Gospel Lesson: John 4:5–30, 39–42 [The Samaritan woman at the well.]
So Jesus came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph*. Jacob's well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour.** (*Gen. 33:19, 48:22, **sixth hour = noon)
There came a woman of Samaria to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings 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 nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty forever. The water that I will 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 will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 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 now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 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 worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people 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 (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.”
Just then his disciples came back. They marveled that he was talking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you seek?” or, “Why are you talking with her?” So the woman left her water jar and went away into town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?” They went out of the town and were coming to him.
Many Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, “He told me all that I ever did.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there 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 indeed the Savior of the world.”
Are you thirsty? In today’s Gospel Lesson, Jesus is at Jacob’s well in Samaria. He is talking to a woman about “living water” and about being thirsty. The woman wants that water, first because she is lazy, then because she is curious, and finally because she wants to worship God.
Jesus is also thirsty. He has been traveling and so probably is hot and tired. But Jesus is also thirsty to spread the Gospel. He is thirsty like in the words of the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied” Mt. 5:6. And so Jesus speaks to this woman about true religion, about the Holy Spirit, and about true worship and the source of salvation. And as Jesus spoke, the woman became to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, and her spiritual thirst was satisfied. Through dialog and by understanding this woman’s life situation and by not condemning her, he made her thirsty for the love of God, and then satisfied her thirst by the love of the Gospel and by his love and compassion for her.
Are you thirsty? If not I could feed you all potato chips and salty Doritos chips. When you are thirsty after being in the hot sun or after working or playing hard, what your body really needs is water. And so here in Okinawa many people take a bottle of water with them wherever they go, even when they come to church. That is great. But so often when we are thirsty, we reach for something different than water. After eating a handful of chips, a can of cola or a can of beer tastes good. But actually, those beverages can make you thirsty. When I am tired and thirsty, I often drink a cup of coffee. But actually, coffee makes me thirsty. After a cup of hot coffee, a glass of cold water is really refreshing.
My point is that often when we are thirsty we reach for something that makes us even thirstier. This is not just for physical thirst, but it goes for all of our thirsts and desires and lusts and coveting. These are also the spiritual, religious, emotional, philosophical, and imaginary thirsts also.
When Jesus first spoke of “living water” the woman wanted it because she was lazy. John 4:15, 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.” We are lazy also. We want God to give us everything we need. Pray for this, pray for that, and God will give us what we need. For most people, that is the purpose of religion. It is a way to get what they need in life. That is why they pray. We understand that. We thirst for many things, whether it is for healing or success, we ask God for these things. We do so because Jesus taught us so to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” But this thirst is satisfied only when we realize that God is the source of all we need for life and thank Him for it.
Then when the woman realized that Jesus was a prophet, she became curious about many religious things. The fact is that there are a lot of things that we do not know about God. Unlike the woman, we cannot debate with Jesus about these things, so we read the Bible and learn about God from sermons and Bible classes. The woman’s question was about where to worship, it was a big debate between the Jews and Samaritans, who both worshiped the same True God. Jesus answered this way:
John. 4:21 Jesus declared, “Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.”
There is something about being a Christian so that Christians want to worship God. It is a type of thirst. We come to church and want to be satisfied. It might be hard to put our finger on the source of that thirst. I think it comes from not being fulfilled by other things in our life. Life and society offer at lot of things to help us. Just look at the TV commercials. It is everything from food to cars to travel to clothes to toys to fun to health to beauty to love to friends to money etc. But for a Christian, even if we have all these things in our lives, there is something else that we thirst for.
We thirst for the love and forgiveness of God.
There is something about sin that makes us feel dry. Maybe it is a guilty conscience. Maybe it is the fear of being caught. Maybe it is loneliness. Maybe it is that we are not free and so feel constrained. Maybe it is frustration. Maybe it is failure. But when we feel our sin, we know we want to be rid of it. We want to wash it away. We want to be fresh again. We want to be refreshed. That is why sin causes us to be thirsty; it causes us to want something that will give us peace and strength.
Jesus knows that thirst. He was thirsty after his 40 day fast in the wilderness, he was thirsty that day at Jacob’s well in Samaria, and he was thirsty on the cross. On the cross when he had the sin of the world upon himself, he cried out, “I am thirsty,” John 19:28. It was not the vinegar that the soldiers gave him that quenched his thirst. It was the forgiveness of sin when his sacrifice was complete. “It is finished,” he said, John 19:30.
This is the forgiveness that refreshes. This is the living water. It is Baptism. It is the Lord’s Supper. It is the Holy Spirit. It is the Word of God’s Promise. It is the gift that Jesus gave the woman at the well. He said, John 4:14, “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.”
Amen.
Michael Nearhood, Pastor
Okinawa Lutheran Church
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