Samerican Woman
August 21, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
John 4:1-26
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.”
This morning we’re re-starting all our children’s Sunday school classes. But while the classes were on a break this summer, we had more children in the sanctuary, and we collected pictures people drew of themes from the sermon. The other day our church staff stood there and talked about our favorites, some were those “best drawn,” but we also appreciated the pictures that were truly child-like in the best sense of the phrase. We’ll leave them up in the foyer for a few more weeks.
Obviously you can keep drawing pictures during the sermon if that helps you learn. We’ll probably stop talking about pictures until next summer, but maybe in God’s providence we’re stopping the collection of pictures at a good time. We’ve been teaching through John’s gospel, and we come to a passage this morning that is, shall we say, not so PG: Jesus, a holy man, meets alone with a woman with a sketchy past. Yet maybe this scene would be good to draw because, for all that could have gone terribly wrong, something beautiful happens. Let’s pray as we prepare to learn more about this woman at the well and the God who loves her. “Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
* * *
In literature and film we call the inciting incident the event that puts a new story, a whole new plot, in motion. You might have inciting incidents such as when your parents got divorced or when you dropped out of college or when you felt a lump in your breast and then had to set up an appointment with a cancer doctor. For this woman, her inciting incident was the day a thirsty stranger said, “Give me a drink.” That one request puts a whole new story into motion. And we find out that she is also thirsty, although in ways very different than Jesus was thirsty.
I wonder if you’ve ever been really thirsty. A few weeks ago there were some 95-degree days. Maybe those days made you thirsty. I had a friend who spent time in the military, and he said in his training they were told that “water is best stored in the body.” Maybe part of the advice has to do with the fact that it’s logistically easier to carry water inside you than it is to haul around water bottles. But my friend told me the point made by the instructor had more to do with how extreme thirst can make you do strange things. If you’re stranded in the desert, and you get dehydrated, you might save the water you do have for later, only to not make it, saving water you never get to drink. Or, instead, you might try to drink something that turns out to be harmful.
Years ago, when I was a kid, we had a dog. I remember one summer when antifreeze stored in the garage got spilled on the garage floor. Nothing happened to our collie named Opie, but I got remember the lesson I got from my mom on how deadly that could have been for our dog, especially because antifreeze tastes so good to dogs.
I don’t think it is a coincidence that “thirst” is one of the major metaphors used in the Bible to describe our spiritual need. We are thirsty people, people who often drink that which does not satisfy and that which might actually be harmful to us. 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. (Jer. 2:13)
Two evils, Jeremiah says. First, forsaking God as our fountain, and second, drinking from broken wells. God’s people, through their idolatry and rejection of the God they thirst for, create their own wells, but their wells are broken. God offers a fountain flowing with clear, clean, cold, life-giving water. But instead his people trade him for sludgy brown water that’s not even drinkable. These images of thirst and water and fountains and sludge and antifreeze become embodied in the conversation Jesus has with the person we simply 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.
Let’s look at the conversation in more detail. Our story opens by giving some background material. I’ll read vv. 1–6.
4 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.
Last week we heard about John the Baptizer’s disciples getting worried about this Jesus guy and how he might be baptizing more people than their leader, John. “Don’t worry about that,” John says. “As a best man rejoices when the groom marries his bride,” John says, “so I rejoice to see the Messiah marry his people” (a paraphrase of John 3). Now it seems the religious leaders also worry about the number of people following Jesus. So Jesus leaves town. He goes with his disciples north to Galilee through the region of Samaria and to a town with a famous well established by a man from an Old Testament story named Jacob.
This is something of an aside, but I’ll point out that the narrator speaks of the historicity of Genesis as a matter of fact. To John the Author, the one writing this Gospel as for Jesus himself, the events of Genesis were not fairy tales designed to teach moral lessons. The stories teach moral lessons, but they are facts. They are history. And speaking of history, history is important for understanding our story in John 4.
Nearly 1,000 years before this conversation at this well, 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 into two parts and more or less stayed that way. And those two parts hated each other. The northern kingdom of Israel established its own line of kings, a line of kings that ran parallel to the Davidic kings of the southern kingdom of Judah. The southern kingdom had some good kings and some bad kings. All the northern kings were wicked. The northern kingdom also established another place of worship on a different mountain, which gets referenced later in our passage. When the northern kingdom was attacked by the Assyrian empire in the 700s BC, many of the people were carried off into exile, and those who stayed behind in Samaria began to be even less faithful and thus more despised by the southern kingdom.
And here comes Jesus, through this hated region—a region many Jews would avoid— and he sits with a woman from a hated people at the hottest part of the day; we’re told it was the sixth hour, meaning noon. If it’s going to be 95 degrees outside on some Saturday, most of you mow your yard in the morning or evening unless, because of your schedule or something, you have to mow at noon. And in the desert, you don’t draw water at noon unless you have to. This woman had to, we presume, because of her past. Well, not just her past but, as we find out, her present. Either she didn’t want to be around others or they didn’t want to be around her—or both.
Jesus has asked for a drink. Look with me at how she responds. I’ll read vv. 9–15.
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.” (vv. 9–15)
One pastor described the request of Jesus for a drink in terms familiar to us from America’s past, an evil time, a 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 socially pretty edgy of him. That will get some glares—and it does from the disciples, which we’ll get their reaction next week.
If I said Jesus didn’t care about the glares, that could be the right way to say it. Jesus doesn’t care in the sense that he’s not like you and me and so often trying to read a room, so often being thirsty for approval. Jesus isn’t like us in that he’s always wondering how he’s coming across to others and whether he is doing enough to make these people happy while not at the same time making thosepeople unhappy. Jesus isn’t thirsty in these ways. He doesn’t care.
But it would be wrong to say he doesn’t care in the sense that he doesn’t care about his reputation. Jesus will cross social boundaries to reach a person who needs to know him, needs to know God. And he cares about that reputation, which is why we have this gospel history so we can know Jesus as the one who crosses social boundaries to reach the farthest out, even the sexually broken. Indeed, forget crossing social boundaries, Jesus goes to the cross to secure the eternal joy of the wayward and the outcast. You can’t be so far from Christ that he doesn’t want you. That’s his true reputation. It’s scandalous. And wonderful.
You’ll notice in v. 12 that she speaks of “our father Jacob [who] gave us” the well. Notice the pronouns: our father and gave us. She sees herself as part of this story of redemption even though her personal life does not reflect it. Maybe we’d consider her to be a lapsed Roman Catholic or a lapsed Baptist—someone who grew up going to church on Christmas and Easter and has a sense of the story of redemption but personally doesn’t understand it and doesn’t find much use for it. Maybe she’s like some of you.
Much to her surprise and confusion, Jesus offers her what he calls living water. And she says, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water” (4:15). In the same way the religious leader from the last chapter takes Jesus literally about being born again, this woman takes Jesus literally and misunderstands him. But while she might not fully understand Jesus yet, she is intrigued. To her, she could only imagine living water just disappearing in her shame; to her living water meant not coming to the well at the hottest part of the day. But Jesus wants to give her more. He wants to give you more. And it’s here that the conversation takes an abrupt turn.
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 place of her greatest pain, Jesus pokes his finger.
I mentioned a few weeks ago as I was doing the pastoral prayer that this summer I had a small surgery to fix and athletic injury. It was just four weeks ago. The surgery was done to fix some muscles in my stomach near my hip, and so I took a little time off work and from preaching. During the second week of recovery, I went to the beach, which was a wonderful place to rest—except that I kept having to guard myself. I went around a little bit on edge, worried I’d trip and fall or I’d bump into something or that someone would wrestle with me. I didn’t look like it from the outside, but I was tender.
So is this woman. And Jesus poked her. And he did it on purpose. Was that cruel or kind? He wanted her to heal and knew it was only in the light that she could be restored. What is God be speaking to you about this morning that needs to come into the light? What sin are you tried of carrying by yourself? In the light of the gospel, it can heal.
“I don’t have a husband,” she says, which I guess was technically true. Jesus even agrees. He says, “You are right. . . . What you said is true.” It’s like if you asked me, “Have you read the novel Don Quixote?” and I say, “Well, not in Spanish,” the original language, implying I’ve read a translation in English. You read War and Peace? Not in Russian.
“Let’s see the browsing history on your smartphone,” Jesus says. “Oh, I haven’t looked at one bad thing on the Internet,” you say. “That’s true,” Jesus responds. “You’ve looked at five hours’ worth, and you’re living with someone who isn’t your spouse.” Living 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, one woman in the covenant of marriage.
The woman blurts out, “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” We don’t know if her response is a way to change the subject or maybe she’s trying to talk with this obviously religious man about the religion she doesn’t know much about. It’s sort of like saying, “In Catholicism we say the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ, and you Protestants say the presence of Christ in communion is more of a spiritual presence.”
But here we need to talk about our world for a bit. We have a schizophrenic view of sex that leaves us exhausted. Our culture views sex as both everything and nothing at the same time. On the one hand, we’re told that we must live out what we perceive to be our deepest identity, our sexual identity, and if we suppress our deepest understanding of who we say we are, or if we curtail that version of us, then we are suppressing our very essence. In other words, we view sex as meaning everything to us.
On the other hand, sex is treated as nothing. It’s just people hooking up, just bodies coming together. In this category we have pornography, which takes something sacred like a diamond and makes it as cheap as common gravel.
That’s our schizophrenic view of sex: it’s everything and nothing, and we are exhausted.
I don’t know which view this woman had—everything or nothing. Maybe she had both. But we see she’s thirsty and exhausted. We don’t know what role she played in her misplaced thirst, 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.
You might be trying to satisfy your thirst in other places. Maybe it’s getting the approval of a boss. Maybe it’s getting into the right college. Maybe as school is starting over these next few weeks, it’s finding a way to become friends with a certain group of people. Some of you drink excessive amounts of alcohol because you realize you’ve hit the middle of your life, and you’ll never be as big of a deal as you thought you would. Some of you know I enjoy writing as a hobby and see it as part of my ministry, but it can be so easy for me to see writing as a way to find approval and stack up accolades. These thirsts to know God can only be satisfied by knowing God.
Look at the final words of our passage, vv. 23–26.
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.”
I titled the sermon “Samerican Woman.” Some of you might have seen that as a typo. It’s supposed to be a play on words. My brother is a good musician and he and his wife made an album based on themes in chapters from book of John. They titled the song based on this passage from John 4 “Samerican Woman,” seeing something of America in this Samaritan woman. I always thought that was clever. The song is a duet, and my brother’s wife, echoing the words of the woman, sings the lines: “It seems that nothing can fill this void / The cup that I fill has been emptied again / When will the stability stay and something of substance hold?” My brother sings back, echoing the words of Jesus, “The cup that I fill won’t be emptied again.”
At the hottest part of the day Jesus pursues this unnamed woman by traveling through a hated region full of people hated by his peers, so that he can sit with her and offer her a cup that won’t be empty again, to offer her living water. In fact, if you look at vv. 3–4, you’ll see a fascinating phrase. The inciting incident that likely felt random to her was a divinely planned appointment. Maybe this morning is something of an inciting incident for you, divinely appointed.
We read, “He left Judea and departed again for Galilee. And he had to pass through Samaria.” Had to? What does that mean? Jesus had to do this hard thing, just as he had to go to the cross and die. The love of sinners was costly for Jesus. But it was worth it. He doesn’t stay dead. He rises again, and now this Messiah offers living water, not merely to Samaritans or to Americans but, to the whole world, even to you, if you’re thirsty.
In this week’s sermon we saw how God pursues people. Next week, we’ll look at the second half of this story and see how the people God pursues become those who then pursue others. I’ll invite the music team to lead us in a few songs. Let’s pray. . .
Sermon Discussion Questions
Can you tell a story of a time you were really thirsty?
Jesus spoke of “living water.” What does he mean by this? How does he offer it?
Pastor Benjamin spoke of a “inciting incident” as an event that puts a new story into motion. Can you think of events in your life that put a “new story into motion”? In what ways has Jesus become an inciting incident for you?
To prepare for next week, consider how the disciples of Jesus thought about this encounter. Were they ready to see this woman from Samaria welcomed by Jesus?
