THE TRANSFORMING POWER OF LIVING WATER
A Sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, February 24, 2008
Texts: John 4:1-30
It was so hot. Walking the dirt track that passed for a road, they were caked with dust by the time they reached the familiar fork. Though baking in the noon day sun, the few scraggly trees that grew around the old well offered a measure of relief. It is here we meet a very human Jesus, weary from traveling. Not so hard to imagine. How many of us have suffered travel fatigue - driving from San Diego to Louisiana across Arizona, New Mexico and Texas in the heat of August, six of us crowded into the old, un-air conditioned Buick, as my family did several summers of my childhood; sitting on a runway for an hour or more, waiting for the plane to take you on the last leg of your journey home from a long and stressful week of meetings; trying to make the battered pick-up stretch the last few miles to the promised land of California, leaving the dusty prairie and failed farm behind; sneaking across the border, crammed into the back of a van in the middle of the night, attempting an escape from the persecution of government death squads in the country you love. Travel weary!
Jesus was escaping the jealous political and religious leaders of Judea who feared that he was becoming even more influential with the people than John the Baptist. Since his time had not yet come, Jesus was going home to Galilee. In spite of the hatred between Samaritans and Jews, the shortest route to Galilee was through the heart of Samaria. Here we find Jesus, weary from travel, perched on the edge of Jacob's Well, resting. In this state, he was vulnerable to sharing himself in the way that we sometimes are when we are too tired to keep up our defenses.
As he sat there alone, a woman appeared. Why at this moment, in the heat of the day? We can guess that this woman came to the well at high noon precisely because she didn’t expect to find anyone there. The women of her village would draw water early in the morning or in the cool of the evening, and would go to a source of water closer to town. This woman chose to draw her water in the sun’s blaze, at a well a half-mile from the village, because she did not want to encounter these other women. Too often she had endured their hostile stares and whispered innuendo. It was easier for her to avoid the other women altogether. So, imagine her surprise at finding someone at the well - and not just anyone, but a hated Jew.
But wait, things will get stranger yet, for not only is this person a Jew, this is a male who shocks her by speaking to her. What's happening here? Men do not speak to women. Jews do not speak to Samaritans. A rabbi would have nothing to do with a woman of her sort. The only explanation that makes sense is that someone who is weary and thirsty, who has no means to draw water from the deep well, needs a drink.
Jesus and the woman begin to banter, as she warily attempts to understand what’s going on. He asks her for water. She replies, "How does it happen that you, a Jew, would ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" He answers, "If you knew who was speaking to you, you could have asked for living water." "Right!" she responds, growing bolder. "How are you going to draw water from this deep well? You think you're greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this well?" (Thinking literally and moving immediately to her prejudiced assumptions, she muses, "This is such male chauvinism, combined with typical Jewish arrogance!”) "Actually," he ventures, "I'm talking to you about something that's greater than you've ever known - a spring of water, gushing up to eternal life." Now she's intrigued; maybe he's not a crackpot after all but a real magician. Greedily she says, "Give me some of this magic water so that I'll never be thirsty or have to trudge to this well again," (thinking particularly, "What a relief if I never have to face those awful women from the village again!")
Jesus sees that she is hooked, and makes a move to bring her to deeper understanding. He seems to trick her into making the confession she needs to make in order to begin her journey toward wholeness. "Go, call your husband," he urges. She's speechless for a moment, shame and anger welling up inside her. Just as she has begun to warm to this strange Jewish rabbi, talking to her about magic water and eternal life, he puts her on the spot; he cuts her down. ("Has he meant to embarrass me like this all along? I should have known better than to trust myself with a man, and a Jew!") She looks at him, the age-old hatred shining in her eyes, defiantly refusing to lie, "I have no husband."
"Yes," he says, "I know. You've had five husbands, and now you're just living with a fellow from the village." Again, she’s dumbfounded. How could he have known so much about her? Where did he get the information? Now bewilderment shows in her eyes as she offers the only explanation she can think of, "You must be a prophet! You know me as well as I know myself." In cautious wonder, she sits down tentatively beside him, as they continue their conversation.
She is faced with a dilemma, once she has a sense of who Jesus is. How is she to practice her religion? Where is she now to make her sacrifice of penitence and thanksgiving to God? Her people have always done this on Mt. Gerizim, but if Jesus, a Jew, is a true prophet of God, maybe she should make her sacrifice in Jerusalem. (Walls begin to tumble here!) What she's really concerned with is where she can find God. Sensing her growing openness and understanding, Jesus shares an amazing truth - the time is coming, in fact, it is here, when temples made of stone and systems made, quite literally, by men would not hold God, if, indeed, they ever had. God is to be worshipped in spirit and truth, and anyone open to God's spirit and God's truth is acceptable.
Jesus has gone far beyond asking for a drink of water. He has found something in this outcast woman, something, and someone, speaking to his own weary vulnerability. Not only does he engage her in a powerful and moving discussion about the nature of spirituality and eternal life, in the end, he reveals to her, with uncharacteristic directness, that he is the Messiah, the promised Savior, for whom both Jews and Samaritans longed.
In the process, her life is transformed. A man, a Jew, a religious teacher has taken her seriously, perhaps the first time in her life that anyone has taken her seriously. The old gospel song sings of the woman at the well who was "thirsting for things which could not satisfy." Jesus saw her as she really was, with weakness and with strength, and he knew immediately what she needed - living water, gushing up to eternal life. The chorus swells and echoes down the ages - "Here's my cup, Lord. I lift it up, Lord. Come and fill this longing in my soul."
At the end of the story, the woman leaves her jar behind, running to the village, right into the jaws of those petty, judgmental women and chauvinistic men who were her neighbors. She leaves behind her shame and brokenness as well, to urge the villagers to come meet the man who had known her as no other had ever known her - with grace and with respect; a man who, without condemning her, had "told her everything she'd ever done."
You see, not only is she changed by this encounter, but her relationships are also changed. She will never again relate to others, men or women, with the same fear and shame she had known before. Because God, in Jesus Christ, has spoken to her, she will hold her head higher, she will walk more purposefully, and she will share, with joy, her "living water" wherever she goes. No one who has tasted "living water" remains unchanged. One important way that change is known is in the compelling need to share the "living water" with others. Her healing, her newfound wholeness, cannot be kept secret. It is of no use to her whatsoever if she cannot share it. As a woman, she has a deep understanding of the importance to life and its nurture of a web of relationships. Her own healing must move toward healing her web of relationships. So, she literally runs to the village to share what she has found.
What does this ancient story teach us about transforming our own social and cultural reality? Harsh cultural assumptions and rigid social structures are called into question here. In particular racism and sexism. Jews and Samaritans hated one another. Both groups believed they were God's chosen people, to the exclusion of the other, in spite of their common roots. (Sound familiar?) Jews hated Samaritans because they had intermarried with their captors during the periods of captivity and exile. With their great concern for what was pure, the Jews saw the Samaritans as contaminated, impure. Samaritans saw Jews as self-righteous, arrogant, rigid and mean-spirited. These stereotypes were deep-seated and long assumed to be true.
Jesus, though born a Jew, refuses to operate from this purity system. He recognizes that whatever a society labels as deviant is that which worries that society most. The in or dominant group uses rigid structures and stereotyping to control what is most feared within the group, as well as without, by naming it unacceptable. Jesus bases his ministry in a debt system, founded in God's having created all that is, and in God's having brought the children of Israel out of bondage in Egypt. Since it is God who has made all and redeems all, everyone is in debt to God. No person, or people, created by God, is inherently better than another in this debt system. If one is blessed, it is in order to give, and the more one is blessed, the more one is expected to give. As the Creator, God is the source of all power. To claim undue power for oneself as an individual or nation or race is an abuse of power. That is to say, in the system from which Jesus operates, power is to be shared. There is no justification for power over another, whether it be a person, group, state, or culture. All power is from God, the source of "living water."
In particular, what of man's presumption of power over woman. William Barclay, says "[t]he rabbis so despised women and so thought them incapable of receiving any real teaching that they said: 'Better that the words of the law should be burned than delivered to women…By rabbinic standards, Jesus could hardly have done a more shatteringly unconventional thing than to talk to this woman. Here Jesus is taking barriers down" (William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible, The Gospel of John, Volume I, p. 155.) In Jesus’ system, the old order does not hold. Everyone who thirsts is invited to come to the water and drink. "Living water" is for everyone and every group. There are no exceptions. No one is more entitled than another.
This story calls us to the same kind of openness. What our hungers? How do we thirst? How might God's healing presence, in the person of Jesus, transform our lives and make us whole? What relationships do we endure in silence and pain, in frustration and anger, because we cannot find ways to lower our defenses in order to risk sharing ourselves? How might God's healing power, present in Jesus' long-ago conversation with a Samaritan woman, transform our relationships and make them whole?
How are we bound by rigid notions of who's in and who's out, of who is worthwhile and who is beyond our caring, of who should and should not have power in this world? How many of our cultural assumptions and social structures are born of our own inner fears and hatred projected outward onto an unsuspecting world? How might God's healing spirit, in the person of Jesus sharing himself fully with an outcast struggling to survive on the margins of society, serve to transform our cultural perspectives and social structures, our life worlds, so that justice might prevail and wholeness be the way of life for all?
I leave us to ponder these things.