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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