Sun, Feb 27, 2005 - Lent 3

Exodus 17:1-7
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=exodus+17%3A1-7

Psalm 95
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=psalm+95

Romans 5:1-11
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=romans+5%3A1-11

John 4:5-42
http://bible.oremus.org/browser.cgi?passage=john+4%3A5-42


One of the difficulties of being two thousand years removed from Jesus and the writing of the Gospels is that we lose a lot of the totally outrageous nature of what Jesus did. We’ve heard the stories so many times, and we’ve lost so much of the original context, that we hear a story like today’s, about Jesus and the Samaritan woman, and we kind of shrug our shoulders and go, "Okay, so Jesus is talking to a woman about eternal water. What does that have to do with me?" Or we hear Paul talking to the Romans in his letter, saying that "Christ died for the ungodly," and we think, "yeah, yeah, Jesus died for sinners. Whatever."

But Jesus really did do some incredibly radical things when he lived among us, including dying for the ungodly, and when we really stop to think about it, we can find ourselves both extraordinarily challenged and extraordinarily thankful for the way Jesus behaved and the forgiveness he offered to people. So my plan for this morning is to unpack for you the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman and hopefully draw some parallels in today’s world that will both challenge you and move you to be thankful for what Jesus has done.

So, most of this you probably already know, but it’s important to highlight it anyway. The barebones outline of our Gospel story is that Jesus asks a Samaritan woman at a well for a drink of water, and then offers her life-saving eternal water in return and tells her he’s the Messiah.

But there is so much more going on here than it seems. First of all, even at the most basic level, Jesus is, according to the rules of his day, sinning. Jesus is breaking all the rules by talking to a Samaritan, and not only talking, but asking to share a jug of water with a Samaritan. The Gospel says, "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans," but that’s a total understatement. In Jesus’ time, Samaritans were unclean, unholy, unJewish, and completely unacceptable. No Jew, especially a rabbi who claimed to be close to God, would even dream of travelling through Samaria, let alone sharing an eating utensil with them. It would be like a woman pastor presiding over communion in a Roman Catholic church. It just wasn’t done. And yet, here’s Jesus, in Samaria, asking for a drink of water from a Samaritan.

But not just any Samaritan - a Samaritan woman. Second rule Jesus is breaking. Men don’t talk to women in public. Not even if they’re related. In Jesus’ time, and extending beyond that to Paul’s time even, which is why we get the letters telling women not to speak up in church, is the understanding that women don’t speak to men in public. Patriarchal hierarchy system - it’s kind of like when we say to little kids, "Be quiet, the adults are talking." That’s what it was - "be quiet, the men are talking." Actually, it was more about women being unclean, and talking to them would contaminate the men, but the result is the same. No men and women talking together. Yet here is Jesus, not only talking to a woman in public, but initiating and pursuing a conversation. He is not supposed to be doing this! As a holy Jew, he has to keep himself as clean and uncontaminated, as sinless, as possible.

And here’s what comes next - Jesus states that the woman has had five husbands and is now "living in sin" as we would say with a man who isn’t her husband. Under Old Testament rules, she qualifies as an adulterer, a sinner, someone who ought to be stoned. There’s no question, even today, that adultery is a sin. And what is Jesus’ response? Does he, like he’s done in other Gospels, tell the woman to "go and sin no more?" Curiously enough, he doesn’t. The fact that she is what we would call an "unrepentant sinner" doesn’t seem to bother him. I’m not saying that that means Jesus is condoning her behaviour, but it just doesn’t seem to be an issue for him. And in fact, after proclaiming that "the hour is coming" when God will be worshipped everywhere, not just in the temple in Jerusalem - a radical enough statement in itself - he then proclaims to her that he is the Messiah, the Christ, who has been promised.

Now here’s the astonishing thing about that: up to this point in the Gospel of John, Jesus had refrained from saying who he was. He made oblique references to "the Son of Man", and "my Father in heaven," but he never once came out and said that he was the promised Messiah that everyone was waiting for. Until now. His grand proclamation of who he is isn’t done press conference style to all the important people like the Jewish leaders or priests. Instead, it’s given to this three times sinful person - this adulterous, Samaritan, woman. To the religiously observant of Jesus’ time, this was absolutely shocking - completely outrageous! It’s as if Jesus came at the Second Coming and didn’t appear first to a church full of Christians, but instead showed up at a stripclub or a biker bar or a gay pride parade. I mean seriously, how much more inappropriate can you get?

But you know what? Jesus Christ, God’s anointed one, lived and died completely inappropriately. And there’s the challenge for us. Paul tells the Romans flat out - Christ died for the ungodly, for the sinners, for nobody less than the enemies of God. We hear that phrase so often that after a while it just kind of slips by us unnoticed. Christ died to bring salvation for the ungodly - for people who aren’t Christians, for people who don’t have any kind of religion at all. Christ died to bring salvation to sinners - for every single person out there who turns away from God, not just once in their life, but over and over and over again. Christ died to bring salvation to the enemies of God - I can barely even grasp that one. Christ died for those who reject God, who want nothing to do with God, who go out of their way to counter goodness and life. To be honest, I find that last one hard to accept - that Christ died for murderers, for dictators who orchestrate genocide, for violent offenders. But there it is - in Paul’s words, "while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of God’s Son."

In fact, Christ did more than just die for these people. In dying, Christ reconciled these people to God - Christ made them right with God. Christ took away their sin. Would we even be so bold as to say Christ made them sinless? The adulterous Samaritan woman, the non-Jews, the non-Christians, the unrepentant sinners, the murderers, the perpetrators of evil - Christ’s death made them right with God. Can we even begin to grasp what this means?

I hope so, because it means something for you and me, too. You see, we are the three times sinful adulterous, Samaritan woman. We are the ungodly, the sinners, the enemies of God. We are, each one of us, guilty of continually turning away from God, of continuing in some sin or another that we don’t even want to repent from, of stepping on the Light and Good we see in other people because we’re too tired to do right, or too proud to admit we’re wrong, or because we flat out don’t care about them. We may call ourselves Christians, we may even be Christians, but that doesn’t mean that we’re not sinners. We are - we’re right there in Samaria, next to the well, knowing in our hearts that somebody like Jesus really ought not to be spending time in our company.

So thank God, then, that that’s how Jesus prefers to spend his time and that those are the people for whom Jesus died - for the ungodly, for the sinners, for the enemies of God. Jesus Christ didn’t come for the righteous, for those who live perfect lives, for those who think they’re making God happy by what they do. He came for the rest of us. For you. Christ came, lived, and died so that you would be reconciled to God, so that you would be able to stand before God without sin, as righteous as Christ himself.

And that’s that. That’s all there is - two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ died for you and for all sinners so that you would be made right with God. And as simple as it sounds, it was a move that broke down and rebuilt everything that religious people thought they knew about sinners and righteousness and God. And therein lies both our challenge andour reason for thankfulness. We can wonder, like the religious leaders of the day did, how it’s possible that Jesus could be with such lowly, undeserving people as ungodly sinners, or we can just thank God that he was and continues to be. We can condemn Jesus for his inappropriate behaviour and company or we can say, like the Samaritans did at the end, that Jesus Christ is "truly the Saviour of the world."



For further reading on the issue of crossed boundaries between Jesus and the Samaritan woman, see http://www.nd.edu/~jneyrey1/picture.html.