The Same Old Story John 4.5-42 So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, Give me a drink. (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 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. The woman said to him, Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it? Jesus said to her, Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life. The woman said to him, Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water. Jesus said to her, Go, call your husband, and come back. The woman answered him, I have no husband. Jesus said to her, You are right in saying, I have no husband ; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true! The woman said to him, Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. Jesus said to her, Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth. The woman said to him, I know that Messiah is coming (who is called Christ). When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us. Jesus said to her, I am he, the one who is speaking to you. Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, What do you want? or, Why are you speaking with her? Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he? They left the city and were on their way to him. Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, Rabbi, eat something. But he said to them, I have food to eat that you do not know about. So the disciples said to one another, Surely no one has brought him something to eat? Jesus said to them, My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. Do you not say, Four months more, then comes the harvest? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, One sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor. Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman s testimony, He told me everything I have ever done. So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And
many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world. A priest, a rabbi, and a minister walk into a bar. The priest pulls out a deck of cards and pretty soon they've got a little poker game going -- only to be busted by an overzealous policeman enforcing the town's strict anti-gambling laws. So they're hauled before a judge the next morning, and everybody's kind of embarrassed about it, including the judge. "Look," he says, "just tell me you weren't gambling, and I'll let you go." "Well," says the priest, "gambling seems to imply that engaging in a perfectly accecptable activity will guarantee a payout at some point in the future, whereas considering a hypothetical situation such as the one we were engaged in where the money is taking on more of the role of a token merely for tracking the interplay of the game and the relative..." and so on. "Fine," says the judge, "You can go." The minister steps up. "It seems to me that given that we are predestined in life and death that the concept of gambling, the game of chance, has no basis in reality except when interpreted through yourself and you assume that you are a legitimate mediator when I suggest I need none..." and so on also, and is similarly dismissed by the judge, just leaving the rabbi in the courtroom. "Well?" asks the judge. "Rabbi, were you gambling?" The rabbi looks around and shrugs his shoulders. "Gambling? With who?" I didn t really have to tell the joke. I could have just said the first line, A priest, a rabbi and a minister walk into a bar, and most of you could have come up with a punchline. It s a formulaic kind of joke. There are a million others and odds are if you we put our heads together we could finish the punchline to any number of these jokes: A Yankee and a Southerner sit down to a supper of gizzards and fatback. A Republican and a Democrat meet at a gun show You know the kind there are lightbulb jokes and racist jokes and misogynist jokes and feminist jokes and blond jokes and Presbyterian jokes. Here s what all the punchlines have in common: the context is somewhat irrelevant (it doesn t matter if the priest, the rabbi, and the minister are in a bar or a shopping mall) the setup is not the central issue (it s really not about the gambling)
someone gets made either the fool or the hero in the end (as far as I can tell, the Rabbi has the best answer, without having to show off his training to give it) It s not about the guns or the gambling or the bar or the lightbulb or the food..it s about identity. The punchline defines who the people are in the story and we have to know something about what a priest is, or a Presbyterian, or a Republican to fully understand the joke. But even if we miss a piece of it, we know from the first line that this will be about separating people according to a fundamental piece of their identity. It is about highlighting the differences between people and defining one is better or worse than the rest of us. A Jewish man and a Samaritan woman meet at a well in the middle of the day. Those that heard the story of Jesus encounter would have known a lot just from that first line. 1) They would have known that the well, particularly Jacob s well, was the place for lovers, the most famous story being that of Jacob and Rachel. Boy meets girl at the well, boy waters girl s father s sheep, they kiss, they fall in love, they suffer because of their love, they marry, they raise children and parent a great nation. So the story has some romantic overtones. This is the context that adds interest to the story, that baits the listeners, that suggests a known outcome, a punchline; it promises intrique. 2) But the real zinger in the setup to the story is that the Jew and the Samaritan speak at all. In fact, it is quite shocking that Jesus is even in Samaria. Typically Jews traveling between Judea and Galilee would cross the Jordan to avoid even setting a foot in Samaritan territory. It wasn t just hard feelings, it was dangerous. The lines had been drawn long ago, when two different peoples who worshipped the same God refused to cooperate in the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem. The Samaritans believed in the Torah only, while the Jews held the additional writings and the prophets to be holy as well. The Jews thought the Samaritans were half-breeds, corrupted by intermarriage with the Assyrians. The Samaritans though the Jews to be libertine in the understanding of scripture, and took pride in their direct line to Jacob and Joseph. And so from time to time, the tension got to be too much, and some would cross a boundary and there would be violence and death and more animosity between the two. The same old story differences that seem relatively minor in hindsight defined identities with a line of blood. Jesus crosses that boundary, heading into Samaritan territory that was dangerous for him, a Jew. The boundary we so often notice in the story is a different one the one between men and women, or sinner and saint. That is how we know the story, looking through our own lenses. We don t miss the sexual tension here at all, it s definitely present, but we misinterpret it. We create a story based on moralism Jesus reaches out to the sinful woman, breaks taboos between men and women and overlooks her sexual sin to offer real hope to the harlot. It is the same old story (in fact, it s the story of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman and many a Disney movie) man finds a miserable woman, man saves woman from a life of misery/sin/degradation with his money/religion/sheer strength, and woman looks at man with starry eyes and commits her life to him. We like that story; it fits our theology of Jesus as a personal savior, a gentle, philosophical man, reaching out to those who suffer from sin in a real way. It speaks to us. It is a little challenging
to admit that we all harbor sins that Jesus knows all about even when the world doesn t, but in the end, Jesus accepts us. But look carefully and hear past your assumptions. Jesus offers her living water and she misunderstands, not getting the larger reference he makes. Sounds a lot like Nicodemus from last week, yes? But when Jesus tells her about her marital history and her current situation, her response isn t confession. Jesus doesn t tell her to go and sin no more. We place sin in the story because that s what we expect to find here, but if it s there at all, it sure isn t the centerpiece. The woman s aha moment comes when she realizes that Jesus knows all about her he has knowledge that is special in some way. And her next comment doesn t have anything to do with who is man and who is woman or who is sinner and who is saint: her next comment is indeed all about identity, but it is religious and political in nature: Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem. Who is right, the Jews or the Samaritans? Who will be the hero and who will be the loser in the story? the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth Jesus says this shocking thing, that being a Jew or being a Samaritan is already irrelevant Gerazim/Jerusalem the mountains of worship are irrelevant, the boundaries are no longer fixed, the story is finished, the world is saved, the Messiah is here! If those listening are hoping for a good punchline a soundbite on the righteousness of the Jews, the stubborn sin of the Samaritans, the reason for the line that divides them, they are disappointed. But those who listen, those that have hearts to hear the same old story being told in a new way, those that see a Messiah big enough to save the whole world (including the Samaritans), those that are willing to consider that the particulars of where we worship matter less than the spirit with which we worship, those can imagine a world where the old boundaries no longer matter they can hear and receive and share the good news. In the end, it is the same story. Jesus always turns our expectation into a truth and a promise bigger than we imagined. Be careful when you think you know where a story is headed, because if God has a hand in it, the punchline will be surprising, but if we lean into it, and listen, and live our lives with faith that God will be perfect them instead of resigning ourselves to the same old story, then we will find our identity not in our belief, or our sin, or our righteousness, or our clothes, or our bank accounts, or our gender, but in the Messiah who still comes to us not only in this place, but in all those mundane places, all the wells, of our lives. A man stops you on the way into the grocery store and asks you for gas money, giving you a sob story about needing to get to the hospital to see his mother Someone you ve invited to church says once again that they promise to be there Your loved one makes the umpteenth promise that things will change
Someone sits down next to you on the plane and asks, are you saved? Your father says to you, we need to talk A woman walks up to you in a bar and asks you to buy her a drink We might tell them differently, but most of us here would finish those stories in similar ways. But perhaps we are to look beyond the obvious identity of saint and sinner, perhaps a life of faith is about more than just moralism and drawing lines between holy and unholy, good and bad, right and wrong. Perhaps there is a Way and a Truth bigger than the end we assume to our own stories, and those of others. Perhaps there is good news that we overlook each and every day simply because we don t listen. Perhaps God sends people into our lives to show us his Truth while we remain entrenched in our own ideas about what scripture says, or what God looks like, or how the story is supposed to go. Perhaps we should take a cue from the Samaritan woman, who when confronted with a potentially dangerous stranger in a lonely place did not run, did not accuse, did not assume, but simply asked some very good questions: How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria? Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it? Should we worship here on this mountain or in Jerusalem? Perhaps if we focused more on our identity in Christ, and less on being right, or knowing the end of the story before we ve heard the whole thing, we could ask the final question of the Samaritan woman that creates conversion, belief, and joy among the Samaritans. Perhaps instead of insisting on knowing the answers, we can simply ask God to become present in our lives and then open our eyes to the stories God gives us every day. Perhaps with those stories, those people, those truths in front of us we can ask in faith, trusting that God will answer in God s own time: Can he be Messiah? Can the person in front of me with the same old story actually be offering a new truth? Could this be Jesus? Martin Luther said we are to be little Christs for each other. If only a small portion of us are successful in that attempt, and if God still uses the most surprising people now as he did in the stories we love so much, then the person standing in front of us with the same old story could indeed be Christ himself. Let us listen at least long enough to let him get past the first line.
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