Third Sunday in Lent: Exodus
17:1-7, Romans 5:1-11, John 4:5-42, Psalm 95
The lessons we have
been, and will be, hearing from during Lent, from the Gospel according to John,
are all about encounters and the subsequent conversations between Jesus and
various people. And there is always something surprising about these encounters:
the person, the circumstances, the result, and/or the timing. Take last week’s
encounter with Nicodemus for example. He came to Jesus by night – perhaps
because as a Pharisee and a leader of the Jews, a member of their ruling
council, he didn’t want his colleagues to see him visiting Jesus. As a scholar
and teacher he might also have been studying the Law late at night, and felt
the need to find out more about this man who had so clearly come from God. We
don’t know.
We do however have a
good idea why the Samaritan woman came to the well at noon, when the sun was at
its highest and hottest: she came at a time when she would not have to meet
anyone else, especially not the other women of her city. With her personal
history and reputation, she would not have been acceptable company and she will
have wanted to avoid the dirty looks and muttered insults. So it is very
surprising indeed that Jesus strikes up a conversation with her. Not only
because of her ‘character,’ the fact that she was a woman and a
Samaritan should have prevented any form of contact: “How is that you, a Jew,
ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria,” she asks. The Jews looked down on the
Samaritans because they worshipped in the wrong place, on the wrong mountain,
and because both they and their beliefs were supposedly tainted by pagan
intermingling during the long period of occupation of Israel several hundred
years earlier. And yet Samaritans often get to play a positive role in the gospels,
not just the Good Samaritan, but also this unnamed woman who has a very good
claim to the title of “First Missionary.”
But the surprises don’t
end with Jesus asking her for a drink. The conversation itself takes some
surprising twists and turns. Instead of Jesus receiving living, that is simply running
water, from the deep well, he offers her a different kind of living water, the
water of divine wisdom and teaching, the water of new life in Christ. Although
she doesn’t understand him at first Jesus tells her, and through this story us
too, that accepting him as Lord is like having a spring of water bubbling
inside us constantly refreshing us with new life.
But first we must get
rid of the stale, stagnant water we have been living off before this time, in the
case of the Samaritan woman, as Jesus knows to her surprise, she needs to
acknowledge and deal with her irregular married or unmarried life. Looking at how
she is accepted by her people at the end of this passage, seeing how they
willing they are to follow her lead, it looks to me as if Jesus’ intervention will
help her heal her relationships. Within a few sentences she changes from being
a social outcast, to an evangelist.
But Jesus has some more
surprises in store. As I said earlier, the right place and building to worship
in was one of the issues that divided the Jews and the Samaritans. Well,
surprise, surprise: you can forget about the rivalry between Mount Gerizim and Mount
Zion, Jesus tells her. The worship of God was never really tied to one single
place, God is not a physical being in need of a house. Instead you will find God
in unexpected places, not just in holy people or holy buildings: on a Cross for
example, or in bread and wine. At their best, holy sites are simply signposts
to the divine. One great human temptation seems to be to make these places,
buildings, pictures, statues – whatever – into substitutes for the real thing
and to turn them into the objects of worship.
Probably the greatest
surprise for the Samaritan woman, and the one that sets her off running back to
her city, back to all those people who would not normally give her the time of
day, is a very simple statement on Jesus’ part: “I am he, the one who is
speaking to you.” By which he means I am the Messiah you have been waiting for,
the one who will proclaim the truth, a prophet, your Lord, the savior of the
whole world, God incarnate.
When the disciples
return, and are themselves very surprised to see Jesus talking to this woman,
Jesus no longer has any need for the food they have brought him, He is so
excited by this encounter and by the spiritual hunger he has
discovered, so exhilarated by the success of his first missionary, that his
physical hunger has gone. The disciples fare no better than the woman at the
well in following Jesus’ metaphorical use of the words ‘food’ and ‘harvest.’ It
took her a moment to understand the new meaning of living water and it takes
them a while to realize that the harvest Jesus is referring to is the harvest
of a new crop of believers. This will be the disciples’ mission after the
Passion and Resurrection as it is ours today.
The first half of
John’s Gospel – after the prologue we all know so well – In the beginning was
the word – is called the Book of Signs because it contains a series of signs or
miracles that point to Jesus’ divinity and help explain something about his
mission. At Cana water is turned to wine, in the course of his ministry several
people are healed, five thousand hungry people are fed, Jesus walks on water,
and Jesus brings Lazarus back to life. But in some ways the greatest signs are
not the supernatural ones. Surprising encounters like the one we heard about today
are the even greater miracles. Outcasts are welcomed in, relationships are
healed, ordinary things like water, bread, wine take on new meaning as symbols of
the divine, and very ordinary people become messengers of God. And that’s very
good news for us too, because we are very ordinary people, we don’t have
miraculous powers, but we can still be messengers of God and we can still
encounter and reach out to the stranger and the outcast just as God, in Jesus,
encountered them.
I see three main
lessons for us here in this passage. One is appropriate to this time of Lent and
self-examination. What stale or stagnant water do we need to get rid of to make
room for the living water that Jesus offers? What relationships do we need to
heal? What hurt, whether inflicted or suffered, do we need to acknowledge? Whom
do we need to forgive or ask for forgiveness?
The second lesson is
the need to focus on mission, on being sent by God to reap what God has sown,
to harvest the fields that are ripe for harvesting. I don’t want you all to put
on pith helmets and head off for the tropics. But I do want you to remember
that neither this building not the money we want you to pledge as part of our
stewardship campaign are ends in themselves, they are the means by which we
carry out God’s mission. Your pledge and your commitment are how we finance the
resources we need so that our worship, community events, Christian formation of
the young and not so young, as well as our mission and outreach activities can
grow and flourish.
Finally - how can we do
the unexpected, how can we surprise Wiesbaden? I’ve met a number of our
ecumenical partners this week. One thing they’ve told me is how this church
used to be well known for being open and inviting, with open doors and lit
windows during the week, not just on a Sunday, and how sad they were that we recently
turned in ourselves so much, that we became quite literally ‘introverted.’
Well, let’s surprise them by turning out again. The Kaffeeklatsch initiative that Roxanne Richards and others have
started is such a good example. It’s wonderful that it is helping us raise
money for our ministry and mission, but I think even more important is the
opportunity it offers for encounters and conversation. Jesus discovered a
spiritual hunger and thirst in Samaria, well there is a spiritual hunger and
thirst today that we can help fill or quench. Let this church be our Well, and
the coffee and cake we offer be an opening for a conversation about the Good
News we believe in, just as water and food were for Jesus. Let us surprise Wiesbaden
with the strength of our witness to the God of love as revealed in Jesus Christ.
Amen
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