knew that this Jesus was not just The Savior of the Jews, or any gender, race or nation – this Man “truly is The Savior of the world” (John 4:42).
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