“A Well, a Woman and Living Water” (John 4:1-42)

Just outside the city of Nablus on the Palestinian West Bank is the village of Balata. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was the site of the major rioting that is now infamously known as the First Intifada. All told, that violence led to the deaths of more than a thousand people.

Perhaps less known is the fact that until the time of those uprisings, Balata was also the home of as many as half of the world’s tiny remaining population of Samaritans. But for Christians Balata’s claim to fame lies within the precincts of its Eastern Orthodox church and monastery. There you will find what purports to be (and likely is) the site of Jacob’s well—the very location of this morning’s reading from the Gospel according to John—and from which you can still draw water to this day.

In New Testament times the town was known as Sychar. But its Old Testament name was Shechem. It was at Shechem that the Lord appeared to Abram and gave him the promise, “To your offspring I will give this land” (Genesis 12:6-7). It was at Shechem that Jacob later settled and built an altar to the Lord (Genesis 33:18-20). It was at Shechem that Joseph’s bones were buried (Joshua 24:32). And generations later it was at Shechem that the people of Israel assembled before Joshua and solemnly pledged, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord… The Lord our God we will serve, and his voice we will obey” (Joshua 24:16,25).

Lying on major trade routes that ran both east-west and north-south, Shechem had once been a significant commercial centre. However, over the centuries it had gradually gone downhill, so that by Jesus’ time all that remained was a sleepy wayside hamlet.

Now if you were travelling from Galilee to Jerusalem, the shortest route would take you through Sychar. That is, if it were not for one serious complication. The problem was that such a route would take you through Samaria. And, as we read in this morning’s passage from John, “Jews [had] no dealings with Samaritans.” The result was that the vast majority of Jewish travellers going from Jerusalem to Galilee would be forced to take a wide sweep eastwards across the Jordan River and later cross it again to head back west into Galilee. Needless to say, this added anywhere from two to four days to their journey.[1]

A Well

Jesus, however, had no such reservations. So it is that we find him with his disciples in the tiny Samaritan village of Sychar. Now John does not tell us what time of year it was when Jesus and his disciples were travelling. But he does tell us the time of day. It was the sixth hour, which means noon. So the sun was at its height. And I know that for much of the year the temperature in that region can reach well into the thirties. So perhaps you can imagine what it must have been like for them to have been journeying on foot under the blazing heat of the near eastern sun.

The sight of the little village must have been a welcome one. Wearied from all the walking they had been doing (Eugene Peterson in his translation in The Message used the words “worn out”) and while the disciples went off to see where they could buy some provisions for lunch, Jesus took the opportunity to sit down in the cool shade beside a well.

So it is that John gives us a little reminder of Jesus’ humanity. He was not Superman or Captain America or Thor. He was not faster than a speeding bullet or more powerful than a locomotive. And he could not leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Rather, as we read in Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, “he emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in human likeness…” (Philippians 2:7).

So it is that at the outset of his ministry we find Jesus being tempted by the adversary. A few weeks ago, reading from John 2, we saw him angry, as he drove out the money changers from the Temple, lashing at them with a whip and overturning their tables. Later in the Gospels we find him exhausted to the point that he fell asleep in the stern of one of his followers’ boats—so soundly that even with the waves crashing over the gunwales and threatening to sink it, he continued to sleep (Mark 4:36-38).

Now why is all this important? In the early years of the church there sprang up a form of heresy called Docetism. The core teaching of the Docetists was that Jesus only appeared to be human. That doctrine was quickly rejected by the church for several reasons. First, the fact that Jesus was fully human enables him to relate to us in the fullest possible way. The Letter to the Hebrews affirms that in Jesus “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin”. This gives us the assurance that we can come to him in our own weakness, in full confidence that we will find mercy and grace to help us in our times of need (Hebrews 4:15-16).

Secondly, it was the fact that Jesus was fully human that enabled him to be fully your and my representative when he bore our sins on the cross. The Bible recognizes Jesus as the new Adam, who has come into the world to undo all the wrong and destruction that are the result of sin. As the apostle Paul declared to the Christians in Galatia, “When the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Galatians 4:4-5).

And so in this morning’s reading we meet with a fully human Jesus. Weary and thirsty after a long trek, he took a moment to sit down by the side of a well and rest.

A Woman

The next time he looked up, there was a woman from the village coming to draw water from the well. Not having a bucket of his own, he asks her if he might take a drink from hers. His request is met with a look of horror and raised eyebrows. “What? You, a Jew, asking me, a Samaritan, to share from my bucket?”

At this point you may be asking yourself, what was that about? First of all, the Samaritan woman was well aware that for centuries Jews had regarded all non-Jews—and particularly Samaritans—as unclean. That meant you couldn’t come into physical contact with them or anything they had touched.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, think back a year or two to the covid epidemic. Imagine yourself coming up to a complete stranger and asking if you might take a sip from their water bottle. What kind of response do you think you’d get? “Are you crazy?” “Don’t you take any precautions?”

So begins one of the longest conversations in John’s gospel. And there is something about it that is utterly delightful, as the woman engages Jesus in a deeply thoughtful theological discussion.

Today in our age we might think nothing about it. But you have to realize that the attitude towards women in the first century was poles apart from what it is nowadays in the twenty-first. The very first prayer that every Jewish male recited in the morning, waking with the cockcrow, having barely opened his eyes and before he placed a foot on the ground, was this: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, that you did not create me a Gentile, a slave or a woman.” And here was Jesus, a Jew, engaging in what can only be described as a profound theological dialogue with a woman.

Now when you read the gospels, you find that this is not a one-off incident. Jesus’ attitude towards women was highly countercultural for a first-century Jew. He was happy for a woman—and an unclean one at that—to interrupt him while he was in conversation with a ruler of a synagogue (Luke 8:43-48). He was satisfied to allow Mary to take a place among the men while he was teaching in her home (Luke 10:38-42). He commended a widow as a model of generosity (Mark 12:41-44). He accepted the anointing by a woman’s precious oil as a beautiful foretelling of his death (Mark 14:3-9). And it was women who were the first to bear witness to his resurrection (Mark 16:1-7).

Jesus’ acceptance and honouring of women continued in the early church. As early as the day of Pentecost, quoting from the prophet Joel, the apostle Peter proclaimed,

And in the last days it shall be, God declares,
that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,
and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy,
and your young men shall see visions,
and your old men shall dream dreams;
even on my male servants and female servants
in those days I will pour out my Spirit,
and they shall prophesy. (Acts 2:17-18)

The apostle Paul has been maligned for being a misogynist. But it was he who affirmed that “as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:27-28).

And so what we see in this conversation are the seeds of a revolution. We are given a glimpse of the new society—the Jesus community—in which women take their proper place as equals alongside their male counterparts, even as Eve was drawn from the side of Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Living Water

But let’s take a look at the conversation itself. Jesus answers the woman’s objection with the response, “If you were aware of who you are talking with, you might have asked him for living water.” Of course the woman thought that Jesus was referring to running water. “Are you crazy? Where are you going to get that kind of water from? You don’t even have a bucket to draw water from this well!” To which Jesus replies, “Whoever drinks the water I give will never be thirsty again. The water I give will become within them a spring of water gushing forth to eternal life.” But the woman still doesn’t catch on. “Sir, give me that water, and I’ll never have to break my back hauling water from this well again!”

At this point Jesus shifts the conversation in a deeply personal direction. “Go and bring your husband over and we’ll talk more.” When she claims to have no husband, Jesus reveals that he is well aware of the half dozen men who have been a part of her life. You can only imagine the shock and discomfort she must have felt at this revelation. She may have lived a sordid life, but this woman was no slouch. She had all her wits about her. “So! I see you’re a prophet!” she retorts. Then she vainly attempts to divert the conversation into a religious argument: the age-old hostilities surrounding the question as to which group was worshipping in the proper way—the Jews or the Samaritans? This, she thought, would be sure to get away from the touchy subject of her relationships with the opposite sex.

But Jesus is ready for her. God is not concerned about which mountain people worship him on. He is infinitely bigger than that. No, says Jesus, the true God is far more interested in what’s happening on the inside of our lives, not in external rituals. “God is spirit,” Jesus tells her, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. That’s the kind of worshipper God is looking for.”

At this the woman begins to open her true heart and expresses the deep yearning that has long burned within her for the Messiah to come and rescue her. To which Jesus answers, “I who speak to you am he.”

And of course what happens? Just as the conversation is reaching a critical point, who walks into the scene but the disciples! They kept silent, but the woman must have seen the look of horror on their faces, that Jesus was alone with a woman and engaging in conversation with her—and a Samaritan woman at that! She didn’t need anyone to tell her to make herself scarce.

Whether it was in fear of the disciples or in amazement at the man she had been talking with, she dropped her water bottle as she ran off into the village. And there she became the first evangelist in the New Testament: “Come and see a man who told me all that I ever did!” (As though any of the villagers hadn’t been whispering about exactly that topic for years!) “Can this be the Christ?” she asked. And John tells us “Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony.”

And that’s the thing about living water. If you’ve really had a taste of it, it’s something you can’t keep to yourself. As much as we might like to, as much as we might be tempted to, we cannot bottle it in. The streams of living water will always well up and burst their bounds. And the one who gives them is not only the one who came to the woman at the well, asking, “Give me a drink.” He is also the one who would later cry out for you and for me and for all humankind, “I thirst…” (John 19:28).

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[1]     https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/new-testament/3-pilgrimage-paths-from-galilee-to-jerusalem/

“The Freedom of Obedience” (Romans 6:15-23)

I want you to take a moment to try to form a picture in your mind. We are looking down to the narrow pass that separates the twin slopes of Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal in Palestine. There beneath us is a vast crowd of the Israelite people. They have gathered at the behest of their mighty leader, Joshua, who has led them into victory after victory as they have laid claim to the land which God had promised them through Abraham centuries before. Now the battles are over. One by one the fortress cities of the Canaanite people have been conquered and the Israelites can look forward to peace in their land.

No longer the powerful young warrior that he once was, nevertheless there is still a commanding power in Joshua’s voice. The nation, he tells them, has come to a crossroads. They are free to settle in the land that God has given them. However, now they must make a choice. Will they worship the Lord and serve him in faithfulness? Or will they turn to the false gods of their ancestors? “If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you,” Joshua calls out to them, “then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve…” From the depths of the valley a mighty roar rings forth. “We will serve the Lord,” the people cry, “because he is our God.”

As the noise subsides, Joshua speaks again. “You are not able to serve the Lord,” he protests. “He is a holy God; he is a jealous God.” But again the unanimous cry thunders forth: “No! We will serve the Lord.” Again Joshua waits for silence and speaks. “You are witnesses against yourselves,” he warns them, “that you have chosen to serve the Lord.” A third time the cry echoes down through the valley, “We will serve the Lord our God and obey him.”

In the lives of all of us there are certain defining moments, moments that set the course for much of our future lives. The moment you earned your very first dime; the moment you left home to live in independence from your parents; the moment you said, “I will…” These are some of the defining moments in our lives. And this was such a moment for the nation of Israel.

Another defining moment has occurred at St Paul’s Church this morning. Today in the sacrament of baptism three people, two infants (through their adult sponsors) and one adult, have expressed their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and their desire to follow and serve him. In the washing of water they have visibly demonstrated their wish to die to sin, evil and injustice and to share in the life of Christ.

Baptism is a visible sign of what it means to become a Christian. It is a defining moment in life. As the people of Israel did at Shechem, we are saying, “We will worship the Lord our God and him only will we serve.” But what does this mean? Is what we are talking about a mere symbolic act, a matter of words? In response to this kind of thinking, in verse 2 of chapter 6 and in the opening verse of this morning’s passage from Romans, Paul uses an expression which we find from time to time in his letters. Our New International Version Bibles translate it, “By no means!” In Greek it is me genoito, which the King James Bible translates, “God forbid!” Perhaps the best way of rendering it today might be, “No way!” And so to those who would argue that becoming a Christian doesn’t make any difference to the kind of people we are, Paul responds, “No way!” To those who would want us to think that faith in Christ has no impact on our daily lives, he replies, “No way!” Then in the verses that follow he goes on to explain his answer.

Two kinds of slavery

For his explanation he uses the image of slavery. In the Roman world of Paul’s day there were sixty million slaves, and there can be no doubt that among those who first read his letter in Rome there were some who were themselves slaves. William Barclay gives us some idea of how masters could abuse their slaves the first century:

Pliny tells how Vedius Pollio treated a slave. The slave was carrying a tray of crystal goblets into the courtyard; he dropped and broke one; on the instant Pollio ordered him to be thrown into the fishpond in the middle of the court, where the savage lampreys tore him to pieces.[1]

In truth few masters ever displayed such cruelty to their slaves. In some cases slaves were better educated than their masters, had positions of great trust in the household and were treated with respect. But suppose, Paul suggests to us, you were the slave of a master such as Vedius Pollio and his lot, who treated you with cruelty and contempt from sunrise to sunset every day of your life. Then suppose you had the opportunity to come into the service of a master who was fair and kind, who graciously looked after your needs and treated you only with dignity and respect. Would you choose to go back to your former master? Me genoito! God forbid! No way!

This, says Paul, is exactly what the Christian life is all about. We can be slaves to sin. Or we can be set free from sin to be slaves to God. The choice is ours, and each has its consequences.

Slavery to sin

To be a slave to sin is to be trapped in a downward spiral. Paul uses three words to describe what is involved. The first of them is “impurity” in verse 19. For the ancient Jews impurity or uncleanness was a technical term. It had to do with one’s fitness to join in the religious observances of the nation. If you had a certain type of skin disease or had been in contact with a dead body or if you were a woman in her period or had recently given birth, you were considered “unclean”. But in the New Testament Jesus turns that around.

Nothing outside a person can make that person ‘unclean’ by going into him. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that makes him ‘unclean’. … For from within, out of people’s hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. All these evils come from inside and make a man ‘unclean’ (Mark 7:15,21-23).

What the Bible is saying, then, is that to be a slave of sin means that we become tainted inside, in the realm of our hearts and minds. We do things that we know are wrong because “Everyone else does it, so why shouldn’t I?” We secretly gloat over our fellow workers’ failures because somehow we think it makes us look better. We embroider the truth a little bit when we talk about others, just to give the story a little more spice. This is the kind of thing the Bible means when it speaks about impurity. It is the direct consequence of being in slavery to sin—to all the negative forces in our lives—and the list could go on and on. But Paul has more to say.

Impurity is not the only consequence of our enslavement to sin. Paul goes on to speak about “ever-increasing wickedness”. In Greek the expression means something like “lawlessness which leads only to further lawlessness”. The actual word Paul uses is anomia, which some of us might recognize in the French word anomie. Anomie is a word we hear today to describe the spiritual decadence which is undermining our society inch by inch. We become inured to the outrageously violent words of rap music which pollute our young people’s minds and ears with thoughts about breaking women’s backbones and forcing fellatio on them till they puke, or perhaps even defend it as artistic expression. We criticize governments that move to limit child pornography on the Internet in the name of free speech. We worship athletes and pop stars who leap into bed with literally hundreds of sex partners.

The outcome of such lawlessness can only be anarchy and the general collapse of our society as we know it—and finally the ultimate decay, which is death itself. The progression is easy to follow. Bondage to the forces of sin taints and distorts or inner being. This impurity of heart and mind inevitably leads on a social level to lawlessness and decadence. And that in turn delivers us to that state of being (or non-being) which we call death, where life has been sapped of all of its God-given beauty and meaning. It is a tragic picture.

Freedom in Christ

Right beside it, however, Paul gives us another picture, an altogether different one. The picture this time is not slavery to sin, but slavery to God and to Christ (which, ironically, the Bible tells us, is true freedom). The contrast between the two forms of slavery is total. As with slavery to sin which leads to impurity, lawlessness and death, slavery to Christ also brings with it three consequences.

The first of these, says Paul, is righteousness. We come across this word and its cognates at least fifty-five times in the letter to the Romans, so it is important to understand what Paul means. Essentially, when the Bible speaks of righteousness, what it is talking about is right relationships, living in harmony with God and with our fellow human beings. To be Christ’s willing slave means placing myself in obedience to him. And his first two commands are these: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength; and you shall love your neighbour as yourself. This is what righteousness means in practical terms. So it is that we ask in the service of baptism:

Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself?

Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

To which the candidates reply, “I will…” In doing so, they commit themselves to living a life of righteousness.

Paul tells us at the end of verse 19 that righteousness leads to holiness. Here I would prefer to use the old word “sanctification”, for what Paul is describing is not a final state, but an ongoing process. “Sanctification” may be even less understood than “holiness”. But what we are talking about is a path, along which as we travel it, we become increasingly infused with the character of God.

From time to time we may see a sunset whose grandeur reflects the glory of God. We may look at the delicate petals of a flower and be reminded of the magnificence and intricacy of God’s creation. How wonderful it would be if people could look at you and me and in us see something of the beauty of God’s nature! When we are enlisted in the service of Christ, that most certainly is the goal that he has set for us. We are embarking on a journey, whose destination is to become more and more like him. “Dear friends,” wrote St John, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2).

To some this path of righteousness and holiness seems dreary and restrictive—and all too often because we Christians have done our best to make it appear so! In reality to give ourselves in Christ in this way is to discover life, life as it was meant to be, life, as Jesus promises, in all its fullness.

To bring ourselves back to where we began: Like the people of Israel at Shechem you and I stand at a defining moment. The words of Joshua ring in our ears, “Choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve.” Will we be slaves to our own selfish desires, or will we be slaves to Christ, “whose service is perfect freedom”?

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[1]           William Barclay, The Letters of Timothy, Titus and Philemon, 270