Third Sunday in Lent | Göttinger Predigten im Internet

John 4:5-42 | Hubert Beck |

selected verses below

Jesus said, “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.” v. 10

Jesus said, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” v. 14

Jesus said, “Believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 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 is seeking such people 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 (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” vv. 21-26

Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version.

WATER AND SPIRIT, PROMISE AND FULFILLMENT

Twenty-first century readers or hearers of this lengthy report given by John of Jesus’ encounter with a woman at the well in Samaria will miss some very significant dimensions of this text if they are unaware of a number of major factors intermingling with each other in this reading, all of them important for an understanding of this account.

SOME OF THOSE MAJOR FACTORS ARE . . . . . . .

Firstly, it would have been rare to hear of or to see any woman coming to draw water from the well at “the sixth hour.” That was the time when the highest heat of the day would have been experienced. Times near dawn or dusk were more likely times for drawing water since those hours were considerably cooler than the mid-day hour. The woman’s appearance at this unusual time, then, may suggest that she was, herself, considered an outcast because of her multiple marriages. Those multiple marriages may have taken place for a number of reasons, though. They do not necessarily signify anything of a sinful nature. Nevertheless they may have placed her into a less than praiseworthy situation in her society and that may have been the reason for her to appear all by herseslf at the well instead of at a more ordinary time when women gathered there in groups for their rations of water. Her solo appearance gave the opportunity to have the intensive one-on-one discussion with Jesus though.

Jesus’ appearance in Samaria is also very strange. It was a shortcut for going from Judea to Galilee through Samaria, to be sure. But Jews nearly always used a roundabout route to get to and from those places because of the intense repugnance that each ethnic group felt for the other. So Jesus was truly a “fish out of water” when he stopped his journey there in the midst of Samaria for some rest and refreshment.

Moreover, the exchange that took place between the Samaritan woman and Jesus out in the open air was almost unheard of, both because men and women were not to have conversation with one another in public places, it being proper only in private places, and also because a Jewish man would never think of speaking with a Samaritan in general – certainly not with a woman in such an open way as we hear about in this text.

In addition to all that, a Jew considered using utensils like the Samaritan woman’s drinking cup to be forbidden inasmuch as everything Samaritan was considered to be a forbidden item, not to be even touched much less used for drinking. So Jesus was transgressing Jewish laws right and left in the narrative at hand.

Now why was all this so? Because Samaria as a territory and the Samaritans living there as a citizenry were considered to be even worse than mere aliens to Jews. In short, they were downright enemies of truth. That was so because the people living there were a mixed race with roots dating back to the days of the Babylonian captivity when all rightfully named Jews were removed from the land save for a rag-tag bunch of people with little Jewish allegiance who were left behind. The departure of the Jews in general left a void of population in general, so governors repopulated the area with gentiles of various sorts. The religious mixture resulting from all this, therefore, was based on a small station of people having a Jewish awareness mixed into gentile religious ideas of all sorts, thus basically leaving the region a non-Jewish area maintaining some sort of Jewish identity as the woman at the well testified. That left little more than a strange mix of religious ideas. For that reason the Jews looked down upon Samaritans as essentially godless people (suggested again in the text) who were to be denounced and reviled wherever they might appear. It was in this area, once a very important place in Jewish history (again noted clearly in a couple ways in today’s text) but now a totally alien territory, that this encounter took place.

THE STORY ITSELF

So we have a story containing a number of unusual or at least unlikely angles poking around inside and out of it. Jesus, himself, opened the exchange on what appears to our modern minds to be a neutral level having to do with nothing more than a request for a drink of water. The woman responded with astonishment that he was willing to cross all the recognized social and religious lines by even speaking with a Samaritan much less with a woman and then making a forbidden request. Unphased, Jesus continues the exchange with what seems to be a quite edgy reply: “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 conversation from that point on rises to an increasingly tense level to the point where Jesus pokes into the woman’s personal life as a way of establishing his credentials as a prophet – a role she finally recognizes and even honors. The Jewish part of her background, however, makes it possible for her to engage Jesus on a still more stressful level. What may seem to us as a “lightly once-over” extension of their discussion, she takes up a religious dimension involving the geography of the holy land. The well was located at the base of a small mountain named Mount Gerizim upon which some of the earliest Jewish claims of the land had taken place, making it a very sacred place upon which the first tribes of Israel had offered sacrifices. Samaritans continued that claim for a high significance of that very place and thought that centralizing the government, the religious life of Judaism, and particularly the temple in Jerusalem was a much later and misbegotten claim. That disputed assertion was a major part of the dispute between the Jews and the Samaritans.

That opened the way for Jesus to make a basic statement concerning the nature of, the place of, and the object of true worship. “The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 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 is seeking such people to worhip him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

This touched the woman so acutely that, drawing still more deeply from the Jewish part of her religious instruction, she said, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” At this point the truly mind-blowing aspect of Jesus’ confrontation with this woman took place, for he said, “I who speak to you am he.” The woman undoubtedly could draw more deeply still from the Jewish aspect of her education at this point, for she surely heard an age-old declaration that went all the way back to Moses who led Israel out of Egypt and the way God spoke to him on Mt. Sinai: “I AM he!” “I AM!” It was the way God had identified himself when Moses wanted to know God’s name so that he could tell Pharaoh and the people of Israel who he was representing! And Jesus tells the woman, “I who speak to you AM HE,” essentially identifying himself as “JAHWEH!”

Unfortunately the disciples who had been running errands during all this time suddenly reappeared, questioning why Jesus was engaging in such an unorthodox conversation, thus breaking the exchange apart. Before Jesus could justify himself for this behavior the woman excitedly took it upon herself to go back into her town, leaving her water jar behind in her obviously keyed up haste, to report all this to the townspeople.

THE REST OF THE STORY!?!?!?!

The “end of the story” following this has its own significance, but we leave her and her townspeople and Jesus and the disciples at this point in order to ask how do you know who or how to worship if God cannot be seen and if he, furthermore, is “spirit and truth”? After all, Jesus assures us just as he assured the Samaritan woman, “the Father is seeking such people to worship him.” Do we ourselves not want to be the kind of “people who want to worship God?”

This is the place, listening in on this exchange between Jesus and this woman through the text for today and concerning ourselves with the words found there, where those who seek him with all their hearts and souls and minds have opportunity to resolve their hopes and fears in the world of faith. God has spoken, to be sure, just as Jesus spoke to the woman. We have this word that God spoke in the scriptures, the written word within which the LIVING WORD reveals himself, offering LIVING WATER to those who seek him. The faith of God’s people is not simply grounded in a mysterious other-worldly kind of spiritual manifestations and dreams speaking out of an emptiness to anyone who listens.

The faith of God’s people is a faith born of God’s word spoken, then recorded in the scriptures for us to hear as the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1 It relies on the same thing that “the people of old” did when they “received their commendation,” namely the word of the Lord spoken by prophets and evangelists to whom God gave it and the word that was then written for our learning as “sound words that we have heard from God’s selected people” who wrote under the influence of the Holy Spirit. 2 Timothy 1:13, 14

He whom we cannot see makes himself known through this man who was very visible and available to the people of his time, assuring us as he assured the woman at the well, “I AM he.” As the citizens of Samaria testified in their turn on the basis of the report this woman gave concerning that which took place at this well, his words can be – even must be, in fact – broadcast through us far and wide. It is and will be as he said to the woman, “The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Water as living as that which Jesus promised to all who earnestly seek him are or have been poured on all those who are baptized into his death and resurrection, a death and resurrection that is regularly RE-membered regularly in, with and under the bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist.

We can be sure they are all there for us because.“the hour is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him.” v. 23

LIVING WATER AND THE SPIRIT OF THE LORD, PROMISES AND FULFILLMENTS … they are all gathered together at this well in Samaria. Are you there with them?

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Hubert Beck

hbeck@austin.rr.com

Minister of the Gospel, retired

Austin, TX 78749