[Propertalk] Fw: Preaching John 4:5-42, Free Resource from GoodPreacher.com

[Joe Parrish]

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Preaching John 4:5-42

Where do you begin unraveling the knots in this most lengthy of dialogues in John’s gospel? The woman at the well is a fascinating figure not only because of her repartee and her numerous marriages, but also because of the contrast that she presents to Nicodemus. If Nicodemus comes by night, she comes by day. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, an insider, and she is a Samaritan, an outsider. When the encounter between Nicodemus and Jesus is finished, we have no word as to Nicodemus’ conclusions regarding Jesus. At the conclusion of the story of the woman at the well, she does something Nicodemus does not: she bears witness to Jesus.
There are a wealth of homiletical issues to be explored—where God is worshipped, Jesus telling the woman all she has ever done, the empty jar left behind, the affirmation of faith that is more question than affirmation—"He cannot be the Messiah, can he?" Every one of these options is a way into a sermon.
One particularly intriguing possibility is the very fact that a Galilean man speaks to a Samaritan woman. A feminist critique of this passage in recent years has underscored the extraordinary circumstance of a man meeting a woman at a public setting like this. Parallels are drawn to "betrothal" stories from the Hebrew scriptures, e.g. Abraham’s servant and Rebekah (Gen 24:10-61), Jacob and Rachel (Gen 29:1-20), and Moses and Zipporah (Ex 2:15b-21). But of even more significance is the fact that a Samaritan and a Galilean are meeting and conversing at all, considering the history between the two peoples.
These are two communities which have little in common. They shared a common history, yes, but not one that united them. John editorializes early in the text by saying, "Jews do not share things with Samaritans." Their dislike and avoidance of each other were legendary, thus the story of the counterintuitive juxtaposition of good and Samaritan in the well known parable of Luke 10.
The poet and philosopher, George Santayana, has said that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. Injury, however, often causes remembrance of the past to repeat itself. Samaritans and Jews remembered their history and so were doomed to repeat it indefinitely. Miroslav Volf, shaped by his own experience in the former Yugoslavia, writes of the poisoning effect of remembering the offenses of the past. "Victims will often become perpetrators precisely on account of their memories. It is because they remember past victimization that they justify as rightful self-protection what to most observers look like violence born of intolerance or even hatred."1 We have seen this not only in Yugoslavia, but also in Israel/Palestine, in Northern Ireland, and in Somalia, to name only a few.
In the encounter at the well, Jesus reshapes the memories of an alienated past into a future hope that one day all God’s people, ancestors and generations to come, will worship God in a re-imagined future, one in which the common thread is the Spirit and the Truth of God’s love expressed in Jesus Christ.
That Spirit and that Truth are what unite these strangers conversing at the well. Jesus tells the woman the truth about himself and about her. It’s the truth that sets them free. Like the water that promises to bubble forth like a spring between them, something new is created as the past gives way to what is yet to be. In Jesus, she has met that living water that can slake the thirst of the soul.
The Spirit and the Truth of the thing is that the world can change for the better sometimes when the walls come down, risks are taken, and God is worshipped in unexpected places. The truth is that God is Spirit and cannot be bound by the boxes we make, or the easy lines we draw. God overcomes the histories that haunt us.
Where the gifts of Water and the Spirit are present, people can overcome their hostility, their separateness; finding peace and creating community because that is where the Water is flowing and that is where the Spirit is leading.
You may ask where you get water like this, as the woman at the well asked of Jesus. The answer, of course, is that you don’t get it at all. It gets you. It comes unexpectedly, as you sit by a well doing the familiar and someone speaks in a way that catches you off guard. It comes as a gift. Like the best gifts of all, it comes without earning, the abundant expression of affection that flows from the heart of the giver. It comes in seeing your worth reflected in the eyes of another. It comes in the word of forgiveness sought and forgiveness given. It comes in facing the sufferings that we have endured and the ones we have inflicted; and, God help us, it is discovering that for all the wells we have visited and all the springs from which we have drunk, this is the one we have sought all along, because he is there, in Spirit and in Truth—because He is there.
Jon M. Walton



Notes

1. Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 6.
The extraordinary nature of this conversation is discussed, for example, by Gail R. O’Day when she notes "The conversation between Jesus and the woman is thus a scandalous conversation, a scandal noted by the woman herself. She responds to Jesus’ request for water with the words 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' (4:9) The woman knows that a Jewish man should not talk with a Samaritan woman. ...The scandal is noted also by Jesus’ disciples when they arrive at the well (4:27). They are amazed that Jesus speaks with the woman; Jewish rabbis (see 4:31) did not speak in public with women." (Gail R. O’Day, John, "Jesus and the Samaritan Woman" The Women’s Bible Commentary. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, editors. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992, 295.)




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