"Everything I Have Ever Done"

John 4:5-42

March 19, 2017

I.

Jesus and his disciples are walking through Samaria.  They stop at a famous well in the town of Sychar.  The disciples go off to find something for lunch, Jesus stays by the well, and a local woman comes for some water.  Completely inappropriately, breaking all rules and boundaries, Jesus starts talking to her.  

Their conversation is about the water, but it’s almost like flirting.  She’s talking about literal water, but he’s talking about water that will make you live forever, which is to say, symbolic, metaphorical “water,” the water of his Wisdom and teaching, which does lead to new life.  

And it continues this way until it gets personal.  Jesus says, “Go, get your husband, and come back, and I’ll tell you more about my magic water.”  The woman answers, “I have no husband.”  If Jesus were hitting on her this would all be going according to plan so far.  But then Jesus says, “Well, you got that right, you’ve had 5 husbands, and you’re not even married to the one you have now.  At least you’re honest.”

I imagine here a period of dead, if not deadly, silence.

The tone… changes.  A bit.  All playfulness quickly drains out of the conversation.  She decides to change the subject, and move to a topic that was guaranteed to generate animosity: the issue of where it was appropriate to worship.  It was one of the many things that Jews and Samaritans would regularly go to the mat over.  

Jesus says, “It’s not about which of these rocky hills God wants us to worship on.  Real worship doesn’t depend on places; it’s about the heart.  God is Spirit, and those who worship God must worship in Spirit and in truth.”

The woman rolls her eyes perhaps and just says, “Whatever.  When the Messiah comes he will let us know about the theology of it.”

To which Jesus says, “I am the Messiah.  I am the One you have been waiting for.  And I am talking to you right now.”

Anyway, the disciples come back loaded down with pita bread, hummus, and olives.  And I imagine they’re like, “Oh crap, he’s talking to a woman.  I told you somebody should have stayed with him.”  

But the woman scampers off back to the village, even forgetting about her water jar, leaving it there unfilled.  When she gets to the town she excitedly tells everyone she meets, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done!  He couldn’t be the Messiah, could he?”  And somehow, this unusual evangelistic elevator speech is remarkably effective, so that the whole village goes out to see Jesus.  They even beg them to stay for a few days, which is unheard of.

In the end, the Samaritans realize for themselves who Jesus is: the Savior of the World.

II.

The woman does not get it until she sees herself through Jesus’ eyes.  When he says that bit about her 5 husbands, her whole demeanor changes.  It’s like he holds up a mirror to her and she sees herself in a new way.  And it isn’t pretty.  She sees that her life is a train wreck of ruined relationships, dashed hopes, crushed joy, disappointment, disillusionment, cynicism, and despair.  She wants an idealized Messiah to proclaim all things to her; all she repeatedly gets is these lame, human men who didn’t work out.

She’s been going through this ego-centric existence, doing what she wants according to how she has learned to cope in the world, with her defenses and her strategies… and it’s hasn’t worked.  She’s left a string of broken promises, broken relationships, and broken people in her wake, including herself, the most broken of all.

The woman represents all of us, normal humans, sleepwalking through life, going back to the same old well for the same old stale water, which is to say habitually relying on the usual sources of information and entertainment, advice and satisfaction, going through the motions; having basically given up hope for a better life; now afraid even to make another commitment because they all fail, they all fall apart, they all end in tragedy and pain.  She ends up alone and isolated, locked in her own routine with no apparent way out. 

And it’s only when this stranger, this foreigner, this traveler shows up, who talks in riddles and images and metaphors, on some other level, about some other kind of water that you don’t have to keep coming back to the well for but which somehow he will give you in such a way that you find welling up within yourself.  Which just sounds like poetry, or psychology, or philosophy, having no traction in real life for women having to lug real water back to their houses to wash real clothes and use to cook real food.  But then he exposes you to yourself, forcing you to look at yourself in brutal honesty.  And you realize that your life has become unmanageable, intolerable, unsustainable, and you can’t keep doing this.  This is not working.

It’s kind of like when an addict “hits bottom,” which is usually pretty horrible.  If they don’t actually die, they realize they have a choice, which is to turn their life around or die.  Which makes addicts who hit bottom and survive sort of lucky in that they have the benefit of this 2 by 4 upside the head that wakes them up and at least gives them the opportunity to change.  Most of us don’t get that, yet we still have the same choice: turn your life around or die!.  But we don’t know it.  We think our life is what it is.  We never get the benefit of some guy mysteriously reminding us about our 5 spouses and how missed-up that is.  Without some kind of shock, it never occurs to most of us that it doesn’t have to be this way.

Jesus comes into the world to give us this existential shock, and if that’s not how we experience Jesus, then I wonder if we have experienced him at all.

III.

Near the end of the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, after George Bailey has his transformative encounter with the angel who tells him everything he ever did, he goes back to his home where the bank examiners are waiting to arrest him, and he says something like “I’m going to prison!  Isn’t it wonderful?!”

The people there think he’s nuts, of course.  But this can be the effect of hitting bottom.  You break through to another life, another set of possibilities, another reality.  Your old self gets smashed, but this releases your new and original and true Self.  You let go of everything you had been depending on, everything you thought you were, and you find yourself strangely, marvelously, miraculously held.  You find that you are and always were somebody else, and didn’t know it.

So when this woman goes back to her town and says they should come see this man who told her everything she ever did, and they say, “You do realize that everything you ever did is pretty bad, right?”  And she says, “I know, right?  Isn’t it wonderful?!”  It means that everything she ever did is not going to hold her back anymore.  

By mentioning it and showing it to her Jesus removes everything she ever did from off her back.  The One who takes away the sin of the world, has taken away hers as well.  That is, all the behaviors to which she had been addicted, and which expressed the fear, violence, anger, shame, and delusion indicating a separation from God and from her true Self, are removed.  Now she can look back on everything she ever did and not be crippled by it.

The clincher for her is when Jesus affirms directly that he is the Messiah.  “I am he, the one who is speaking to you,” he says.  Whenever Jesus says “I am” it is a reference to God’s name.  Remember that when Moses asks God for God’s name, God simply says “I am.”  God is the One Who Is.  God is the Truth.  God is the Fully Real One.  We are only real to the extent that we realize our participation in God’s reality.  

And God is the One who speaks the universe into being at the beginning, and here he speaks to this woman as well, as if by speaking he remakes, reforms, renews, reimagines, and recovers this woman, allowing her to enter into her own true Self.  He speaks to her, to who she really is, to the Image of God in her, and by doing so he embraces her in his own I am, regrounding her own identity, separating her true Self from the false self expressed in everything she ever did.   

The villagers apparently notice that this isn’t the same woman who left an hour ago to fetch water.  This new person has joy and hope and peace about her, as she gushes about this odd stranger at the well.  “He can’t be the Messiah, can he?”  It is an open-ended invitation to “come and see” for themselves.  This isn’t the imaginary, ideal personal savior she’s been waiting for, to which her former relationships didn’t measure up.  I mean, on the one hand she is telling them she “met somebody,” but on the other she is encouraging them to go meet him too!  This could be the Savior of all of us!  Samaritans, Jews, everybody! 

IV.

This is the effect that meeting Jesus has on everyone who is able to open their eyes and see whom they are dealing with.  If we are willing to allow his light to shine into our own lives, revealing every confused, deluded, secret, twisted fact, every broken relationship, every bad decision, every harm done, every self-destructive, and unbreakable habit, he shows us that it doesn’t and never did have to be that way.  

For he speaks to a part of us we never thought was there; he speaks to himself, God’s own Image, within us at the deepest core of who we are, the true humanity we share with him.  He tells us everything we have ever done… and he does not hold any of it against us, but allows that to fall off of us like the old skin falls off a snake, revealing this shiny new Self we didn’t know we had.

And maybe he also tells us everything we have ever done in the sense of revealing to us how our true Self in him really has been there all along.  Maybe there are things good things we have done and not realized it.  Maybe God has been working for good even in everything we have ever done.  And maybe having that pointed out to us inspires us to let go, and let God emerge in and through us.

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