Sermon - The Rev. Dr. Paul Kolbet, Mar. 12th, 2023

Our gospel reading today is one of the longest scripture readings of the year. It appears to tell the story of an encounter between Jesus and an unnamed Samaritan woman, but turns out to be a spiritual meditation on how each of us manage the needy, vulnerable, aspects of ourselves.  

The Samaritans were a group of people that lived in greater Israel whom the Jews of the time hated because they were descendants of foreigners the invading Assyrian empire centuries earlier had imported to replace the Jewish population who had either been killed or deported from their land. The very flesh of the Samaritans was a living reminder of a horrible history of loss. This woman in particular was perhaps not even the best Samaritan. As we find out later in the story, she had lived hard, and this day she walked to the town well to fill her water jar. She was all-alone. We are told that it was twelve noon, as if it is important for us to know that this conversation took place in the full light of day. There would be no secrets here, only truth telling. Under the noon day sun, there would be no shadows to hide in.

She met a stranger there, who was thirsty. The stranger, without any introduction, said to her, “Give me a drink” (John 4:7). What was she going to do? Of course, she was thirsty, too. That was why she was there. She may have thought that this man should get his own water, but she knew he could not because he didn’t have a bucket and the well was deep. In the middle of her day, under the noon sun, Jesus asks her first of all to give away the water she would otherwise draw for herself, as if that is what she needed more than water. I wonder why that would be the case for her. What would she do?

She began by reminding Jesus that she was not the kind of woman that a man like Jesus would ordinarily even be seen talking to. Maybe in that moment of decision, she remembered the scene from our Old Testament passage. There we find the Israelites wandering in the Sinai desert and they were so thirsty. They did not like the hard life of the desert and longed to live in a land where life was easier, a land that flowed with milk and honey. They cried out, “God, did you bring us up out of Egypt to kill us, and our children, and our livestock with thirst?” (Exodus 17:3). God, did you bring us to this point only to abandon us? In that story, water comes from the most unlikely, unpromising place. Moses strikes a rock with his staff, water flows out of it, and it quenches the thirst of the people. Water does not come from a well, or a hidden stream, or from fruit, or even from sand. In the dry desert full of desperate people, water comes from solid rock.

So perhaps thinking about this story, she thought that in that moment–Samaritan that she was, even in her thirst, she wasn’t to be a member of God’s people. No she was the rock. She was that unpromising place that was hit hard by the staff of life, yet she had within herself the capacity to provide the water. Probably, as she handed Jesus the water that she drew from the well for him, he said to her that he also had water to give her, but that it was better water. It was “free flowing, living water,” not the kind you draw with a jar or bucket, but kind that is like an unlimited spring. Indeed, Jesus claimed that those who drink his water “would never thirst again.” She said to him, “If you have that sort of water, give it to me so that I don’t have to keep coming to this well day after day” (John 4:15). For a man who had such water, Jesus sure was thirsty. He didn’t even have a bucket. At this point in the conversation, is not clear who is the rock now. Jesus seems to be the more unlikely place to produce the water.

As they continued to talk, it became clear that the woman had had five husbands, and was living with a man who wasn’t her husband. There surely is a more to the story here, but the Bible isn’t interested in the details of that painful history. What it wants us to see is that she had a need deeper than her physical thirst. That woman who walked to the well alone day after day, yearned to be really heard, known, and understood. And she got that from the needy stranger. She thinks Jesus is a prophet or seer because he really sees her and shows her that she has something of value to offer. This is such an important point that, just to make sure we see it, the Bible tells us that the woman left her water jar behind. What she received that day wasn’t like water that could be contained in a jar. It was like living water that flowed freely through her whole person.

There is so much need in this story. It is easy to think that what is of value about ourselves is the surpluses we have acquired beyond our own most basic needs. It is easy to think that what we have to offer others is what we have that they do not have. Ever so subtly this causes us to esteem in ourselves what we don’t have in common with other people. It is easy to think that we can only truly give something of value after we have become whole, after we have solved our own problems. It is easy to think that we are only in a position to heal others after our own pain is cured. It is easy to come to believe that what God loves about us is that we are not thirsty, that God loves that we are helpers, rather than those who are being helped.

How different this is from what St. Paul says to us this morning in his epistle. Paul writes, “For while we were still weak … Christ died for the ungodly…. God proves his love for us in that while we were still were sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:6-8). In other words, God values us as we are, before we get our act together, before we become better. According to Paul, God takes our weakness, pain, and shortcomings and turns it to God’s own purposes and to our own good. In Paul’s words, God pours love into our hearts by his Holy Spirit and this love transforms our suffering into endurance, endurance forms character, and character becomes the basis for hope. The point here is that this whole process of change and growth begins in our need. It begins in the thirst we share with the ancient Israelites and with the Samaritan woman at the well.

This notion of our own need rather than our abundance being what makes it possible for us to give and to grow may seem counterintuitive at first, but I think Paul must be right. I do know that I have far more compassion for people who are suffering from something I have felt myself. When someone loses a loved one, it is in feeling my own losses of those I have loved that I am able to connect and to care. I am at my worst when I don’t find the point of vulnerability that I share with the stranger, when I forget about my own thirst. How would the Samaritan woman have found resources within herself to draw water for a thirsty stranger, if she wasn’t thirsty herself? She knew what it was like to thirst and so she had compassion upon him. However much she may have been ashamed of her hard life, however much she may have been embarrassed by never really getting ahead of it all, by never having the surplus she wanted, it was these very needs and deficiencies that Jesus would turn into wells of living water. In the revealing light of the noon day sun, Jesus asked this thirsty woman to give him a drink because, in this way, her very needs and shortcomings could become a source of life and connection to the basic needs of the whole human race.  

We are told that the Samaritan woman returned to her city and exhorted the townspeople, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!” Her experience of her gift being received and being recognized by Jesus overcame the isolation of her old life. Other Samaritans came looking for Jesus and believed in him because of her. I suspect that she did not walk to the well alone after that. Thinking of her, Jesus chastised his own disciples saying, “Don’t say four months until the harvest! I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting.” Could his disciples find the path from their own needs to others like that woman did? Could they find the way from their own hunger to the harvest?

We Americans live with this myth of the good life being the one that is the most self-sufficient one. Oh how we admire “self-made” people who pull themselves up from their own bootstraps (if any of that is even possible)! It hard not to believe that this ideal contributes to the feeling of disconnectedness that Americans feel and the loss of deep community ties that so many lament. In the world of the self-made and self-sufficient, it hard not to be embarrassed by the lonely, needy, incomplete, and searching aspects of ourselves.

Could it be finally that these impoverished aspects of ourselves are so hard to crush and extinguish because God insists on meeting us there? If we pay attention, every day God sits at the well of our need and asks us to give him something to drink. We can become upset by the weakness, the sin, and the scarcity, and feel justified in protesting with Israelites, “God, did you bring us out into the desert only to kill us?” Or we can come to see how water springs from rock, how the love of the Holy Spirit poured into hearts uses our own shortcomings and shortages to save us. Jesus asks us to give out of our need in order to help us experience our most basic needs in a new way. Rather than our needs being a testimony to how we have fallen short, Jesus transforms them into a path to connect to others. It is in this connection with others and what God does with our shared need where so much Christian joy is found. It is in being heard, seen, and known, that God’s Spirit truly satisfies our thirst as a spring gushes up to eternal life.

Eternal Father, you provide for all our needs, may we know you as we are known by you, and may our own needs and desires lead us not to pursue an isolated self-sufficiency, but rather, may we offer them up to your Christ so that the love of the Holy Spirit will redeem them and use them for your glory.

Amen.