“At the Well”
John 4:5-42
Allen Huff
Jonesborough
Presbyterian Church
3/23/14
“For God so
love[s] the world [that] God [does] not send the Son into the world to condemn
the world” but for the sake of the world – for the sake of its wholeness, and
for the sake of its deep, spiritual awareness that the creation, every cell and
solar system in it, resonates with the voice and the heartbeat of God.
The saving
work of Jesus is the work of reuniting this beloved world which is being fragmented
almost entirely by the human creature’s propensity to idolize itself, by our
laziness in settling for, and even choosing prejudice, greed, violence, and
pride over the higher callings of humility, gratitude, generosity, and
neighboring.
It is this
broken and fragmented world that has taught a woman that one appropriate
response to a request for water is to say: “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a
drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”
Instead of
acknowledging the common ground of thirst, and then gratefully receiving from
the earth the elemental gift of water, the woman, out of submissive habit perhaps,
simply regurgitates the boundaries that have, and as far as she is concerned,
will always keep Jews separated from Samaritans, and males separated from
females.
It is easy to
name all the “wrong” things we do and to label them “sins.” It is another thing entirely, though, to
begin to realize that most of those “wrong” things are nothing but petty
distractions, and that the grand and honorable things we do to protect our
visible “goodness,” which we protect with rigid, exclusionary boundaries, are
very often the most dangerously sinful things we do.
The actions
and attitudes that distance us from God and from neighbor usually make us feel
righteous and superior. They make us
feel other. Jesus enters the
fragmented world, however, to overcome otherness, to live a life that
very deliberately exposes our tolerance for injustice, our collusion with
brutal powers, and our pandering moralities that allow us to ignore God’s love
for and presence in those whom we fear, or simply don’t understand. Jesus lives his saving life for all
creation’s sake, and for all creation’s sake he invites the human creature back
into healthy relationship with the Creator, with one another, with self, and
with the earth.
The story in
John 4 describes one of Jesus’ most memorable “for the sake of” moments, and it
occurs at the lip of a storied well. The
Old Testament does not mention Jacob’s well, but a tradition that is probably
more convenient that convincing remembers that Jacob digs this well.
At the time
of Jacob there is no Jewish nation, so there is no Samaritan offshoot to
disdain and to live over against. There
is, of course, a hoodwinked twin brother, Esau.
In spite of his tendency to surrender to his appetites, the Hairy One
eventually matures and demonstrates the strength and substance of his true
self. He forgives his deceitful
brother. And after Jacob wades the
shallow Jabbok, the brothers embrace and at last, they drink from the deep well
of reconciling grace – together.
At the
physical well, a legacy attributed to the forgiven Jacob, through whose lineage
God molds the very face of Forgiveness, Jesus meets a forever-nameless
Samaritan woman. This well, like all
oases, is a place where thirsty creatures, human and animal alike, gather to
remember that their very existence depends on the life-giving offerings of the
earth from which their bodies arise.
Such provision is the blessing of the Creator to and through the
creation, and we all stand on equal footing at the lip of the Well. To become aware of the realities of grace, of
shared dependence, and of interdependence, and to receive such realities as
holy gift, this is to begin to taste the living water that Jesus offers.
It is hardly
that easy, though. When conditioned by a
broken and fearful world to judge, to compete, and to “eat or be eaten,” we
quickly overlook the face-to-face earthiness of a vulnerable
Well-gathering. And in our forgetfulness
of grace, we can say the oddest things.
“Sir, give me
this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw
water.”
I can’t tell
what the woman is up to here. Is she
serious? Does she genuinely believe that
Jesus’ promise of living water is some kind of magic that will finally make her
life all coziness and leisure? Or is she
just slapping what she considers to be some haughty Jerusalem Jew in the face with rude sarcasm? Either way, she misses the point.
“Go get your
husband,” says Jesus.
“I don’t have
a husband,” snaps the woman.
‘I know,’
says Jesus. ‘But that’s okay. I understand.
I’m not here to condemn anyone.’
Then, in so
many words, Jesus says to her that she has been going to the well of marriage
over and over, but for whatever reason she keeps drawing up one empty bucket
after another. She still has yet to
drink the water of true relationship, the water of deep connection, of
spiritual as well as physical oneness with another human being. And now, perhaps because of an imprisoning
patriarchy, she has more or less barnacled herself to some man so that she does
not have to turn to begging or to prostitution in order to survive.
Indeed! How thirsty she must be!
‘Okay,
Rabbi,’ she says. ‘So, you’re a
prophet. I get it. But you’re still a Jerusalem Jew. Your people still refuse to recognize my
people because we worship here, on Mt. Gerazim.’
Jesus has
successfully turned the conversation in the direction he wants to go. And from his mouth, from the lips of this New
Well, flow words that begin to soak the woman’s desert life in living
water. Jesus invites the woman to lean
out over the well and to peer inside.
‘Look,’ he
says. ‘This Well is so full you can see the water. And in the water, you can see your
reflection. And in your reflection you
can see the reflection of God. So it is
for all who come here.
‘God is not found
any better on one mountain than another.
God is not reflected any more fully in one person’s face than
another. So, to see and to know God we
need all faces, all reflections.’
These words
are fresh, living water, and like all water they seek the lowest, deepest place
they can reach. They tumble down into
lonely valleys where darkness, sadness, and day-to-day weariness dry us
out. When we get dehydrated, all our
efforts to know and to share God tend to petrify into idolatries – into the
worship of worldly things, rigid structures and strictures that we experience
and define in only the most limited and tangible terms.
In these
spiritual deserts we focus more on the place of worship than on the One whom we
worship.
In spiritual
deserts we focus more on who we will allow to receive the sacrament than on the
host who invites us to the table.
In spiritual
deserts we focus on what people do, wrong and right, rather than on who they
are at the core of their God-imaged, human being.
In spiritual
deserts we allow ourselves to see ourselves according to confining dualities
such as Jews and Samaritans (those who do the right thing in the right place versus
those who do not), and as males and females ("stronger sex" versus "weaker
sex").
In spiritual
deserts we even begin to accept the world’s view of us as mere consumers, tools
whose chief end is to produce and to purchase as much as possible in order to
keep an economy afloat. And that opens to door to seeing ourselves and others as eye candy whose worth is tied to physical beauty rather than to
our innate and intimate worth as children of God.
And from the
earliest of times, never has there been a clan, a tribe, a state, a kingdom, a
nation, or an empire that has not told is young people, especially its young
men, that they are renewable and thus expendable resources to be taught the
science of killing and being killed for the betterment of their betters.
To save this
mixed up world, to reunite this fragmented creation, which God so loves, God
makes a loud splash in the desert.
“God is spirit,”
cries Jesus, “and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”
Jesus' life
is wringing wet with the prophecy of Isaiah: “The wilderness and the dry land
shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall
blossom abundantly…They shall see the glory of the Lord,
the majesty of our God. Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble
knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here
is your God.’” (Selected lines from Is. 35:1-4)
“Here is your
God,” says Isaiah
“I am he,”
says Jesus.
And the
ripples spread.
Here is our
challenge as followers of Jesus: As a people blessed to be a blessing, we are
called to be crocuses in the desert, signs of God’s ongoing renewal.
Our
blessedness becomes blessing for others when we, out of love for the world, die
the costly death of grace and embrace God’s freedom from the world’s condemning
ways.
Our
blessedness becomes blessing for others when we respond humbly to God’s call to
be an oasis, a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” a place of
Well-Gatherings.
Our
blessedness becomes blessing for others when we, like Jesus, dare to enter forbidden and contemptible Samaritan lands.
For through such risky congregations, the living water washes our
hearts, and minds, and eyes to reveal new brothers and sisters. And when we trust Love to reveal Love, our
new siblings in Christ will say, “It is no longer because of what you said that
we believe, for we have heard [and seen] for ourselves, and we know that this
is truly the Savior of the world.”
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