I.
When I teach the Bible to children (as well as to adults), I often get the question, “Why didn’t God just…”
“Why didn’t God just let Adam and Eve eat the apple?”
“Why didn’t God just make Pharoah let the Hebrews go? Why all the plagues?”
“Why didn’t God just forgive? Why did He make it so that His Son had to die for our sins?”
Questions like these aren’t just asked by people learning about the Bible. They are asked by all of us who are dealing with the circumstances of our lives.
“Why didn’t God just make everyone equal?”
“Why didn’t God heal me when I asked?”
“Why didn’t God make my friend’s (or my brother’s, or sister’s, or child’s) life turn out as well as mine has?”
The Israelites are asking the same kind of question in today’s reading from Exodus:
“Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?”
The Bible depicts their question as part of an ongoing quarrel that Israel has with God. A quarrel that escalates to the point of truly testing the covenant relationship. They ask:
“Is the Lord among us or not?”
Implicit in the question is the expectation that God should be making their lives easy and simple.
After all, they are His chosen people.
If God promised to bring His people to a land of milk and honey, then why isn’t He doing it right away?
Why was there hardship? Why was there scarcity of food and drink?
Why (we ourselves may ask), if I put my faith and trust in God, do I have any problems in my life?
II.
Today’s readings from Exodus and John talk about how God provides for us.
What they are trying to teach us is that God will provide the basics (water, food) if that’s all we ask for, but He will provide much more (including eternal life) if we ask for it.
Jesus says to the woman at the well:
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
Of course, the woman might be thinking:
“Why didn’t you just give me this ‘living water’ then? Why do I have to ask for it? Why do I have to ask for everything in my life?
“Here you are, a Jewish man, with all of your privilege and education, and I am this Samaritan woman —
“Oh, you Jews think you are so much better than us, but we have the same father, Jacob. Do you think you’re better than him? —
“And here you say you have some access to fresh water, something that could make my life easier, so I wouldn’t have to come to this well, in the heat of the day, day after day….”
To which Jesus replies:
“Go, call your husband and come back.”
But, of course, she has no husband.
She’s had five husbands and the man she now lives with is not her husband.
III.
Here is how the two stories are related.
Both Israel in the wilderness and the Samaritan woman at the well see the problem as out there rather than in in here.
The problem get externalized. It becomes a problem with God or with the Jewish religion.
They never think: could the problem be internal, rooted in our own moral shortcomings?
But consider: what was it that caused Israel to fall from a noble, patriarchal family into slavery?
The Bible does not tell us, but we know the character of the brothers who went with their father, Jacob, down into Egypt.
The were murderers.1 They had sold their own brother, Joseph, into slavery.2
Likewise, John tells us nothing about the reasons why the woman has had five husbands and now lives with a sixth man who is not her husband.
Nevertheless, there is a note of rebuke in Jesus’ words, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
These words were meant to sting.
When Jesus’ words hurt, they hurt for a reason.
They are meant to stop us from looking for external causes (and making excuses) and to force us to look inward (and to start taking responsibility).
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
Could the root of our ills be that we ask God for too little?
And is the sin that we do not value Him too much to begin with?
IV.
At the heart of the story of the woman at the well is Jesus saying just who He is:
“The woman said, ‘I know that Messiah’ (called Christ) ‘is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.’
“Then Jesus declared, ‘I, the one speaking to you—I am he.’”
What follows is the immediate conversion of the woman, who then becomes an evangelist on the spot, dropping her bucket, and running into town to invite everyone to meet Jesus.
“Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?”
There are two points I want to make about this.
First, the woman’s faith comes alive when Jesus tells her what she already knows about herself, but has sought for a very long time to suppress.
Jesus confronts her with her sins, whatever they may be.
She responds:
“Sir, I can see that you are a prophet.”
Second, the woman’s faith rests on nothing more than Jesus saying who He is. He says that He is the Messiah, and the woman believes Him.
We are not told why she believes Him.
Could Jesus be lying? Could Jesus be mistaken?
These questions do not even come up.
The woman simply believes Jesus’ own testimony about who He is. She does not ask for further proof. She does not ask for His lineage. She does not question Him about the prophecies of the coming Christ and how He plans to fulfill them.
Moreover, the townspeople believe the woman’s testimony:
“Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, ‘He told me everything I ever did.’”
This tells us a lot about what constitutes authority in the Church.
Authority is not vested in the institution, the office, or the ordained ministry. It is certainly not vested in me, the preacher, the man.
Authority is vested in the self-attesting words of Jesus Himself.
“I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
The authority rests in the words as spoken by the Word incarnate.
Therefore, anyone who takes it upon himself to proclaim these words, does so with authority.
The Samaritan woman becomes an apostle. She preaches to her own village. They believe her words.
What we need are more men and women like this Samaritan woman who are faithful to the Word of God.
That Word tells us on every page: “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”
V.
It ought to be clear now how revolutionary Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well was. It turned the world upside down.
What Jesus says next would get Him thrown out of any church today, just as it got Him nailed to a cross two thousand years ago:
“You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we [Jews] worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.”
So much for His cultural sensitivity training.
Jesus is not afraid to say that His Jewish religion is superior to the Samaritan faith.
Why? Because He knows that the Jews worship according to the Word of God. The Samaritans are, at best, muddled and confused as to what that Word says.
They go through the motions of religion, like getting their children baptized and confirmed, but they do not know why.
Yet here He is, the Word of God incarnate, announcing that all this is about to change:
“A time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.”
Who else could authorize a change to the way God’s people are commanded to worship God but God Himself?
And now God says He wants all people to worship Him in Spirit and in truth.
In Spirit. That means in the very Spirit of Christ Himself. The Spirit He gives to each and every one of us who believe in Him.
In truth. Because the Spirit is of God.
That may not seem like much when you first hear it, but it is the key to our freedom.
Because God can only be worshipped in His own Spirit, no church, no government can ever get between God and His people.
Yes, religion and the government can get you to comply and conform, but that kind of externalism is never true worship.
Yes, church and state can label you and affirm your identity, allowing you to check off as many boxes as you like, and give you a certificate to frame that says you’re a member, but that’s only a kind of show-and-tell, and falls short of truly belonging.
If you need your religion to validate who you are then you are not worshipping God in the Spirit, but in the flesh.
God thinks very little of the human categories with which we choose to self-identify. In fact, He explicitly says not to make idols out of them and worship them.
Putting an end to human self-worship is what Jesus came to do. That’s what He means when He says:
“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”
God seeks followers to worship Him in Spirit and truth, not from force of habit or a forceful personality.
Self-worship can seem liberating at first.
You may say, “Finally, I am accepted for who I am.”
But will that wear well over time?
I’ve changed quite a bit. It would be awful to discover than I am still bound today by the terms and conditions I agreed to way back when.
Perhaps that’s how the Samaritan woman found herself, bound by covenants of flesh.
What set of choices led her to the well that day, every day?
How did she end up in that one-horse village?
And so, she said to Him:
“Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Her self-worship had become tiresome. She was ready to let it go.
Now, you may say, “Fine, I’ll just update my religion to suit my new self.”
But that will only repeat the error. You’ll soon find yourself boxed in again. The Samaritan woman seems to have tried it at least five times, and the sixth isn’t worth the effort.
The Psalmist writes:
“Do not remember the sins of my youth and my rebellious ways; according to your love remember me, for you, LORD, are good.”3
In Jesus, the Samaritan woman met a man who confronted her with her past and then set her free from it.
The Father seeks such as these. He seeks you and me.
If only you knew Who it is Who seeks you, you would ask to be set free too.
You would ask for living water, eternal life, and you would have it. Amen.
Preached on March 12, 2023 at St. Peter’s Lithgow, Millbrook, New York.
Lent 3, Year A – Notes
Exodus 17:1-7; Romans 5:1-11; John 4:5-42
See: Gen. 37:12-36, Joseph is sold into slavery.