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SERMONS

Third Sunday of Lent
February 24, 2008

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

The Woman at the Well, John 4

You have to wonder if Jesus is having a heat stroke.
Like all of the journeys that Jesus and the disciples take through Israel, they are on foot in the middle of a desert; their commitment to their mission is more than something that is simply abstract. Jesus and the disciples have to believe in themselves enough to spend shoe leather on it.
Jesus is tired from the walking. He is resting at what formed the crossroads in much of ancient Palestine - a watering hole, a well. This one is believed to have been given by Jacob, sitting at the foot of Mount Gerizim, a place that Samaritans considered their holiest place.
Legends describe Jacob as the great giver of water to the people. Some legends even said that with Jacob in the midst, water would simply and miraculously bubble to the surface of the ground; Jacob was the ultimate “rain maker.” Prosperity and peace followed in his wake.
This Samaritan woman is not coming to draw her water at a normal hour. She is coming in the middle of the day; in the midst of the hottest part of the day in the desert; there would not be many other women at the well; there must be a reason. Perhaps she is trying to be invisible.
On the surface, there are two good reasons for her to be invisible.

She is a Samaritan, a group in Palestine who were territorial and religious rivals with the Jews. They were thought to worship pagan gods, and considered unclean by traditional Jews. Jews would often make long detours around a Samaritan region in order not have contact with them.

The life of women in the ancient world was very difficult. Her value was determined largely by her usefulness to her husband. She was perhaps more valuable than a camel; but not perhaps more than five camels. Women were not to be addressed in public, especially by Rabbis. An unattached woman was considered like a person lost, and perhaps this woman hopes to be invisible because her track record with husbands is not stellar.

And so perhaps Jesus is having a heat stroke as he speaks to this would-be invisible woman. She responds to Jesus as though he were living on another planet, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? . . . Are you clueless? Are you touched in the head? What is it you don’t understand here?”

This woman has the impression that Jesus does not understand how things really are in the world. That Jesus is out of touch; he doesn’t “get it.” And she looks at Jesus with a great question mark in her voice.

But when Jesus answers this woman, we discover who actually is out of touch with the ways things really are. While the woman is focused on what can be seen, what can be shared, what can be said, and how she might hide from them by coming to the well in the heat of the day, Jesus opens another door for her, and tells her where her focus should be.

Essentially Jesus says to her, “The water in this hole that you revere is water for a thirst of the flesh. There is another water for this life that will never end in thirst, that will never dry, that will flow forever.”

Now the tables have turned; it is the woman, savvy in the ways of how things really work in this world, who is being informed on the nature of reality. As St. Augustine has said about this moment at the well, “The very one who asks for a drink - offers a drink.”

The drink that Jesus is offering is not only water for a thirsty body, nor is found in some ancient hole in the ground that somebody’s great-grandfather dug. Nor is it found on Mount Gerizim, the holy place of Samaritans, nor at the Temple in Jerusalem, the holy place of Jews, because with his coming the worship of God will be in spirit and truth and will require no geographic location.

The way things really are” now, is that people must accept the Spirit that transforms hearts and souls and minds to understand God’s limitless love for us. That is the way things really are. The important identity is not that I am Samaritan or I am Jew, woman or rabbi, but that we drink the living water.

It is not hard for us to understand the Samaritan woman. Many of us have compromised ourselves. A few of us know how it feels to be considered “unclean,” outside the boundaries of what is accepted, what is popular, what society tells us “must be.”

But I have a hunch that each of us knows what it is to be thirsty, not just for water, but for “living water.” I have a hunch that each of us can tell a story about what it feels like to live in a land of abundance, that becomes a spiritual desert at times. It’s not water from the ground we lack, but water from heaven; and we fear in our thirst for this water that we will never find it; or that if we have known it, that we will not find it again.

It often seems that we live surrounded by the promise of spiritual water in abundance, whether it be through a gospel of prosperity, a gospel of romantic attachments, a gospel of popularity, a gospel of self-actualization - but these are really no more than half measures. And often, if truth be told, our running after these half measures might cause us to be like the Samaritan woman, compromised, and wishing that we too could become invisible, resigned to our fate.

We need something, someone, to tell us “how things really are.” Jesus shows us as much in that he offers hope and light to someone in the ancient world who had two good reasons to be invisible; yet he sees through the tangled webs of our lives, through the resignation, the shame, the questionable compromises.

As the Catholic writer Demetrius Dumm says, “God does not really want us to live a life of quiet desperation.”{Thoreau} Jesus gives each of us the invitation of living water. Jesus gives us the invitation to live.

Our prayer in these final weeks of Lent can be our doorway; so that we can step from our invisibility, from our hiding, from our shame and resignation, into a place where God will be gentle with us. We can ask God within the hidden prayers of our hearts to show us “how things really are,” and to give us that hope and peace and love that quenches the old thirst that torments us.

Jesus comes to give us what we need. He comes into our country, we does not walk around our regions in order to avoid us; no, he comes to our daily life, he comes to our well, so that he might see us as we really are, so that he might save us from invisibility and thirst, so that he might give us something to drink.