Choosing To Believe: Jesus and the Woman at the Well Exodus 17:1-7 John 4:1-42 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. Mention the woman at the well and people immediately think of John s story about a naughty woman who had five husbands. Yet in John s fourth chapter you hear nothing about repentance and forgiveness because the sin of significance for John is not sex but unbelief. This is a story about a woman and a community coming to belief in the light of day, a story John tells as counterpoint to the story of Nicodemus who came to Jesus by night and did not believe. To begin at the beginning of the story, we see that the God who so loved the world is the initiator of this encounter. On the way back to Galilee, Jesus had to go through Samaria, John writes, suggesting that God s will might be hidden in geographical necessity. God sends his only Son not only through Samaria but to a Samaritan woman, an encounter meant to reveal that whoever believes in him (even theologically suspect Samaritans) may have eternal life here and now. However it is not the divinity but the humanity of this Jewish interloper that first strikes us. Sitting by the well, he is visibly tired from the journey; he is hungry (the disciples have gone into the city to buy food, conveniently leaving Jesus alone and available for what turns out to be the longest conversation he has with anyone in the Gospel); and he is thirsty. Give me a drink, he says to start the conversation. Initially the exchange echoes Jesus back and forth with Nicodemus about being born from above. Only the metaphor has changed. In this story the woman is talking literally about water from the well while Jesus is speaking of living water that wells up from the depths of a soul whose source is God s Spirit. He is speaking of the eternal life that he is--here and now and
standing before her! I repeat from last Sunday, the gift of eternal life in John is not the gift of life after death, of dead relatives alive at the end of a white light glimpsed on the other side of the grave by those who keep their zippers zipped: this is the gift of eternal life available now, ours for the asking! If you knew the gift of God, Jesus says, 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. Yet even to form such a question in our mouths calls for a radical change of mind, a complete reorientation of knowing and living the truth that begins not with a what or a how but with a where and a who, with a relationship. The significant difference between Nicodemus response to Jesus and the woman s is this: Nicodemus asks How can a man how can I? while the woman asks Where do you? Nicodemus question seeks a technique that can be learned and practiced apart from Jesus; the woman has an inkling that whatever this living water is, its source cannot be known apart from Jesus. Still, she has only an inkling, a sense that she is in the presence of someone great, even greater than Jacob; but how he fits into the story she already knows remains a mystery. I think this is how it is with you and me when we first encounter him who is the source of a whole new life. Wherever we happen upon him, we likely have come to draw from the well that has sustained our life thus far. And because his presence is always mediated and so hidden, he will surprise us no less than the Jewish stranger surprised the woman at the well. The place he encounters us may be in a place with religious significance a worship service, say, or morning devotions or working in Germantown on a house for Habitat; but he also may find us on the mezzanine level at the Kimmel or staring at a Renoir in the Barnes or ordering dinner downtown with friends or reading a bedtime story to the only child still young enough to listen to us. What
you know of yourself with no help from God is that you could probably keep on doing whatever it is you routinely have been doing to sustain your life all the way to the grave working yourself to death or eating or drinking or playing or sleeping around or boring yourself to death-- except for this seemingly chance encounter with a stranger who engages you in conversation about the breadth and length and height and depth of a life you could not imagine without him: a fullness of life, an abundance that is never exhausted, like a spring gushing up from the depths of your being. It is as though he has awakened in you the person you had long ago put aside to pursue whatever it was in the moment that made you feel alive, but that now has left you exhausted from the effort. Perhaps this was how it was with the woman. There was the endless routine of drawing water from the well to slake her literal thirst, but then there were the men, an endless parade of men that may have seemed, in the moment, an answer to her prayers. One interpretation of this story suggests that the men, the ba als in Greek, were actually the idols of the Samaritans, the gods they worshipped in addition to the God of Israel. Whether it was flesh and blood men or statues fashioned by human hands, the woman kept putting her whole trust in people or things that could not bear the weight. We know this about her because, in the light that Jesus is, we think she has been exposed as a sinner; except, I repeat, there is no hint of repentance in this story nor does Jesus say anything about forgiveness. Jesus does not see her the way we see her. Rather after she asks Jesus to give her this water so that she may never again be thirsty, he does. He gives her himself. In a word, he knows her and she knows herself as known by him. I think of Henry s words in Tom Stoppard s The Real Thing: It s to do with knowing and being known. I remember how it stopped seeming odd that in biblical [Hebrew] knowing was used for making love. Whosit knew
so-and-so. Carnal knowledge. It s what lovers trust each other with. Knowledge of each other, not of the flesh but through the flesh, knowledge of self, the real him, the real her, in extremis, the mask slipped from the face.knowing and being known. I revere that. In response she says, taking one small step toward the belief that is knowing and being known, Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Mary D Angelo writes that One function of early Christian prophecy was knowledge of the human heart. As Jesus knew what was in the human being and the woman knows him by his knowledge of her, to borrow from Nicodemus story, she knows herself as God knows her, from above: she is seen whole through the eyes of the love that abides forever, the love that is eternal. When the conversation turns to who you really are beneath your Sunday best, religion teaches you to see the broken pieces frame by frame, pieces that may or may not be picked up and put back together in the end. Religion teaches us to be fearful of being known, teaches us to reach for the fig leaves as we take our leave of the garden. But the God who came to dwell with us, the eternity that assumed our mortality, the Word that became flesh, knows us better than we know ourselves, knows from the beginning when we were knit in our mother s womb that we have been destined in love to be God s own. To be known in this way is to quit the pretense and to live in relation to God as the vulnerable yet beloved creatures we were made to be. So it is with the woman at the well. To say that her life is given back to her is not to say enough. When she later exclaims to the people in the city that Jesus told her everything she had ever done, I imagine that in his telling of her life, for the first time, the pieces fit together, the meaning and purpose of her life were revealed in the light of his. "Revelation," H. Richard Niebuhr wrote, "is [the] clue that enables one to put together the disparate experiences of life into a meaningful, coherent whole, to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the
incongruities between what life is and what life ought to be." This is your life and mine seen from above, seen through the eyes of the love for which we were made. All the woman knows to do in response to being known in this way is to worship the God who graciously sent a prophet to meet her at the well. I imagine her saying in Annie Dillard s words, I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready at hand. But worship God where? Is this the same God her own people worship on Mount Gerizim or is this the God worshiped by the Jews in the temple at Jerusalem? Jesus response takes her breath away and would take ours away too if we ever really believed. He says simply, I am. Who shall I say sent me? Moses asks the voice in the burning bush. Say I am sent you. At this very moment, the bumbling disciples return, but this morning I cannot take my eyes off the woman. She leaves her water jar and goes running into the city saying, Come and see! It is the winsome witness of a woman awash with amazement whose faith will only fit in a question: He cannot be the Messiah, can he? I confess that the same question lurks underneath my every proclamation of the gospel because the news of God s dwelling with us is so completely beyond anything I can ask or think that the only sentence able to contain the news must be said in the subjunctive mood and so with utter astonishment. God in Christ, eternity within the confines of mortal life, Word made flesh can only be known as truth if it is the beginning of all our knowing. Finally John tells us that many Samaritans believed because of her testimony, which must have been mind-blowing given what they knew of her life before this day. Others, in response to her invitation, did come to see for themselves and asked Jesus to stay with them. The word is better translated as abide : they asked him to abide with them. Likewise Andrew and Simon, three chapters before, in response to Jesus asking them what they were looking for, asked Jesus
where he was abiding. Come and see, he said, and they came and saw where he was abiding and remained with him. It was in the abiding he in them and they in him that the Samaritans believed. Perhaps you, like the woman, met him at a well that had left you weary with the effort of drawing from it again and again. There you came to know yourself as known by him and are here to worship him by any means at hand. More likely, you are here to see for yourself if he has the words of eternal life. If so, ask him now, while you are in the bloom of living a life that has left you parched, ask him to abide with you. Dwell in his word. Follow him. For in knowing him more and more, you may come to know yourself as known by the One who is the source of living water gushing up to eternal life, the source of love that never ends, the source of truth that will set you free from all others to believe no longer because of what I say; rather, abiding in him, you will hear God s Word for yourself and know that this is truly the Savior of the world.