When Sexuality is Everything and Nothing

Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek

November 8, 2020

Scripture Reading

John 4:1-25

1 Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus himself did not baptize, but only his disciples), 3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee.4 And he had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.

7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)10 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.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.”13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.”17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.”21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 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. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”25 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.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”

27 Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” 28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30 They went out of the town and were coming to him.

31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, saying, “Rabbi, eat.” 32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples said to one another, “Has anyone brought him something to eat?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are yet four months, then comes the harvest’? Look, I tell you, lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest. 36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together.37 For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.”40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 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 indeed the Savior of the world.”

43 After the two days he departed for Galilee. 44 (For Jesus himself had testified that a prophet has no honor in his own hometown.) 45 So when he came to Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him, having seen all that he had done in Jerusalem at the feast. For they too had gone to the feast.

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Our sermon passage is a long passage but also a passage that God has used throughout history to draw thirsty people to himself. We’ve been in a series called “All Who Are Weary: The Idols That Exhaust Us and the Savior Who Won’t.” We’ve talked about money and work and politics and our dreams. This morning’s sermon is an invitation to come to Jesus when our schizophrenic view of sex leaves us exhausted, which is to say when we view our sexuality as both everything and nothing at the same time. We should pray before we begin. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”

Introduction

I wonder if you’ve ever been really thirsty. My children seem to be thirsty all the time, especially when Mom or Dad holds a bottle of Gatorade. When we visit Grandma and Grandpa in Iowa, it’s a long ride in the car, something like 15 hours. And to keep potty breaks to a minimum, we often ration liquids to our children at the level of one ounce of fluid per year of age. (I’m only sort of joking.)

I wonder when you’ve been really thirsty. I don’t just mean after eating a spoonful of peanut butter. I mean really, really thirsty. My friend Geoffrey told me about the time he was hiking a mountain in the desert and his friend almost died of dehydration. They were airlifted back to the trailhead, which saved his life. Thirst can be dangerous. Sometimes it causes us to drink what will actually harm us. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that thirst is one of the major metaphors used in the Bible to describe our spiritual need. Consider what God says to his people through the prophet Jeremiah in the Old Testament.

My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewed out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that can hold no water. (Jeremiah 2:13)

Two evils, Jeremiah says. First, forsaking God as their fountain, and second, drinking from broken wells. A few images come to mind when I read this. I picture a man laboring over one of those old-school water-pumping stations. He’s working like a dog, all sweaty and frustrated and puffing for air. The pump is barely working, and when it does, it just spits out brown syrup into a tiny Styrofoam cup, and the cups has a pinhole in the bottom. The water’s not even drinkable. The other image is a beautiful Colorado mountain stream. It’s clean, clear, and cold. You can drink right out of it. Through Jeremiah, God is saying to his people, “You’ve traded me for sludge.” 

These images of thirst and water and fountains and sludge become embodied on a conversation Jesus had in John 4 with the person we call “the woman at the well,” a woman with broken sexuality. We don’t even know her name. But as we’ll see, Jesus knew her. And Jesus loved her.

1. The Conversation

Let’s look at the conversation in more detail. 

A thirsty woman, vv. 3–15

3 he left Judea and departed again for Galilee. 4 And he had to pass through Samaria. 5 So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.) (vv. 3–9)

Jesus had been in the southern region of Israel called Judea, where Jerusalem is, the capital of social and religious life. And now he’s traveling north through what was called Samaria. Some 950 years before this, a rift opened up between the two parts of Israel. When the United States had our Civil War, our nation reunited. When Israel had their conflict, they split in two and more or less stayed that way. And they hated each other. The northern kingdom established another line of kings, their own line of kings, which ran parallel to the Davidic kings of Judah. All of the northern kings were wicked. The northern kingdom also established another place of worship, a place of idolatry. 

And here comes Jesus, through this hated region to sit with a woman from a hated people at the hottest part of the day; we’re told it was the sixth hour, meaning noon. In the desert, you don’t draw water at noon unless you must. This woman had to, we presume, because of her past. Well really, not just her past but, as we’ll find out, her present. Either she didn’t want to be around others, they didn’t want to be around her, or both. 

Jesus makes a request of her for water. He doesn’t have a bucket. One pastor described this in terms familiar to us from America’s past, a darker time when people made in the image of God had water fountains that were separate and not equal. It’s as though, this pastor said, Jesus walks up to a woman at a “colored” water fountain and asks to use her water bottle. That’s edgy. That will get some glares. And Jesus didn’t care.

Then, much to her surprise and confusion, Jesus offers her what he calls living water. 

10 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.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” (vv. 10–15)

I don’t think she gets is yet. This woman is intrigued. Her interest is there, but still, all she can imagine is water that will satisfy her physical thirst, while Jesus means to give her more. Jesus wants to give us more. Here the conversation takes an abrupt turn.

Husbands & Sex and Worship, vv. 16–26

16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. (vv. 16–19)

“Go call your husband,” he says. There’s nothing comfortable about this conversation. It’s awkward and charged. In the place of her greatest pain, Jesus puts his finger. 

Last year I had shoulder surgery. The doctor reconnected my pectoralis major into my shoulder with a tendon from a cadaver and some wire and three little grappling hooks that he drilled into my bone. I had seven months of physical therapy to recover. I can still feel it if you poke the insertion point. 

During physical therapy, there was a moment that is now funny but was terrifying at the time. My physical therapist is named Dan. Dan had been working me hard for a few sessions, and my arm was sore. There was this one tiny fiber of muscle, apparently, that was a little bit shorter than the rest; it got stretched during the surgery. Dan had me on the table with my arm above my head while he checked mobility and healing, and he lightly placed his finger on that tiny thread of muscle near my ribcage. A shot of pain like I’ve only felt a few times in my life surged through my body. I screamed, jerked my arm back, and curled up in the fetal position on the padded table to protect myself. Everyone in the clinic looked. Dan thought he’d broke me and had a look of terror on his face. He’d barely touched me, but I’d been walking around for months guarding that part of me because I knew it was tender—yet even I didn’t know how tender.

Jesus poked this woman. He did it on purpose. “I don’t have a husband,” she says, using truth to tell a lie.[1] “Let me see your browsing history on your smartphone,” Jesus says. “Oh, I haven’t looked at one bad thing on the Internet.” “That’s true,” Jesus responds, probably with a half-smile and a nod. “You’ve looked at five hours’ worth, and you’re living with someone now who ain’t your spouse.” Living together as a married couple when not married is a sin. Sexual intimacy is a gift from God, but only in its proper place: one man and one woman in the covenant of marriage. 

I mentioned our schizophrenic view of sex leaves us exhausted—our view of sex that says sex is both everything and nothing at the same time. On the one hand, the prevailing view in culture is that we must live out what we perceive to be our deepest identity, our sexual identity, and to suppress that or curtail that is considered suppressing our very essence. Which is to say, sex is everything. On the other hand, sex is nothing. It’s just people hooking up, just bodies coming together. And then there’s pornography, which takes something sacred and makes it as cheap as common gravel. Sex is nothing, pornography says. That’s our schizophrenic view of sex: it’s everything and nothing. We are exhausted and confused. 

I don’t know which view this woman had—everything or nothing. Likely it was both. She’s exhausted and confused. We don’t know what role she played, whether men just kept throwing her away when they were done with her or whether she was the one who kept leaving. Regardless, no one has five failed marriages without physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma. She’s thirsty for living water. So are many of you.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. The way Satan points out your sin and the way Jesus points out your sin is different. The condemnation of Satan is ambiguous and broad and hopeless. The conviction brought by the Spirit, however, is focused, narrow, and hopeful. Satan tells you that you’re a loser. That’s ambiguous, broad, and hopeless. If you take your finger and put it in your shoulder and press on it with increasing pressure, that’s like the work of the Spirit; that’s how the conviction of God works. “Do you feel that?” God asks us. “This particular thing needs to go. Let me help you,” he says. Jesus is here to help, which is why next they get into a conversation about the Messiah, which Jesus says is him and that he’s here and wants to satisfy this thirst of hers that nothing else has satisfied. “The hour is coming,” Jesus tells us, “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” (v. 23). 

Disciples and food, vv. 27–38

The disciples come back with food, and the woman leaves quickly. But she’s not gone. She just went to evangelize. She has been a Christian for like five minutes, and she’s about to lead more people to Christ than most of us will in our entire lives. 

27 Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” 28 So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” 30 They went out of the town and were coming to him. (vv. 27–30)

For however awkward and painful it was to have her sin exposed, she took it the right way, not running from Jesus, but rather a chance to be healed and also a way for others to be healed. Her joy and curiosity are contagious. “I found a better well,” she says.

The passage goes on, and the disciples talk about food in the same way Jesus talked with the woman about thirst—thirst as a metaphor and food as a metaphor. The disciples want to give him something to eat—“Here, Jesus, eat this sandwich we just bought for you”—but Jesus says he has food to eat that they don’t know about. Look at v. 34: “My food,” Jesus says, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” Then he tells the disciples about a harvest. There is coming, not a harvest of wheat or fruit, but a harvest of people. Jesus’s food is to do God’s will, to reach the broken and thirsty. And he’s about to harvest a crop of forgiven converts, a harvest among the Samaritans and then throughout time. 

In vv. 39–42 we read the result of this unlikely and socially unacceptable conversation. 

Many drink down living water, vv. 39–42

39 Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. 41 And many more believed because of his word. 42 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 indeed the Savior of the world.” (vv. 39–42) 

As much as Christians and pastors might fear talking about the biblical view of sexuality, we must also see the potential fruit from the harvest. Imagine that salvation is a doorway. The doorway to salvation has a sign above it labeled “sinner.” It takes humility to walk through that door, but when you walk through the door, and look back, the sign says, “forgiven and loved.” Later in John’s gospel Jesus told a crowd, “I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture. . . . I came that [people] may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:9–10). If salvation is a door, and Jesus is a door, and to first walk through it requires that we name sin as sin, don’t be afraid to name sin. Because on the other side of that door is life, are green pastures and rest, and clean, clear, cold water.

2. The Application

So what does all of this mean for us? Maybe I’ll ask a different question. Why are you here? Why are you at Community Evangelical Free Church this morning? We each have different answers to that question. But there is one answer we share in common. Some of you are here because you were invited by a friend, so you came. Some of you found us on the Internet and are just trying us out. Others have been here for years; you’re a member of our church and come each Sunday. Some of you have wandered from your faith and are trying to get it back together. Some of you have no faith, and you’re trying for the first time to figure out who Jesus is. That’s good. Others have been around Jesus for a long time and are captivated by him. Again, I don’t know why you are here, why you came this morning. But, in another sense, I know exactly why you are here. Jesus wants more of you. Jesus wants to give you living water. Jesus wants to heal you. 

I think back to vv. 4, 23, and 34. “And he had to pass through Samaria.” What does that mean? Why did Jesus have to pass through that region? He didn’t have to pass through Samaria; Jesus didn’t have to do anything. He’s Jesus. He had to in the sense of the divine will of God to seek the lost. Look at v. 23: “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.” The Father is seeking thirsty people through his Son. Then v. 34: “Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.’” Jesus was on a mission to accomplish his Father’s work, which was seeking people—and not just seeking his friends or those who are morally neutral. Jesus goes for the harlots, the sinners, and the sexually schizophrenic. I don’t know why you are here, and I know exactly why you are here. You are here in church this morning because Jesus is seeking you. 

Conclusion: “In the Midst of the Congregation”

I read an Old Testament passage at the start. I’d like to read one more. It comes from Proverbs 5, where a father warns his son to avoid sexual sin. The father describes with stirring, vivid language the misery of those who don’t avoid sexual sin.

At the end of your life you groan, when your flesh and body are consumed, / and you say, “How I hated discipline, and my heart despised reproof! / I did not listen to the voice of my teachers or incline my ear to my instructors. / I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation.” (5:11–13) 

This picture of the future is bleak, and it’s supposed to be. It is, after all, a warning. The man groans, his flesh and body are consumed, he laments his folly, and now he’s nearly ruined. In short, he’s become a dirty old man. Nevertheless, there’s a ray of hope in this passage. Did you hear it? I’ll reread the last line: “I am at the brink of utter ruin in the assembled congregation.” To be sure, the man is in agony, and he’s made a complete wreck of everything. He’s at the brink of ruin, but not yet ruined because he’s “in the assembled congregation.” He’s in the right place. He’s at, in our words, here at church. The assembled congregation of the people of God is the right place to be broken. It’s the right place because it’s where the unconditional love of the King is known.

We should want to be in the assembled congregation, not because mere church attendance is what saves us or, by itself, what makes us better. That’s not it. We want to be in the assembled congregation because this is where the gospel story of forgiveness is celebrated, known, and received. Church is where the story of King Jesus offers hope to his people, even to those who have drunk from broken cisterns. If you have a thirst that nothing else has satisfied, I commend to you the living water that Jesus gives. He lingered for two more days with these people when they asked. But they had to ask. And he’ll linger with you until you’re healed, even if it takes a lifetime, but you have to ask. 

I’ll invite the music team to lead us in a few songs. Let’s pray. . .

[1] A point made by John Piper in his sermon “The Tragic Cost of Her Cavernous Thirst” (Desiring God, June 21, 2009, https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/the-tragic-cost-of-her-cavernous-thirst).