What to Thirst For

Sermon for March 12, 2023, Lent 3A Central Presbyterian Church, Fort Smith, AR,

John 4:5-42

So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshipped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water-jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.

Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there for two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

March is Women’s History Month, so it is fitting that the lectionary reading for this Sunday is the story whose main characters are Jesus and a woman. 

This story may seem unremarkable to us because of our familiarity with it, but it is, in fact, stunning, for multiple reasons. 

Frequently, as I encounter scripture and reflect on what to say to you all, I am struck by how important it is to try to help us all stand back, to reassess these familiar stories, and allow them to strike us as amazing, which they are. 

In this story, as we have it in the Gospel of John, some shocking things happen, some shocking statements are made with far-reaching implications for us today. Let us look at some of them together.

The Woman Theologian

First, in Women’s History Month, let us notice that this is not just a story about a woman, it is a story about a thinking woman. 

This woman has a developed understanding of theology, including a theology of worship and a theology of salvation. 

Worship, she knows, is a controversial topic between her people, Samaritans, and Jesus’ people, Jews. 

The issue is location: whose temple is legitimate? That is not our question nor our issue, but let us just notice that it was an issue then, and this woman is both informed about it and has an opinion about it, and is willing to engage a man in conversation about it. 

She also has thoughts about salvation, which, in her context, is all about Messiah. On this topic too, she is willing to engage a Jewish man. She is a woman who can think theologically. 

Remarkably, Jesus engages her. He welcomes the dialogue. That means he sees her as a full person and respects her. The fact that she is a woman does not even come up at all, until the disciples return. It is their issue, but it is not an issue to Jesus. The teaching is clear: disciples of Jesus should emulate him; Jesus valued women and took them seriously. 

If men have a problem with that, they have not reached the spiritual maturity that Jesus was modeling. They need to take a lesson. 

We value the gifts and calling of women here in the Presbyterian Church USA. Women are clergy, they are elders and deacons, they chair committees, run programs, teach both adults and youth, and are the backbone of any congregation. They are chaplains, theological professors, authors, and spiritual directors. 

Jesus has led us to examine our traditional assumptions about gender and to be open to God’s gifts in both genders, male and female. 

Further Thinking About Gender 

Today, we need to push the gender question further. We, in the mainline Protestant denominations, have come to understand that Jesus and Paul’s radical views of women, as fully equal with men, was toned down by the later writers of texts that have been included in our cannon. 

New Testament books like Ephesians and Colossians are important to us, but scholars recognize that they come from the hand of a person living after the historical Paul’s life, and represent some views that he did not share, like the subservience of women to men. 

Books like Timothy and Titus go even further in limiting women’s participation. We see a tendency in the developing cannon of the New Testament in the second generation of Christians to soften the radicalness of Jesus and Paul, probably to make the early Christian movement more acceptable to a wider audience, as it spread in the Roman Empire. 

So, the question of gender was unsettling to some, and the knee-jerk reaction seemed to be to retreat to a safer, more traditional perspective. (By the way, the very same softening of radical views happened within the cannon with respect to the issue of slavery as well.)

Gender: Further Discussion

The question of gender is again on the table in our day. Just like many other issues, we have come to understand that a binary, black-or-white perspective on gender simply does not account for the facts. 

The problem with binary categories is that they simply do not account for real life. Binary categories work great for us when we are children, but we are called as adults to put away childish ways.

Today, scientists know that many binaries are simply inadequate to account for gender in real life. We now know, for example, that between one in 1500 and 2000 babies are born each year, in which gender differentiation at birth is so ambiguous that a specialist is called in. Decisions are made, one gender manifestation is preferred, the other removed. (see http://www.isna.org/faq/frequency)

Physical manifestation of gender ambiguity is just the tip of the iceberg. We know that chromosomal ambiguity, in other words, not XX or XY occurs in one in 1600 births. There are XXY chromosomes in one of 1,000 births, according to a Brown University study. 

The list of medically defined non-standard conditions is long. The male-female binary simply does not adequately account for reality. It is a conventional way of looking at the world, but an inadequate one.

I had a philosophy professor in college who pointed out to us that everything in the world is either a chair, or it is not a chair. That binary is true, but completely unhelpful. That is how binaries work. They are inadequate.

In the ancient world, most people accepted all kinds of binaries: male and female, Jew and Gentile, slave and free, pure and impure, kosher and not kosher, but Jesus, a person of deep spirituality and enormous courage, could think beyond those categories. 

He taught us to look at every human being as a person God created, God loves, and God values. So now, we need to engage questions of transgendered persons and other non-binary identities with seriousness and openness to Jesus’ radical inclusion.  

…

Thirst

There are so many profound ideas in this story but we have time only for one more. The central question that the story opens with is about thirst. 

John’s Gospel repeatedly uses a literary strategy that we see here: a person in a conversation with Jesus, in this case the Samaritan woman, mistakes his message because they take literally what he intends to be taken spiritually. For example, Nicodemus thinks new birth is about being a baby in a womb again. 

Here the question begins with literal thirst, so it concerns a well, a bucket, and social rules about who can drink with whom. But quickly Jesus moves the conversation to the spiritual level, making the issue of thirst much deeper. 

The woman in the story has certainly lived a life of unsatisfied thirst. Probably with great hyperbole, we hear that she has had five husbands and is now living with a man who has, for some reason, not become her sixth. 

So, she shows up at a well to get water, but reveals a thirst for a meaningful, lasting relationship that, for reasons we are not told, has been utterly frustrated. She has a longing, a thirst that has gone unquenched her whole adult life.  

So Jesus deftly re-directs her attention. They talk about her past, her many husbands, and her present relationship. 

Why? Because she believes her deepest thirst will be quenched by finally getting into the right relationship. 

There are so many inadequate thirst-quenchers that people seek, but probably the most common is this one: the right relationship will solve everything for me.  

I love Mary Oliver poems, and she has one that tells the truth beautifully:

“Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.”  

— From “Sometimes” Devotions, p. 105, originally in Red Bird, 2008.

Being in love, being in a committed relationship is a gift of God, maybe one of the best gifts you can ever receive. 

But there is a quest in our hearts that goes even deeper. We all long to be truly known for who we are, and to be accepted and loved, even with all of our warts and failures; even with a past that may include things we are not proud of. 

We long for a connection with God, who is Spirit, who knows us intimately and completely, and who, despite our past, still calls us beloved children of God.  

So we see Jesus, bringing up her past, with all of its complications and frustrations, and what does he do? Judge her? Shame her? Call for acts of contrition? Not at all! He simply tells her that the God whom he knows intimately as Father is seeking worshipers who will worship him “in Spirit and truth” — God is seeking people; people to celebrate their belovedness, not looking for people to condemn as unworthy.  

That is why she runs back to the village saying to everyone, “”He told me everything I have ever done.” He told me, with out condemning me! That is awesome! And in so doing, he taught me what to thirst for: for living water; spiritual water, the water of knowing who I am in God, and that changes everything!

We want all kind of things, and we need all kinds of things. Many are legitimate to want. We all want to live healthy lives, to have good relationships with our families, to have close friends, and to be materially successful enough not to be in want. 

We want a healthy planet for our descendants, we want good government. We want human love. All of those are wonderful. None of them is ultimate. 

Let this story teach us what to thirst for: the water of the spirit, the water provide from the deepest well; the well of God’s love that is inexhaustible and given freely to men and women and to every other gender identity. If this is what we learn to this for, we will experience a “a spring of water gushing up…” so that we need never thirst again.