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"So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.” “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?” Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.” He told her, “God, call your husband and come back.” “I have no husband,” she replied. Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” The woman said, “I know that Messiah (called Christ) is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.” Then Jesus declared, “I who speak to you am he.” "
Just then the disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?” Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Christ?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him. Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.” Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. Do you not say, “Four months more and then the harvest? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. Even now the reaper draws his wages, even now he harvests the crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. Thus the saying, ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor. Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony: “He told me everything I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. And because of his words many more became believers. They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.” (NIV) YOUR NOONDAY ENCOUNTER AT THE WELL IS WAITING Nobody expects anything of importance to take place at noon at a Mediterranean village well. The midday siesta is right around the corner and people sensibly avoid work in the heat of the day. The moment does not promise anything special. Despite that, what takes place in the story before us is high drama. We ought to spend some time experiencing this together, for this story is as good as stories get. I’ve actually been to the place in this story. It’s a fork in the road in what we now call the West Bank, one way leading to Scythopolis, another to Nablus. The setting, however, albeit rural and withdrawn, is bathed in history. Here Jacob once purchased land for one hundred pieces of silver from the sons of Hamor. At his death, he bequeathed it to Joseph, and Joseph was buried here. Jacob’s ancient well is very deep, filled not with “living” or running water, but with water that percolates from the ground. I remember dropping the small metal drinking cup by the rope into the depths, listening for the splash, lifting the cool water to my lips, and wondering whether this was safe to drink-- my mother’s warnings overcoming my appreciation for history! So many ancient stories took place here. Today, however, it is Jesus who stops for a drink of water. Let’s see what happens. He could have chosen a different route from Jerusalem to Galilee, of course. It would have taken two days longer, yet it would have been more appropriate for a pious Jew to avoid this Samaritan territory. Jesus, however, has broken with a lot of Jewish piety and John, who is writing to Gentiles in this Gospel, can’t wait to let them, and us, know of the most recent example. This story, surprising to say, takes place at high noon when you should be relaxing with bees buzzing around your nose and a burro hee-hawing in the background. Here, of all times and places, John tells us, Jesus had an encounter with a stranger who within a few moments had her life reoriented. Could something like this really happen this fast? What do you think? I wonder what you think because there is something in this story for everyone. There are surprises here for feminists, for human rights activists, for those troubled by formal religion, for people with bruised consciences, and for timid spirits. There is something here for you. High noon! Jacob’s Well! 30 A.D.! I The God Who Comes to Us One by One. I think it’s interesting to provide a contemporary context, as we begin, by realizing that this story challenges the very thesis of Dan Brown’s immensely popular, The DaVinci Code. An underlying theme of that novel is that alternative Gnostic gospels were suppressed by patriarchal concerns of control-takers within the earliest church. Of course, the implication is that we have been deprived of the real truth that may still lie there waiting for curiosity seekers in those alternative gospels. The reality, however, is that it is of great importance that the early church fathers and mothers rejected these Gnostic gospels. Those Gospels assumed a spirit-God who would have nothing to do with the material world and thus, of course, with humans. Only divine emanations and urges, they believed, far removed from the Godhead, created the world and humans. God as God, according to Gnosticism, wants nothing to do with your world and mine. Now you can understand why John is so excited to tell this story. He wants his readers to understand that in Jesus, a God who is far off is also very near. John tells us that this Jesus not only claimed to be one with the Father, but he also made it his pleasure to get personal with people, with Samaritan women and with you and me. How important it is for us to know that Dan Brown got it all wrong and John got it right—otherwise the world’s untouchables, the nobodies, the outsiders, and yes, even you and me, would be of little interest to the omniscient God of the universe. Listen to how this plays itself out in this story. Jesus encounters a person at the well, and because of his outgoing nature, his interest in people, his compassion for outsiders, he engages this person in a conversation. If this is extraordinary in itself, there’s more. First, this person is a woman. In this society, men don’t talk to strange women in public, certainly not rabbis. We are told this shocks the disciples, but they have learned to hold their tongues because Jesus often does surprising things. Second, the woman is immoral. She is regarded as such by her community, attested to by the fact that she comes to the well at midday, a time when she would be free from taunters and critics. She has had five husbands, and she’s living with a man to whom she isn’t married. We learn this as the story unfolds, but it’s enough to know that Jesus has no problem initiating a conversation with her, knowing what he knows about her. Thirdly, she is a Samaritan. The Jews have had a five hundred year feud with the Samaritans, ever since these people who were never taken into the Assyrian captivity intermarried with those pagans who were resettled in their region. They were not regarded as Jews by the Judeans, but only as half-breeds—as people for whom God no longer cared. How surprising it is that Jesus talks to her—and is willing to drink from the same cup with her. Is this Jesus not someone for you and for me! John is surely delighted to share this story with us, but my guess is that there were many stories like this that could have been told. After all, the disciples went into a Samaritan town to buy lunch while Jesus chatted at the well—something they would never have done had not Jesus helped them to see that the old barriers were gone, the popular prejudices with outlawed encounters with women and non-Jews had come to an end. More than that, Jesus had helped them to understand that God was concerned about people, one by one, no matter who they were. God is not only the one through whom all things were made, but also the one who became flesh, and lived among us, full of grace and truth. (Jn. 1) Of course, this is all terribly profound, but, more importantly, intensely personal. A woman, an alien with a shady reputation sits at the well and chats with Jesus. He knows who she is. He accepts her as she is. It’s high noon in ordinary time. Just as any high noon. In your office or school cafeteria. In a café with a friend. Around the dinner table with family. At a soup kitchen at the Salvation Army. In an army mess hall. Along a seashore in tsunami struck Indonesia. Ordinary times with ordinary people like you and me. People are talking. They have burdens, problems, guilt, and anxiety. They are the lead characters in the story. They are waiting to be heard, affirmed, cared for. It may be our role, as it was Jesus’, to listen, to hear them out, to let them come face to face with God’s love alive in us. One by one. You and I. II. Humans Who Are Changed One by One. What follows in the story is nothing less than remarkable. When you and I watch a movie or read a novel, we have certain criteria that we use to determine whether something is plausible. When we read a Biblical story, we often use these same criteria. Is it really believable that a hardened, cold-blooded killer can be changed by an encounter with a little girl? Does it make sense that the love of a woman can change a reckless, thoughtless high-school dropout? Can fisherman just pack up their belongings and follow a rabbi because he meets them at the seashore and says, “Follow me?” How long does it take? Doesn’t it take more than an hour? What do you think? Here is a man willing to listen to a woman with some serious issues. He helps her to talk about what is normally not public conversation for her. Long-held, deep-seated burdens of guilt are brought to the surface. She begins to think about issues more profound than her own personal wrestling with guilt—issues such as, where do we go once we have acknowledged our guilt, whom do we confess to, whom should we call God, where is God? Jesus tells her more than she is ready to hear, and John can’t wait to tell his readers this. “The day is coming, and is already here, when people will not worship God on mountains in Samaria or in Judea, but wherever they are, in their personal space, in spirit and in truth!” What can this mean to her? Does it mean she can deal with her guilt and God’s acceptance right now? Not only after some pilgrimage to a holy place? Can she know, here and now, that she is affirmed and loved? We wish we knew more, but John’s report is like a news flash that has left out some of the details. We do know, however, that whatever she may have been seeking, in that moment, she found it. In that moment she who was looking for God’s personal messenger and Messiah to her, heard him say, “I who speak to you am he!” She runs to tell the people in her village. Wasn’t this difficult for her? She, an outcast, now telling people what they ought to know? The village prostitute, perhaps, telling them that a Jew at the well has freed her, rescued her from the deepest burden in her life-- and she has to tell them about it? Embarrassing or not, she tells what she must, and they invite him to stay a couple days. And for the first time in that ancient hour, non-Jews called themselves converts. It didn’t first happen with Paul or Peter. For the first time in that wonderful, life-changing, barrier-breaking era when traditions were shattered and new paths were forged, people who once were blind, now told others they could see! John can’t wait for you to hear this! Here was a woman with nothing to commend her who became a somebody in God’s new dawning creation. Jesus was not the lead character in this story. It was a woman transformed, a woman of no-account, the victim of prejudice and human rights violations at the hands of the Jews, now leading a community of her own people to hear the same transforming message that she has heard. Here in this dog-day-high-noon-desert-hour a woman called a man who led her into God’s presence, Savior, and helped others to say it as well. I don’t know how long this took. An hour for the woman? Two days for the village? But it was a transformation, that’s for sure. And it happened one by one, in a setting where the stories of a person like you and me had become important to a listener whose name was Love. How many times have you experienced something so immediate in your own life? Let me tell you about a time when it happened in my ministry. A woman was in the hospital with symptoms, vague pains, aches, anxiety, and worries about serious illness. She was a woman I had known as a serious critic of my ministry, a person negative about most things, a complainer, always calling attention to the worst things in her husband, her children and others. She lay on her hospital bed as I visited her, not really wanting to see me because I represented to her much of what was wrong in her world. We talked about her symptoms. It was a long talk, perhaps about an hour. She was in a position to be worried, to think even the worst about her prospects. She talked about death, about sin, about guilt, and I shared God’s good word of love and forgiveness. Two days later, after many tests, she went home with a positive prognosis. There was nothing wrong with her. But you and I know what this was all about. She had received a revelation about herself, about all her shortcomings and failures. She had also been enabled to see beyond herself to the One who alone can heal, comfort, forgive and free. In her own way, she had called Jesus, in a most personal way, Savior, and she was different than she had ever been before. She too had been transformed in a moment in ordinary time, in the heat and doldrums of her very real day. All of us are changed one by one. We are freed from our pasts to become new men and women because we have come to know God in Jesus, the God who is not merely a cosmic power, but also a personal presence. If you do not know this God in Jesus today, this is surely your time at the well. He is waiting to listen to you and affirm you with the extravagant kindness that characterizes the God of the Bible. If, however, he has already rescued you from your personal burdens of guilt, and you know him as Savior, because someone once took the time to hear you in your need, your immaturity, your guilt, then this is also your time at time at the well. There are friends and strangers, colleagues and neighbors, who await your patience, your genuineness, your calming presence, and your offer of hope. John remembers this story for us for a reason. It not only reminds us that God has loved us in Jesus one by one, but that we are called to listen to others who are waiting to be heard. This is your day at the well. There is someone waiting to tell their story, and to have you share yours. If you are timid when it comes to sharing your faith, this is the time to hear those who said, “we now believe not just because of what you told us, but because we have heard him ourselves.” You who know Jesus as Savior are today sitting at the well. It is high noon. People are waiting. Some are strangers. Some are known to you. They do not come in groups. They are waiting. One by one. Prof. Dr. Dr. David Zersen, President Emeritus
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