John 4:1-30, 39-42

If Only You Had Known...

Sermon preached Jan. 31, 2021

Introduction

A few weeks ago a group of people got together to deliver food to hungry people in Los Angeles.
One of them drove one of the trucks carrying the food and helped unload the groceries and hand
them out to the public.

Like everyone else he was wearing a mask. The man had long salt-and-pepper hair and was
dressed in a casual plaid shirt, ripped jeans and work gloves. Hard worker. As he talked to the
other people helping with the food, and the people getting the food, he seemed like a good-
natured, friendly, hard-working guy.

Then he took a break to have a cigarette and took off his mask. It was Brad Pitt, there with some
friends including at least one other Hollywood type. Brad Pitt working alongside people, and
handing out food, and no one recognized him! If only they had known.

The woman, alone

In the middle of the day a woman heads out to a community well, by herself. Odd that she goes at
that time of day. In that part of the world, the midday sun hammers down on you like an anvil
dropped from the sky. Everyone else goes to the well early in the morning and late in the day
when it’s cooler. But this woman, goes at midday.

Odd too that she’s all by herself. Community wells were social gathering places. Back then, and
in most cultures during most of human history, women went to fetch the water and carried the
heavy bucket on their heads back to their homes. But while at the well, women would socialize,
catch up on news of the community, talk about their children, share ideas about how to make
some extra shekels, commiserate about their husbands, warn each other that the melons at the
market today are lousy. But she’s all by herself. In fact, that’s why she went to the well at
midday, so she wouldn’t encounter other women from her village.

A man by himself

She walks towards the well and sees something odd. There’s a man by the well, all by himself.
What’s he doing out here? Even odder - she can tell by his clothes that she’s not a Samaritan like
she is - he’s a Jew. An outsider.

Now that’s strange. Jews almost never went into Samaria if they could help it. Jews and
Samaritans hated each other. The hatred went back centuries to when the Assyrian Empire
invaded and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and took off into captivity the educated

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people, the leadership, the craftsmen, and left behind the poor nobodies. And then the poor
nobodies married the non-Jews in the land - the Palestinians, so to speak - and created their own
ethnic group - the Samaritans. And to make matters worse in the eyes of the Jews, the
Samaritans developed their own version of Judaism, with their own temple at Mt. Gerazim that
competed with the Jerusalem temple as the only “right” place to go worship God.

Jews hated Samaritans so much that when they were forced to utter the word “Samaritan” they
would curse and spit on the ground. And the Samaritans - they had this custom, that if a Jew
walked through their territory, they would toss straw in the footprints of the Jew and then light
fire to the straw.

So why’s he there? Well, Jesus is walking home from Jerusalem to Galilee and John tells us that
Jesus “had” to go through Samaria. That’s what scholars call a “divine imperative,” meaning that
the Holy Spirit directed Jesus to go through Samaria, instead of taking the long way around.
Reading the text, we know Jesus is in Samaria on a mission from his Father, but the woman does
not who he is or why he’s there. She just sees a strange man, a hated outsider. If only she had
known.

Jesus speaks

Then another surprise. The stranger speaks to her. That’s a no-no. In that culture an unescorted
woman was not supposed to talk to a man and vice-versa. It violated the bounds of propriety, was
indecent, kind of immoral. There were unwritten rules against it.

Jesus surprisingly speaks - and pushes the envelope some more - and asks the Samaritan woman
for a drink. Why is that pushing the envelope? An illustration.

About ten years ago Susan and I visited Savannah and stayed at a bed and breakfast run
by a husband and wife. The husband served us breakfast on nice china and it was a really
good breakfast and then he clears our plates and takes them into the kitchen and with the
door to the kitchen wide open, he puts our plates on the floor and the dog comes over and
starts licking them clean. He looks at us and says don’t worry, I always do this, I put them
in the dishwasher afterwards. Yes, true story. I don’t believe I’d eat off his china again.

A Jew taking a cup of water from a Samaritan woman, was like eating from one of those
plates, like drinking from your dog’s water bowl.

Now you’re really pushing it, buddy. A Jew in Samaria, a man talking to a woman, and now
asking her for a drink from her bucket? Who is this guy? What does he want?

The conversation

So when this strange Jewish man violates all propriety, she tries to back him off - what are you

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doing, a Jew, asking me, a Samaritan woman, for a drink of water?

And Jesus in effect says to her - if you only knew - who is talking to you here - and if you only
knew - that God wants to give you living water - you’d ask me.

But she doesn’t know who is talking to her. And she doesn’t know what living water means.

She pushes back, says, you’ve got no bucket...you not greater than our ancestor Jacob, are you?

Jesus offers her living water again. He doesn’t mean H2O - he means, the gift of the Holy Spirit
that will give her new and abundant life. Living water that will satisfy all her thirsts - for love, for
someone to understand her, accept her, to value her not for her sexuality but for who she is. The
Lord is using a common metaphor from the Hebrew Bible - “As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1). “With joy you will draw water from the wells of
salvation.” (Isaiah 12:3).

But she still doesn’t get who this man is, and what he’s offering her! If only she had known!

Do we get it?

But I wonder if we get it - who Jesus is, and what he’s offering us.

Maybe you’re vaguely dissatisfied with your life. It’s not a bad life - you’ve done ok - you did
what society said you needed to do to be successful, and on the outside it looks like you’ve got it
pretty much together. You’ve got everything you should need, there are no big crises in your life,
but something is missing. Something doesn’t feel right, and you can’t figure out what it is.

Maybe you dip in and out of this church and religion thing when you need it, like when you feel a
deficit in your life and sometimes you make a resolution to pray more or to be more generous -
you try to do the right stuff but it never lasts and you simultaneously feel a hunger for more and a
great disappointment at not being able to find it.

Maybe your life is a big train wreck. And you’re hearing this today through the livestream
because no way would you go to a church - you think, maybe on the basis of actual experience,
that you would be judged - and you know you’re a mess, you’re disgusted with yourself, you
have a string of broken promises and broken relationships in your past and you’re starting to
believe you can’t change, be better and maybe you’re thinking of ending it all.

If you - if you only knew...who Jesus really is and how he can give you new life, remake
you...well, maybe you will shortly.

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The woman’s great shame

Remember how the woman was at the well, alone, in the middle of the day? Now we’re going to
find out why.

The woman kind of cracks open the door a wee bit and says, Ok, give me this water so I don’t
have to come back to the well. At that moment, like a doctor touching a tender place and asking
if it hurts, Jesus touches her most tender place, her greatest wounding, by saying to her call your
husband so we can talk further.

Now we learn why she’s at the well alone. The woman is a pariah. She’s had five husbands and
is now living with yet another man without even being married to him. We have to understand
that this woman wasn’t her choice - women in that culture had no power, no right to divorce.
What happened was, the men passed her around. One married her, then got tired of her and
divorced her, then the next, the next, the next and the next, until finally she ended up with a man
who didn’t even give her the dignity of marriage. Used and rejected five times...living with a man
not her husband...she’s a walking scandal and she went to the well alone in the heat of the day
rather than endure the stares, whispers or outright hostility of the other woman in her village.

I wonder, how many of us have deep guilt and shame inside us - about what we’ve done - about
who we are. We’ve tried hard to bury it in the past, but we know other people know, we know
that God knows, and that stuff is evidence that demands the verdict that we are flawed, defective,
stupid, worthless. When we meet new people we think, if they only knew...the truth about
me...they’d be disgusted with me, the disgust I surely deserve.
Jesus knew the truth about her the whole time - and he doesn’t force her to admit the truth - you
fess up, now! He just points to it - not to shame her but to name her place of greatest pain and
need so she can begin to see she’s loved, so she can begin to desire that living water Jesus offers.

Jesus does know the truth about us too and pursues us too - not that he pursues us anyway, like
he has to get past the truth about us - he pursues us precisely because we are wounded and
shamed.

What the church has done to women

The Samaritan woman was wounded and shamed because of her sexual history violated the
religious morality of the people of her village. A morality that condemned her. Jesus had to
rescue her from that, too.

I wonder how many women listening today have been wounded by the church, by religion.
Kathleen Norris describes her experience like this:

“Church was a formal affair (when I was little), a matter of wearing “Sunday best” and
sitting up straight...I have lately realized that what went wrong for me in my Christian

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 upbringing is...the belief that one has to be dressed up, both outwardly and inwardly, to
meet God, the insidious notion that I had to be a firm and even cheerful believer before I
dare show my face in ‘his’ church...and, like many woman of my generation, I simply
stopped going to church when I could no longer be ‘good,’ which for girls especially
meant not breaking rules, not giving voice to anger and resentment, and not
complaining.”1

And I wonder how many women have suffered deeper wounding, shaming. You were called a
Jezebel for asking too many questions. You felt called to preach or teach and were told to sit
down and be quiet or you were run out of your church. You were taught that if you had
premarital sex you were like a piece of used chewing gum and forever impure. You were abused
by a church leader or teacher and no one believed you.

If anything like that happened to you - I am so sorry - we men should have known and we didn’t,
or we chose not to.

But Jesus is not like other men. He doesn’t shame, condemn, tell you to shut up. He love you,
accepts you and wants to make you whole.

The end of the story

So the woman opens herself to Jesus and is transformed and she tells her village and they come
and believe in Jesus too. A happy ending.

But not for Jesus. Jesus should have known...surely did know...the trouble he was making for
himself. Jesus and his promiscuous acceptance of “unworthy” people, extending grace and mercy
to them - it cost him. Later on in John, the religious authorities throw the worst insult they can
think of - aren’t you demon-possessed and a Samaritan? And then the nail him to a cross and he
becomes one with the outcast and despised of the world. He cries out “I thirst” and they don’t
even given him water to drink. He dies, a soldier pierces his side with a spear- and blood and
water flow out.

And that’s how the living water gets to us. The cost of the living water that gives us eternal life
was the death of Jesus Christ.

But he paid that cost, out of love. And now the risen Jesus Christ is waiting for you to let him
give you the living water that will satisfy your deepest thirsts. Forever. Amen.

Endnotes

1. Kathleen Norris, The Cloister Walk, pp. 90-91. New York: Riverhead Books, 1996.