38.

John 5:1-18.  (March 15, 2015)

I.

This gospel measures itself according to Jewish holidays.  By doing this, it shows how Jesus is taking the stagnant well-water of our old religious institutions, and replacing it with the wild new wine of the Spirit.  Jesus goes up to Jerusalem from Galilee for an unnamed festival. 

Jerusalem is the holy city.  It is God’s chosen city.  It is supposed to reflect God’s power and presence.  It is also supremely representative of the Jewish religion.  We would expect it to be a place of joy, peace, and health.  Instead, when he gets there Jesus finds a crowd of sick people languishing around a reflecting pool called Bethsaida.  One guy has been waiting by this pool to be healed for 38 years.

I am told that there is in Jerusalem today a counseling center dedicated to helping bitterly disappointed tourists and pilgrims.  People come to Jerusalem from all over the world.  Many of them only know the city from the Bible, and they have some very exalted expectations.  When they get there they discover that Jerusalem is a chaotic, dirty, under-maintained, ancient, conflict-ridden Middle Eastern city.  For anyone expecting the streets to be paved with gold and everyone loving each other and lost in ecstatic prayer all the time, the reality is a crushing disappointment.  In Jerusalem the Christians don’t even get along with each other!  Do people expect maybe the Disney World version?!

Jesus plays on this discontinuity between what Jerusalem is supposed to be, and what it actually is.  For him it represents the chasm between what religion is intended to do for us, and what it is actually doing to us.

The last time Jesus is in Jerusalem, probably about six months earlier, he encounters the corruption of the Temple by business interests.  This time, what he finds is a lot of sick people.  It is another indication of the failure of the religious institutions.  People were coming to Jerusalem and they were not being made whole  They were not being made well.  The place was not working.  38 years?  Seriously?

Jesus sees all these broken people lined up along porticoes next to these two rectangular pools.  And he finds the guy who has been there 38 years.  Now, numbers in the Bible are almost never only about quantities.  In Deuteronomy 2 we learn that 38 years was how long it took for virtually all the adult Israelites who had escaped from Egypt to die as the people wandered in the wilderness of Sinai.  So we get the impression that for this sick man in Jerusalem, his time of brokenness and languishing in vain by this pool is over.  It is time for this life to change.

Jesus kneels down and asks the man, “Do you want to get well?”

The man answers with this eruption of self-pity about how he never has anyone who will put him in the water at the right time, and as he’s trying to get there, someone else beats him to it.  Apparently there was this legend that if you got yourself into the water when it was “stirred up,” you would be healed.  This man never seems to make it into the water in time.

This is how he answers Jesus’ question, with this whining about how unfair it all is, and nobody will help him, and it’s not his fault, and nobody likes him, and everybody else gets healed but not him, and so forth.  For 38 years he’s been stewing in this resentment and frustration.

If we stew long enough in resentment and frustration it becomes the only thing we know.  It becomes the only way we know how to feel or relate to our world.  Years ago I was on a train, sitting in the dining car with other people.  I asked one of these people what he did for a living, by way of small talk.  And he launched into this well-rehearsed sob story about how he is a professional accordion player, but no one will hire him.  People these days only want guitar music or piano music.  No one wants an accordion player.  Next to him was his wife, giving him loads of understanding comfort in his misery.  Accordion music is obsolete and forgotten, and woe is me, was his basic tune.  In my ignorance I started asking him about musical styles that still used accordion.  Ever played Zydeco?  No.  He never heard of that.  How about New Tango?  And I went through two or three other kinds of current music in which accordion figured prominently.  But no.  He didn’t know anything about any of those.  And his wife starts giving me dirty looks.  Because if it ever turns out that anyone anywhere will actually hire an accordion player, their whole relationship would have to be reconfigured.  They were getting too much mileage out of his tragic failure.

All of our personalities are like this.  We have learned some rudimentary ways of coping with the world.  And God help anyone who threatens our chosen methodology, or questions the circumstances that brought us to this point.

II.

Jesus is utterly unconcerned with the morass of self-pity the man by the pool has churned up for himself.  He does not try to get the man into the water, or have him participate in this superstitious and cruel version of God who punishes people because they can’t get into a pool fast enough.  He just says, “So get up!  Pick up your mat.  And start walking!”  You don’t need any pool.  You don’t need any religious institution or tradition.  You only need to trust in the Word of God.  You only need to hear and obey me.

And the man is immediately made well.  Obeying Jesus, he gets up, picks up his mat, and walks! 

We do not immediately realize what a bind the man is in here.  He has probably been told for 38 years that the reason he is so sick is that he must have broken God’s law.  Now there is this man who has healed him… and requiring that he break God’s law, by picking up his mat and carrying it on the Sabbath.  The text doesn’t mention that significant detail until after he does it: oh, by the way, this is all happening on a Sabbath.

The man starts walking carrying his mat.  I can only imagine that he is ecstatic and amazed, walking in astonished glee among the other crippled and sick people.  He must have attracted a lot of attention.  He certainly attracted the attention of the Jewish leaders, the Sabbath police.  

And in typical fashion, because we see this kind of attitude in the New Testament a lot, they have no concern for the person.  They only have this laser-like focus on the fact that he is carrying a mat, which is against the Sabbath laws.  Just because you’re walking for the first time in 38 years does not mean you can just ride roughshod over the law.  Put. The mat. Down. Sir.   Or we’ll have to bring you in.

It’s all about the rules.  The person is immaterial.  Spectacular miracle?  Who cares?  Thirty-eight years of pain and misery?  Doesn’t matter.  Just don’t carry anything on the Sabbath, for God’s sake.

The other night we watched one of my wife’s favorite movies.  It’s called Chocolat, and it’s about this village in France in the 1950’s that experiences a reawakening of life and joy because a woman arrives and opens a chocolate shop.  The plot revolves around the fact that she does this at the beginning of Lent, in this strictly Catholic town.  The season plays out as a battle between the oppressive, pious conformity enforced by the mayor, Alfred Molina, and the playful freedom of the chocolatier, Juliette Binoche.  My point is that Jesus would be with the outsiders and their chocolate, not the upright, uptight Christians and their morose, paranoid, legalistic, self-flagellating religion.

Jesus brings joy!  He brings health!  He brings delight!  He brings freedom!  And he is famous for breaking the social, religious, and moral rules.  Jesus seems to go out of his way to wait until the Sabbath day to do stuff like this, just to make the point that these oppressive rules are part of what is making and keeping people sick.  

III.

And the thing is, the man, even though he is healed of his physical disease, still has this law-phobic prison in his head.  Just because his body is better, doesn’t mean that his mind has caught up with his new status.  Indeed, he seems to just transfer his resentment from his situation to Jesus, the one who heals him!

After the authorities complain about how he is carrying his mat, he deflects responsibility for his own actions.  “It’s not my fault!” he says.  “The man who made me well told me to pick up my mat and walk.  He made me do it!”

The discontinuity here of course is that it’s breaking the law that’s supposed to make you sick.  Sickness is supposed to be God’s punishment for law breakers.  But here, in this man’s experience, breaking the law is associated with healing.  The man is required by Jesus to look within himself for the truth, not to the law.  This should make us a bit nervous.  Jesus is asking him to decide for himself which is better.  He can keep the law and stay sick.  Or he can break the law and get well.

And the law is not just, you know, some municipal code, or some rules of the condo association.  It’s the Bible.  Don’t do any work on the Sabbath; that’s in the 10 Commandments.  And Jeremiah 17 says don’t carry a load on the Sabbath.  What do we do with this kind of discontinuity?  The man has to make a choice to obey Jesus or the Bible, as usually interpreted by the accepted authorities.

We have to make this choice more often than we know.  And obeying the letter of the law and the plain sense of the text is way easier than obeying Jesus.  But one of the things I learn from our Presbyterian Book of Confessions is that: a) Jesus Christ is the Word of God, and b) the Scriptures bear unique and authoritative witness to him.  There is no contradiction between Jesus the Word of God and the word of God in the Bible; and if there appears to be a contradiction, then Jesus Christ rules.  If you think the Bible is saying something contrary to Jesus Christ, then you’re reading it wrong.

Unfortunately, the man at the pool is not familiar with the Book of Confessions.  Still less so are the authorities giving him a hard time.  All they had was a self-serving interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures, such that they decided that carrying a mat constituted prohibited work, even if someone has just been miraculously healed after 38 is years of illness.

The reference of Scripture to Jesus is not just a matter of hermeneutical or theological methodology.  It is not an arbitrary choice or even a statement of a faith commitment.  Saying that the Bible refers to Jesus Christ means that the words in Scripture express and reflect the Word of God, God’s self-expression, God’s overflowing love pouring into the nothingness of the primordial chaos, speaking order and beauty and goodness into existence.  The very atoms that make up the universe, including our bodies, were breathed into being by God and informed by God’s Word, and declared very good.  

This means that Jesus, as the living Word of God, is an inherently and essentially healing presence.  To experience him truly is to experience healing.  This is what happens to the man in the story.  He doesn’t need a copy of the Book of Confessions to know the effect that simply being in the presence of the Lord Jesus has on his own body.  The man feels and knows the difference between being broken and whole, between pain and in joy, between paralysis and mobility.  He knows one is right and the other isn’t.  He knows that one qualifies as part of the “very good” world that God created, and the other is a broken, tormented aberration.

The Word of God becomes flesh and dwells among us full of grace and truth in order to restore people and creation to their original blessing and goodness.  We have that goodness and wholeness inside of us already; Christ comes to set it free, to let it emerge in our hearts, and to let God’s love flow again in our bodies.  The man experiences this.  He knows it directly.  He doesn’t have to read about it.

IV.     

The leaders ask him, not “Who healed you?”  They don’t care about that.  They only care about their law.  “Who is this man who told you to pick up your mat and walk?”  Who told you to break the Sabbath laws?  Who is this nefarious influence, this outsider, this unpatriotic atheist, going around among these poor sick people and telling them to break the law?  Who is creating a problem out here, getting people into trouble, changing everything?

The man looks around.  But Jesus has moved on, and has mixed into the crowd.  The man can’t find him anymore.  Jesus has left him.  And in this confusion and absence he starts to piece back together the house of resentment that was his home for so long.  Think about it.  His life has changed.  He is healed and whole again.  But there are new challenges he now has to deal with.  The man is able-bodied, but has no job.  His only goal in life, to get in the pool at exactly the right time, has been rendered pointless.  He’s broke, but now has no way to appeal to people’s pity or charity anymore.

Plus Jesus puts him in this difficult position with the police, telling him to break the law, and then disappears.  Perhaps the man feels somewhat entrapped, abandoned, hung out to dry.    

When Jesus does come across him again, he tries to encourage the man.  “See!  You have been made well.  Don’t sin anymore in case something worse happens to you.”  Don’t give in to the resentment that you sucked on for so long.  Don’t go back to your crippled approach.  You body is healed; your mind and heart need to catch up.  It is one thing to be subject to disease and disability.  That’s bad enough.  But it is another to consciously choose it.  To experience healing and deliverance and liberation, and then decide that you would rather keep cooking your resentment and stay broken because that’s just easier and more familiar and comfortable… that’s the “something worse” Jesus is talking about.   

Unfortunately, that’s where the man has gone.  After Jesus walks away again, the man goes and finds the police to rat on Jesus.  

The leaders then go and start harassing Jesus over his lax attitude towards the Sabbath laws.  He says, “My Father doesn’t stop ‘working’ on the Sabbath.  And neither do I.  You have chosen to define compassion and faithfulness and shalom and justice as ‘work,’ and prohibited them on the Sabbath, even though these are what humans are created for.  You have turned the Sabbath into a day of oppression and sour-pussed piety.  You have separated the Sabbath from the One who made it.  You have drained it of all joy and turned it into a 24-hour commemoration of your own power.  Of all times, the Sabbath should be a day of liberation and joy!”

But what the authorities get out of this is that Jesus adds to his reputation as a troublemaker and lawbreaker the additional title of heretic.  And then these leaders, these authorities of the old religious institution, these experts, recognize the truth about Jesus.  That in making God is Father he makes himself equal to God.

Which would indeed be a problem were it not the truth.  Like the demons in the other gospels, the authorities here recognize who Jesus is and accurately name him the Son of God.

V.

When Jesus first speaks to the man, when the man is still languishing paralyzed by the pool, the word Jesus says to him, the word in Greek, is “arise.”  It is the same word used for resurrection.  “Rise up!” says Jesus to the broken man.  Jesus walks among the crippled and sick and calls for an uprising.

He invites us to entertain the possibility that if we lose the dead weight of our resentments, our despair, our subservience to illegitimate and oppressive authorities… if we become free of the old religion… if we do not let that stuff hold us down anymore… we will ascend, and emerge into new life with and in God.

“Rise up!  Pick up your mat, that enables you to make your home, lay your head, anywhere; pick up your mat and show that you’re not coming back here.  And start walking in the light!

We too have to rise up.  Not by jumping or flapping our arms really fast.  But by trusting the word of the Lord, who shows us that what we think is holding us down isn’t really anything at all.  It’s made up.  It’s not real.  Our true self doesn’t need to get to the capricious, unreliable, and intermittent #water of the old institution.  Our true self needs only to trust that the person Jesus is talking to, whom he completely expects to rise up and walk in the light, is who we really are.  Free.  Light.  Blessed.  And very good.

+++++++    

   

 

 

   

 

 

Walking to Capernaum.

John 4:43-54.  (March 8, 2015)

I.

After this remarkable encounter with the woman at the well and the people of the Samaritan village of Sychar, Jesus and his disciples continue on northward, back home to Galilee.  In Galilee, they are met by many people who are pleased with what Jesus did in Jerusalem, which was basically create that disturbance in the Temple.  Galilee is famous for being hotbed of dissent, and the people must be impressed by his demonstration against the collaborationist Temple authorities.

They get to the town of Cana, where Jesus had performed his one miracle so far, the turning of water to wine at a wedding, back in chapter 2.  A royal official, probably someone who works for King Herod, seeks out Jesus to heal his son, who is gravely ill.  It is clear that when your child is dying, you do not have much concern about the politics of someone who may be able to bring healing.  The royal official does not care that Jesus is gaining a reputation as a trouble-maker.  He just wants his son to be well again.

Once again we see Jesus’ lack of concern about such extraneous distractions.  All he ever cares about when he heals someone is their suffering.  He doesn’t have any thought to things that we might think are important, like how they got sick, or their moral character, whether they deserve healing.  He doesn’t care about people’s nationality, religion, status, politics, or past history.  He only focuses on the suffering and its alleviation.  In this case, even though he has made a big public statement about his opposition to the current regime in Jerusalem, to the point of upsetting the Temple system itself, he does not hesitate to receive someone from the other end of the political spectrum, an official of King Herod.   

At first Jesus just observes with some frustration, “Unless you see miraculous signs and wonders you won’t believe.”  But when he says this he’s not talking to the man with the dying son.  The pronoun is plural.  He’s addressing the crowd of Galileans who have heard of his activities and have come out to see more.  They have come for the entertainment value of Jesus activities, demanding miracles as the price of their faith.  He’s just a showman to them.

The man, however, already has faith in Jesus.  He has come to Jesus because he knows Jesus can heal his dying son.  He says, “Lord, come before my son dies.”  He already trusts that Jesus can and will do this.

One of the issues this whole gospel is about has to do with seeing and believing.  We say that seeing is believing.  And that is true.  When Jesus did the first miracle at Cana, the text clearly says that the disciples came to believe in him because of it.  They saw and believed.  It was a revelation of his glory.  Seeing what Jesus does brings people to faith.  It inspires them to trust in him if they have seen with their own eyes who he is and what he can do.

We are rational, Modern people.  Modernity is based on a radical reliance upon what we can see with our eyes and perceive with our other 4 senses.  We depend on what we can empirically experience, measure, predict, and control.  We have faith in objectivity and reason.  Therefore, we tend to place our trust only in those things that we can see, measure, touch, and predict.

II.

But this faith is being shaken because we are slowly coming to realize that not only are a lot of very important things in life immaterial and unmeasurable — like love, joy, beauty, pain, fear, grief, and hope; but even what we think we are seeing is not necessarily reliable and objective.  People see things in different ways.  Different perspectives and points-of-view make a big difference.  Memories change.  And this doesn’t even get into the strangeness of subatomic physics where experiments come out different depending on the observer.

We now know that there is no such thing as objectivity.  There is no unbiased, unprejudiced perception.  We are all conditioned by our background and past experience, personality, desires, and so forth.

Then there is the fact that to believe only what you see isn’t faith at all.  By definition, faith is trusting in what we can’t see.  So faith in terms of the first miracle at Cana was not in the fact that the water turned to wine, it was in the identity of Jesus as the One who transforms the stagnant water of .

For this reason, the royal official who comes to Jesus in Cana now is actually more faithful than anyone who merely believes in Jesus because of the former miracle.  My point is that believing and seeing are related and reciprocal; there is a kind of circle in which what we see and what we believe are continually influencing and changing.

Jesus underscores this point when he decided not to come with the man down to him home in Capernaum.  He says, “Go home.  Your son lives.”

So the man and the crowd are not going to get to see a miracle.  Jesus refuses to be the entertainer, showing off for the spectators.  He refuses to use his powers as a way to attract followers, because then the only thing they would be following is the miracles.  Jesus is utterly opposed to any bait-and-switch marketing strategy, which lures people in with a spectacular show, and then gives them the gospel.  He knows that the medium is the message; the show would overwhelm the gospel, and create a very weak and conditional faith.  A false faith that would have to be fed with new and better magic shows every few days.

So the man has to make the long walk down to Capernaum alone, without Jesus’ physical presence, keeping his faith in his heart that Jesus can work miracles even at long distances.

This is where the man represents us.  This is the kind of trust that is required from us.  We have to hear in order to believe.  Then we have to believe in order to see, then our seeing reinforces our faith.  And that in turn changes the way we see going forward.  There is this constant interaction between what we perceive and that in which we trust.

We also have to take the long walk through life trusting and hoping that Jesus can and will do what he says.  Trusting that when Jesus says, “Your son lives,” he is telling the truth.  Trusting that Jesus can do this without actually, physically showing up.  This is the trust we have when we are driving to the hospital, or when we are sitting by the side of our sick child, or even when we watch the news about the terrible atrocities in the world.

Our whole life is a walk down to Capernaum.  And the question for is all is whether we will walk in hope or in terror, in trust or in fear, in faith or in anxiety, in the knowledge of the truth, or paralyzed and obsessed with the lies we are told and experience every day.

III.

There is a degree to which we are all “royal officials.”  That is, we are all thoroughly bought and invested in the system of falsehood, corruption, fear, and violence that dominates human existence.  We all keep the human kings, powers, principalities, authorities, leaders, bosses, in place by our strenuous efforts, for which they pay us.  We all sustain and maintain this system constantly by our implicit and explicit obedience of the rules, habits, traditions, and values that keep us at enmity with each other and God.

Faith is not just having an opinion about Jesus and proceeding merrily upon our way as if nothing else has changed.  Especially if that opinion is merely that he could do some cool miracles.  True faith has to mean actually living in a way that is in contradiction to this whole superstructure of lies that we have been indoctrinated into.  Jesus himself says we demonstrate our faith in him by keeping his commandments, which are all rooted and grounded in love.

We cannot keep his commandments and continue to live as we have always lived.  The two are contradictory.  We cannot walk down to Capernaum in faith, hope, and love, while still implementing oppression, exclusion, inequality, and violence in our day jobs as royal officials.  At the very least we have to serve as witnesses where we are to God’s miraculous, saving love, and seek to bring that love into our own work.  

So, as we make our way down to Capernaum, what is going on in our hearts is not a concern for whether Jesus can do this thing or not.  That is settled.  Now it’s not about what Jesus can do, but what we actually do as witnesses to him and as evidence of our trust in him.  That is, are our hearts filled with love, compassion, joy, life, light, and freedom?  Is it infectious?  Do we participate so fully in the cycle of seeing and believing that people can come to believe simply by seeing us?

We have to be walking to Capernaum expecting not just the healing of one boy, but the revelation of a new future, moving forward in wholeness and healing, blessing, joy, and life.  In this the sick boy represents first of all a future, as do all children.  The image of the royal official with a sick child tells us that this present regime has no future.  Our future is also at risk, sick unto death, when we devote ourselves to the perpetuation and maintaining of this present darkness.  

The human sinful addiction to greed and selfishness, violence, inequality, and exclusion, is foreclosing on our future.  We see this most urgently today as we have kicked the whole planet out of balance and are beginning to endure the nasty consequences.  

We have no other choice than to progress on to Capernaum confident in the future that Jesus gives, simply by his declarative word.  For he himself is the Word by whom God spoke the whole creation into being in the beginning, and when he says “Your son will live,” we may take that as unspeakably good news.  There is an alternative to suicide and extinction even for “royal officials” like us.

Another thing the boy represents, along with the future, is our past.  Each of us was a child once, and it is as children that we picked up the sickness that is killing us.  For it was as children that we got infected with the attitudes, practices, values, and ways of thinking that are killing us and our world.  The only way to be healed of this malady — which we call sin — is to enter the cycle of seeing and trusting in the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

Just the fact that we are walking to Capernaum with hearts full of the expectation of life will itself serve to open our eyes to see that life happening and blooming before us.

IV.

So when the man finally gets home, even before he gets to his house the servants are running out to meet him!  They are telling him that his child is alive!  It turns out that the boy was healed at the very moment Jesus spoke those words, “Your son lives,” 1 o’clock the previous afternoon.  Now the man who believed, who trusted in Jesus, who followed and obeyed his word, sees.  And his faith is strengthened by seeing, and it spreads to his whole household.  This new consciousness is not limited to an individual, but it infects a whole community.

We see the spiritual growth of the royal official.  Before the story he remained in the darkness of the unconscious existence we all have in our condition of blindness and separation.  Before this story is somehow hears about Jesus, maybe from people who witnessed the way the water turned to wine at the wedding in Cana.  Maybe he is told about Jesus’ tirade in Jerusalem.  But the catastrophic illness of his son, and the fear and panic this stirs up in him, is what catalyzes this peripheral awareness of some figure doing unusual things, and turns it into a spark of trust.  So that when he hears Jesus has returned to Galilee he goes to Cana himself to meet him and ask for his help.

Then, obeying the word of Jesus, he travels back home, and finds that Jesus’ word has actually happened.  The boy is healed.  And trusting in Jesus expands to include more people who join the circle of seeing and believing.

The circle expands because Jesus’ word is truth.  What he says happens in real life.  We trust in it, we see it happen, we trust even more, and we see even more.  Until we are living in a different world, one characterized by the truth of God’s love radiating through and permeating everything.  The evidence piles up and we start to see how blind we used to be, and we grieve for neighbors who are still crashing around in the rat-race of sinful, destructive existence.  And we gather in community to support each other in keeping this vision and feeding this trust, and helping each other live in this new way, according to the commandments of Jesus Christ.

V.

Jesus’ words to the man, “Go home, your son lives,” are words we all need to take to heart.  Not because we have sons who languish close to death, though some of us do have sons who need all the help they can get.  “Go home, your son lives” means that we need to recover our participation in the world as God made it, breathed into life at the beginning, informed by the mind and will of God.  In that sense we need to come “home”, to our true home, not the counterfeit world we concoct in our fear and blindness.

Our true home is where we find healing, both of a past that left us crippled and conditioned us for an existence without hope or love, and of a future that is gasping for breath, having been brought close to extinction by diseases of our own making.

The Lord’s telling the man, “Your son lives,” should be heard by us as thrillingly good news, because it means that both the inner child of our past and the child as the promise of our future are safe, healed, secure, blessed, and made alive by his word.  His words mean we have hope.  The world does not have to be the way we know it; there is a better, truer way to live.  And through trusting and obeying the Word of God, Jesus Christ, the Lamb, takes away our loneliness, our alienation, our brokenness, and our separation, and restores us to union with and in God.

+++++++ 

     

  

Evangelism.

John 4:1-42.   (March 1, 2015)

I.

Jesus decides to head back to Galilee.  The quickest way is straight up through a region called Samaria.  The people who live in Samaria have a long-standing sometimes violent relationship with Jews, even though they accept the Torah as scripture.  Jews are not allowed to have contact with Samaritans at all, and any kind of interaction between a Jewish man and a Samaritan woman is not even considered possible.

They stop for lunch at a town called Sychar, where there is a famous well used by the patriarch Jacob.  Jesus waits at the well while the disciples go into the city to buy food.  It is the middle of the day.  A solitary woman comes out of the town to get some water from the well.  This is weird for two reasons: first of all usually families got their daily water at the beginning of the day, and secondly, the women would usually come in a group because it was safer and you would have someone to talk to.  So right off this is an unusual situation.

Then Jesus does the unthinkable: he asks the woman to give him some water from the well.  To which the woman responds, basically, “You know you’re not supposed to be talking to me, right?”

Jesus, who would become infamous for his carelessness and transgression of social rules, launches in with mysterious, mystical talk: If you recognized God’s gift and who is saying to you, ‘Give me some water to drink,’ you would be asking him and he would give you living water.”

Like Nicodemus in the last chapter, the woman takes him literally.  “You don’t even have a bucket, and this is a well, not a spring; it doesn’t have ‘living’ water.”  (“Living water” was an expression that meant running water, as opposed to still water.  This whole conversation is full of such plays on words.)  At this point she may think this man is, well, mentally slow, which may be why his friends left him out at the well while they went shopping.

But Jesus is again making the distinction between the old religion and the new Way he is announcing.  Only here it is not Judaism that is the old religion, but the even older faith of the Samaritans.  At this point I am willing to make a leap to say that Jesus sees himself coming into the world to challenge and fulfill all old religions.  And by that I do not mean just the various religions he encounters during his ministry, but our old religion.  He has come to challenge whatever institutional, traditional religion, whatever tired old ways of thinking we have come to rely on.  His new wine explodes every old form of thinking, believing, and practicing, because they are all based on ego-centric, hierarchical, unequal, exploitive, fear-driven ways of thinking.  They are all stagnant water compared with the living water of the Spirit that he offers.

“Everyone who drinks of this well water will be thirsty again.”  The old religion is always a stop-gap, provisional, temporary arrangement.  It’s a band-aid, it gets you through the day, maybe; but it needs constant replenishment, frequent repetition, and perpetual renewal, which the authorities have figured out how to dole out for a fee.  “Whoever drinks from the water I give will never be thirsty again.  The water that I give will become for those who drink it a spring of water that bubbles up into eternal life.”  He’s now clearly not talking about literal H20 to quench your literal thirst.  He means that which sustains us within, spiritually, in our souls.  It’s is a metaphor.  

The woman says that this sounds like the kind of water she needs.  Water that wells up from within.  Then she would not have to make these trips out to the well and haul the heavy water back to her house.

II.

I think that’s a wise-crack.  Maybe she still takes him literally; maybe not.  Maybe she gets it.  But she continues to play along.

But Jesus is done fooling around.  He tells her to go fetch her husband and come back, to which she replies that she’s fresh out of husbands, she can speak for herself, thanks.  To which Jesus replies, “No kidding, you have had 5 husbands and you are not married to the man you are living with now.  You’ve spoken the truth.”

We could probably talk for the next few hours about what might be going on her her head at this point.  Her response to his amazing knowledge of her intimate life is to change the subject.  “But enough about me, let’s discuss religion.”  And she dredges up the classic argument between Jews and Samaritans about where people are supposed to worship.  It was a topic that could be counted on to get a fruitless and heated theological argument going, and it would get their attention off of her relationship history.  Where are we allowed to worship?  Which is the true Temple of God?

“None of them,” says Jesus.  Your Samaritan religion is illegitimate, face it; Judaism is legitimate but it’s also thoroughly corrupted.  But none of that matters anyway any more.  It’s not about mountains and Temples, its not about traditions and liturgies and doctrines, it’s not about priests and hierarchies, it’s not about denominations and staffing and budgets and per capita, and all the things we get so exercised about; and it most certainly is not about the purity of your ethnicity.  It is about worshiping the Father in Spirit and truth.  “God is Spirit, and it is necessary to worship God in Spirit and truth.” 

This is the thing.  God spoke the whole place into existence by means of the Word in the beginning.  The whole place is holy; the whole place is permeated with God’s breath; the whole place shimmers with God’s energies.  Now the true Temple is the Son of God, Jesus Christ, and because he is the Lamb who takes away the sin of the whole world, whose blood shed on the cross will anoint the entire planet with God’s very life.  And because he is the new Temple, the Human One, so we who share in his humanity also become temples.  We become the holy place where the Creator intersects with creation.  In him we become the interface between God and humanity.  This is what Luther called “the priesthood of all believers.”  The creation itself is God’s Temple and humanity is the “kingdom of priests” dedicated to serving God.  The gathered disciples are the vanguard, the advance representatives of this realization, the anticipation of this ultimate truth.

We worship now in the Spirit, the breath, of God that charges and radiates in everything.  There are no longer unholy places; there are no longer unholy people.  There is no more pecking order or chain of command.  There is no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free, male and female, to quote Paul.  For all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

It is the most offensive, radical, revolutionary, subversive, insurgent core of the Way of Christ Jesus.  

The Samaritan woman replies that this is a pretty aspirational vision, but we have to wait for the Messiah to come at the end of time for it to happen.  To which Jesus says bluntly, “That’s me.  I am the Messiah, the One speaking to you right now.”

III.

The woman is faced with the choice that C. S. Lewis notes about Jesus.  Either he is who he says he is, or he is a psychotic megalomaniac who should be thrown into the hospital and heavily medicated.

Meanwhile, the disciples come back with lunch.  They just look at Jesus standing there talking to a Samaritan woman and you can almost hear what they’re thinking.  “Uh-oh, I told you someone should have stayed with him!”

The appearance of a bunch of men causes the woman to hightail it back to town.  She even leaves her water jar behind, which is a symbol of her no longer relying on the old religion.  She’s got the Spirit from the Source, now.  Now she’s got the living water; she doesn’t need the lousy well-water of her old religion anymore.    

In the town, she becomes an evangelist.  “Come and see the man who has told me everything I’ve done!  Could this man be the Christ?”  That’s what she says to the townspeople.  And everyone, the whole town, decides to go out to the well to see Jesus.  There is effective evangelism.  Her whole town comes to Jesus.

Remember that the disciples were just there, in the town themselves.  But apparently they spoke to no one except what was necessary to buy food.  They did not evangelize.  They did not invite people to come and see the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.  They obeyed the establishment rule about not talking to or interacting with Samaritans.  They assumed that Jesus was for Jews only.  They still do not get who Jesus is or what he is about.  They do not understand that following Jesus means not following the old, exclusive, divisive, shaming, fearful rules.

The woman does get Jesus.

It is not a heavy-handed, threatening, portentous message that she delivers.  She doesn’t start with sin, or hell, or judgment.  She first of all speaks of her own experience.  Jesus told her everything she’s done, not in the sense of a fortune teller relating obscure facts, but in framing her experience and her memories so that they make sense in a different and much better way.  She sees the truth in her life, that she has been jerked through one bad relationship to another, ending up in a tense and arid illegitimate compromise.  But she only sees that truth because she has an encounter with The Truth, the Word of God, who shows her a whole different way of thinking and looking at the world and at her own life.  First he doesn’t reject her outright just for being a Samaritan woman, and second he doesn’t reject her for her difficult and disastrous relationships, past and present.  He embodies the acceptance and welcome and forgiveness of God.

So she speaks from experience.  And then she simply asks a question.  She doesn’t hammer people with what they have to believe to be saved.  She asks what they might be asking themselves.  She wonders aloud about who Jesus might be.  She invites them into a question.  “Could this man be the Christ?”  She asks the question in such a convincing way, opening up this possibility because of her own experience, that they want to see and decide for themselves.

Could this man, this Jesus, be the One who will bring wholeness and balance and healing into your life?  Could this be the One we have been waiting for?  Could he show us our true selves?  Could he accept and welcome and redeem us, the way he did for this woman, whose life was a train wreck just an hour ago and now she’s bubbling over with hope and joy?

IV.

Meanwhile, the disciples, by vivid contrast, are characteristically clueless.  They bring food, but Jesus says he ate already.  They take him literally, and wonder who brought him lunch, probably hoping he didn’t eat with the woman too!  

But Jesus is talking about spiritual food.  “I am fed by doing the will of the One who sent me and by completing his work.”  That’s what gives him energy.  He is nourished by his mission.  “Look,” he says, “We are like harvesters collecting the grain in the fields.”  He and his disciples see a whole crowd of Samaritans coming out of the town towards them.  The disciples may think they are coming to punish them for breaking all the social rules, but Jesus knows they are what he calls the harvest.  They are the fruit of his ministry: people coming to the Lord.

The Samaritans come to Jesus, and they have their own experience of him.  They ask Jesus to stay, and he remains with them for two days, speaking to them, engaging in conversation with them, teaching them about eternal life and the Kingdom of God.  His words bring many to place their trust in him.

A lot of people seem to think the gathering of disciples is for people who already trust in Jesus.  As if we come to believe in Jesus first, then those who believe in him get together and form a church.

But in reality what we see in this story is people coming to Jesus not with belief but with questions.  Then it is through the two days of conversation with Jesus and his disciples, two days in which they show hospitality to Jesus and he speaks words of welcome and inclusion and life to them, that they come to trust in him.  It is not until this full-immersion experience with Jesus that they come to believe in him.

Remember that this is a Samaritan village accepting and being accepted by a group of Jewish travelers.  It is something that may have never happened for them before.  It was unheard of.  This astonishing act of reconciliation breaks down centuries of calcified suspicion, fear, hatred, and hostility.  It happens mainly because Jesus lets go of the superiority, judgment, condemnation, and bigotry that his people sucked on for generation after generation.  

You cannot do effective evangelism from a position of superiority.  You cannot start with the premise that “you’re wrong and I have the answer for you.”  You cannot demand belief from someone as a pre-condition of their coming to Jesus.  It doesn’t work that way.

Real evangelism is an expression of humility and confession.  The woman says, “This is what happened to me; come see for yourself.”  The people come and see for themselves the love, forgiveness, liberation, equality, and inclusiveness of Jesus and his ministry.  They are welcomed.  Jesus breaks down the barriers by rejecting both temples, both mountains, and saying basically “I am the new Temple, and therefore by trusting in me, and living this new life I am talking about, so is each one of you.” 

V.

Their experience is so profound that they see for themselves that Jesus is truly the savior of the world.  It is not second-hand.  It is direct.  The woman is just the catalyst… but she is that.  And that is the role of the evangelist.  To bring people to a place where they meet the Lord Jesus.  The conversion, the awakening, the rising to new life is done by him.

Our job as a congregation is just to be a place where this happens, to be a place where the living Jesus Christ is present by the Spirit, to be a place where his word is heard and practiced, where people find acceptance, welcome, reconciliation, healing, freedom, and love.

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