The Heart of Jesus
Notes
Transcript
Today we come to one of the most gripping stories of Jesus’ ministry. As Jesus is getting ready to leave Judea and make his way north to Galilee, he makes plans to pass through Samaria, which is a direct route, but Jews didn’t pass through Samaria. It isn’t until you get to verse nine that you get a glimpse of why. There is a parenthetical statement simply stating, “For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.”
You see, there was tension between these two people groups and they hated one another. There are a variety of reasons for this. After the death of Solomon, the kingdom of Israel split into two. The kingdom to the north consisted of ten tribes and retained the name Israel. The kingdom to the south consisted of two tribes and took on the name Judah. In that day, the temple was in Jerusalem, which was in the southern kingdom, so the northern kingdom lost access to their place of worship. An alternative site was created, Samaria became the capitol of Israel, and so the divided people of God are worshipping in two places.
Assyria comes along and overtakes Israel, exiling most of their people. Assyria took them from their homeland, but not all of them. Some of them remained. But Assyria also brought people from foreign lands to occupy Israel’s territory during this period of history. When the exile ended seventy years later, Israelites returned to find there were people from their homeland who survived the exile, and they were hated because they didn’t have to go through exile like the rest of them. Those who stayed behind were seen as second-class citizens because they did not experience exile like everyone else.
It is also believed that during this period those who remained in the land intermarried with those who were brought in, resulting in children who were of mixed race. They were half Jewish. A full blood Jew was a true Jew in their eyes. So for this reason they were viewed as second-class citizens as well.
Thirdly, The Samaritans did not worship in the right place. Samaritans usually only accepted the first five books of the Bible as scripture and the place in which they worshipped was not the temple, so the mainstream Jewish population regarded them as false worshippers. The irony here is Samaritans were not allowed in the temple, so even if a Samaritan wanted to travel to the proper place of worship to worship God, they wouldn’t be let in because of the other two reasons.
All these tensions are in play as we get into this story. The direct route from Jerusalem to Galilee was through Samaria, but because of the hatred between these two groups of people having festered for centuries, Jews traveling this route would travel on the other side of the Jordan river to go around Samaria and not through it. But Jesus is going in and you can be assured that his disciples were not too thrilled about the idea.
They travel to a city called Sychar, where outside the city was a well dug by Jacob and given to his son in the book of Genesis. Every day women would come out early to draw water and take it back to town. Only one woman came later in the day and she came alone. This is who Jesus intends to meet.
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.
Therefore the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, being a Jew, ask me for a drink since I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)
The way Jesus interacts with this woman is uncharacteristic of a typical Jewish man. First, he shouldn’t be there at all. This wasn’t illegal, but unlikely. Second, he was a Jewish man speaking to a Samaritan. This is highly unusual because of the underlying tensions between these two people groups. Thirdly, she was a woman. It was not in their customs for a Jewish man to address a woman in this way. It was not wrong, it just wasn’t a part of their custom. The woman is surprised that she is even conversing with this man. All the societal customs are saying this conversation should not be happening.
Jesus responds:
Jesus answered and said to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who says to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.”
She said to Him, “Sir, You have nothing to draw with and the well is deep; where then do You get that living water?
“You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well, and drank of it himself and his sons and his cattle?”
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again;
but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.”
Jesus is unfolding why he is there. He’s also using what is around him to build a bridge to his message. Living water? What is this guy talking about? How can somebody drink water and never be thirsty again? You and I know because of the conversation with Nicodemus in the last chapter, Jesus is pointing to spiritual rebirth, what we know as eternal life. The woman does not quite understand, but she wants it.
The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.”
Look at the motive for the desire. She wants living water, but not so she can have an abiding relationship with Christ himself, but so that she will no longer come to this well in the heat of the day. She can avoid all the social outcast stuff and just live her life if she does not have to come to this well every day alone in the blistering hot sun.
So she asks for this living water and Jesus artfully reveals more to her.
He said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.”
The woman answered and said, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’;
for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this you have said truly.”
I can almost imagine the reaction of this woman. “Oh great. Here is another person here to judge me. I already have enough people in my life doing that. I certainly don’t need another. Wait. He’s not from around here. How did he know that?”
The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet.
“Our fathers worshiped in this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.”
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, an hour is coming when neither in 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 an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”
She sees Jesus is a prophet, so she changes the subject to worship. Remember what I said earlier about two rival worship sites. This part of the conversation centers around that topic. This brings us to the first lesson we learn in this exchange:
True worship is not about time and place, but about heart and substance.
True worship is not about time and place, but about heart and substance.
Jesus is pointing out that both Jews and Samaritans made worship about specific times and specific places. Jesus is helping her understand it is much bigger than that. We don’t want to minimize the importance of coming together for worship as the body of Christ, but we cannot overemphasize it either. These times are very important. We must come together and commune with God together. We sharpen one another. We encourage one another. We seek God’s face together. But worship does not end when we walk out these doors. Worship is about bringing God into every aspect of our lives.
The truth is we can worship both here and out there and we must strive to take on the mindset that worship is lifestyle. The way you drive, the way you work, the way you interact with the staff at the restaurant, the employees at the grocery store, the way you interact with your neighbors, all of it can be done from a posture of worship that says, “I do this to please my king.”
The second, and perhaps more important thing I want you to see is this: Our mission is to share Jesus to the world. If we model our lives after Jesus, then we will develop a heart for the marginalized and outcasts of mainstream society.
We must go out of our way to meet those who are marginalized and outcast by society.
We must go out of our way to meet those who are marginalized and outcast by society.
This woman went to the well in the heat of the day alone because the other women had already gone in the morning. She went alone because she was not welcome in their circle. Her lifestyle, her mistakes, her reputation, excluded her from developing a relationship with those other ladies. Her sins haunted her in part because nobody else would let her move past it.
What I want you to notice is that Jesus is not dismissing her promiscuous lifestyle. He is acknowledging it. But he also sees past it to the deepest need of the human soul: to be reborn. She knows Messiah is coming.
Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am He.”
Jesus says to her, “I am God. And I see you.” My greatest fear having a criminal record was that my sins would haunt me forever. There are a few instances where my criminal past has kept me from doing certain things, but I was more worried about people labeling me a criminal for the rest of my life. What I came to learn is that not I or anyone else shapes my identity. Jesus does. Jesus knew it all and he went to her anyway. “Everybody else may see you this way, But I made you and this is who I say you are. Will you accept it? Will you follow me?”
Here, in this building and in this fellowship of believers, the marginalized, the broken, the downtrodden, the doubter, and the desperate should find their hope. They should find their hope in the one who knew them from before the foundations of the world. The rest of the world is screaming at them trying to tell them who they are. The problem is that it is not working. We have to move ourselves into a position where we no longer see people the way we might be tempted to see them, but by the way God sees them. This needs to be a place where people are free to discover who God made them to be.
Jesus’ disciples return and try to feed hem. He simply says,
But He said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.”
So the disciples were saying to one another, “No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?”
Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to accomplish His work.
Our food needs to be to do our Father’s work. Do you hunger to do the will of God in your life, or is it optional? Do you have a heart to show people who God has made them to be? Do you have a desire to show them the truth? If not, beg God to change your heart. If so, how faithful are you to seeking out the marginalized and outcast? Find someone you don’t understand and get to know them. Maybe God will take the opportunity to speak through you.