Jesus and the Woman at the Well: The Matters of the Heart

John 4:1-42 Jesus and the Woman at the Well (The Matters of the Heart) Introduction: The story of the Samaritan Woman is where we see so clearly the heart of Jesus, who is God, YAHWEH in human flesh, pursuing his creation. This story is a beautiful display of the love, that knows us through and through yet relentlessly pursues us. Jesus in this passage tells us that “God is seeking worshippers.” Why is God seeking worshippers? Is God lonely? Is God incomplete? Is God insecure? NO! God is love and love by its very nature is self giving. Man was created to worship. Therefore God seeks out man so that man can experience the very thing he was created for: love and fellowship with God. God pursues us because he knows that we cannot find fulfillment apart from him. As Augustine once said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” As this story clearly portrays, it is not, as is so often thought, man who is seeking God, but rather God who is seeking man. “Where there is need, there is God. Where there is sorrow, misery, unhappiness, suffering, confusion, folly, oppression, there is the I AM, yearning to turn man’s sorrow into bliss whenever man will let Him. It is not the thirsty seeking water, but (living) water seeking the thirsty. It is not the hungry seeking bread, but bread (from heaven) seeking the hungry. It is not the sad seeking joy, but joy seeking the sad. It is not emptiness seeking fullness, but rather fullness seeking emptiness. And it is not merely that he supplies our need, but he becomes Himself the fulfillment of our need.” -Roy Hession 1. The Samaritans. 1. Samaria- once the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel, was approx. 30 miles north of Jerusalem. The Samaritans were a mixed race (Jew and Gentile) and generally looked down upon by the Jews. 2. The History- In 721 BC the Assyrians sacked Samaria and deported the majority of the population leaving just a hand full of Israelites in the region. They then repopulated the area with Gentiles who intermarried with the remaining Israelites. Their descendants became known as the Samaritans. The Samaritans believed in the God of Israel but only accepted the books of Moses as inspired. They built a temple on Mt. Gerizim in 400 BC and in 128 BC the Jews destroyed it. 3. John tells us that Jesus, “had to pass through Samaria”.- Why? Not because it was the most direct route to Galilee, though it was, but for the sake of one thirsty soul. 2. Jesus - Our Unconventional Savior 1. “So he came to a town of Samaria called Sychar, near the field that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob’s well was there; so Jesus, wearied as he was from his journey, was sitting beside the well. It was about the sixth hour. 7 A woman from Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” 8 (For his disciples had gone away into the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask for a drink from me, a woman of Samaria?” (For Jews have no dealings with Samaritans.)” 2. John says that Jews have no dealings with the Samaritans. What John says in the original language is actually stronger- it speaks of racial segregation. Literally, the Jews do not share any sort of eating or drinking vessels with Samaritans. 3. The woman is obviously shocked by Jesus request. Not only that, but history says that a respectable Jewish man would not speak to a woman in public, not even his wife. Not only that but a religious Jew would definitely avoid any sort of contact with an immoral woman. 1. “When Jesus begins to speak to her, he is deliberately reaching across almost every significant barrier that people can put up between themselves. In this case, a racial barrier, a cultural barrier, a gender barrier, and a moral barrier - and every convention of the time - that he a religious Jewish male, should have nothing whatsoever to do with her. But he doesn’t care. Do you see how radical that is? He reaches right across all the human divides in order to connect to her. She is amazed, and we should be too.” -Keller 3. The Offer 1. “Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” 11 The woman said to him, “Sir, you have nothing to draw water with, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob? He gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock.” 13 Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” 1. "Jesus is speaking metaphorically, referring to "living water,” which he also calls "eternal life”. The image is a little lost on us. Almost everywhere in the United States today we have ready access to drinking water. Most of us know very little about real thirst, but those who lived in an arid climate next to a desert knew a lot about it. Because our bodies contain so much water (the human body contains between 60 - 70% water), to be in profound thirst is to be in agony. And then to taste water after you have been truly thirsty is about the most satisfying experience possible.” -Keller 1. The obvious background of what Jesus is referring to is the Old Testament. There God declares: “My people have committed two sins; They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns, that cannot hold water” - Jeremiah 2:13 1. God’s people had rejected the fresh, running supply of God and his faithful goodness, choosing instead the stagnant waters of cisterns they have prepared for themselves, discovering even then that their cisterns were cracked, and leaving them with nothing to sustain life and blessing. 2. So what is Jesus saying? “‘Ive got something for you that is as basic and necessary to you spiritually as water is to you physically. Something without which you are absolutely lost.’ He’s talking about deep soul satisfaction, about incredible satisfaction and contentment that doesn’t depend on what is happening outside of us…Most of us think about being satisfied by something outside of us, something around us…Yet Jesus is telling us that there is nothing outside of us that can truly satisfy the thirst that is deep down inside of us… But Jesus claims that he can give it, he can put it into us. He says, “I can give you absolute, unfathomable satisfaction in the core of your being regardless of what happens outside, regardless of circumstance.” -Keller 4. The Heart of the Matter 1. The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I will not be thirsty or have to come here to draw water.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come here.” 17 The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband. What you have said is true.” 19 The woman said to him, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I who speak to you am he.” 1. Why does Jesus seem to suddenly change the subject from seeking living water to her history with men? 1. He didn’t bring it up to condemn her. He didn’t bring it up to rehearse the details. He brought it up to expose the thirst that she doesn’t even know she has. 2. He isn’t changing the subject. He’s nudging her, saying, “if you want to understand the nature of this living water I offer, you need to first understand how you’ve been seeking it in your own life. You’ve been trying to get it through men, and it’s not working, is it? Your need for men is eating you alive and it will never stop.” -Keller 2. David Foster Wallace an American writer put it this way in a commencement speech at Kenyon College: 1. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god . . . to worship . . . is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before [your loved ones] finally plant you. . . . Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful; it is that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.” - David Foster Wallace 3. Wallace was by no means a religious person, but he understood that everyone worships, everyone trusts in something for their salvation, everyone bases their lives on something that requires faith. A couple of years after giving that speech, Wallace killed himself. And this non-religious man’s parting words to us are pretty terrifying: “Something will eat you alive.” 4. Because even though you might never call it worship, you can be absolutely sure you are worshiping and you are seeking. And Jesus says, unless you’re worshiping me, unless I’m the center of your life, unless you’re trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, unless you see that the solution must come inside rather than just pass by outside, then whatever you worship will abandon you in the end.” -Keller 2. Here’s where it gets uncomfortable for the woman and for us. She tries to avoid the hard issues, and changes the subject to religious politics. 1. Put your finger on the sore spot, and people will at once start talking about something else. And the best subject for distracting attention from morality is, of course, religion. 2. How many times have you been trying to explain to someone about how Jesus died for sinners and rose again to provide forgiveness and reconciliation and have the person say, “What about the hate speech of right-wing Christian fanatics?” Or “What about gay rights?” Or “What about the people who have never heard about Jesus?” 3. People definitely have legitimate questions. But most of the time we are putting up a smoke screen to hide our deeper issues behind, to avoid our true need being known or seen, but God sees it, he knows, and he offers to satisfy it, to fill it, just like with this woman. 4. “They are all excuses and they are all irrelevant to the heart issue. God’s claim on every human life- and God’s offer of a new kind of human life for all those who give up the stagnant water and come to him for the living variety- is absolute.” -N.T. Wright 1. We get squirmy here because if you want to take Jesus up on his offer of running, pure water, bubbling up inside you, you will have to get rid of the stale, moldy, stagnant water you’ve been living off of all this time. In this woman’s case it was her married life- or rather, her unmarried life, but what is it for us? Conclusion: “How did this woman find salvation? It was because Jesus was thirsty. If he had not been thirsty, he would not have gone to the well, and she would not have found the living water. But why was Jesus thirsty? It was because the divine son of God, the maker of heaven and earth, had emptied himself of his glory and descended into the world as a vulnerable mortal, subject to becoming weary and thirsty. In other words, she found the living water because Jesus Christ said, "I thirst”. That is not the last time Jesus Christ said “I thirst,” in the book of John. On the cross just before he died, he said, “I thirst,” and he meant more than physical thirst. There Jesus was experiencing the loss of the relationship with his Father because he was taking the punishment we deserved for our sins. There he was cut off from the Father, the source of living water. He was experiencing the ultimate, torturous, killing, eternal thirst of which the worst death by dehydration is just a hint….It is because Jesus Christ experienced cosmic thirst on the cross that you and I can have our spiritual thirst satisfied. It is because he dies that we can be born again. And he did it gladly. Seeing what he did and why he did it will turn our hearts away from the things that enslave us and toward him in worship.” -Keller Jesus concludes his conversation with this woman by telling her openly and unreservedly that he is the Messiah. Nowhere in all the gospels do we find the Lord making such a full avowal of his nature and office as he does here. And let it be forever remembered, that it was not made to learned Scribes, or moral Pharisees, but to one who up to that day had been an ignorant, thoughtless, immoral person! Such is the grace of God. It is the same for skeptics, believers, insiders, outsiders and everyone in between.