Sermon — March 12, 2023
The Rev. Greg Johnston
Lectionary Readings
This year I’m serving as a chaplain to the Episcopal Service Corps program in Boston. Every two weeks, I drive down to St Mark’s in Dorchester and spend the morning with a community of six young adults who live in a house there together, who’ve given a year of their lives to work in churches and non-profit organizations around greater Boston. And they’re wonderful people, and they’re very hospitable people, but they’re not always all on time for our 9:00 am meetings in their living room, and I’m usually there a little early, so I often arrive when people are still shuffling around, and making breakfast, and so on, and they kind of trickle in. And so it’s very common for me to have the experience I had on Friday—three separate times over the course of ten minutes or so, one of the six walked into the room, and said, “Hi, Greg! Do you want anything? Some tea? Coffee? Water?” And I said, each time, “No, no thanks, I’m all set.”
These offers of hospitality are common for us. You probably have the same interaction pretty often. And they’re easy offers to make or accept. If I said, “Yeah, actually, I’d love a glass of water,” someone would go to the sink and fill one up. But imagine how different it would be if you went to visit someone, and they said, “Can I get you a glass of water?” And you said, “Yes.” And they said, “Great. Let’s go down to the well. It’s only a couple blocks away.”
This has been the way life works for most people, for most of history. Maybe you wouldn’t literally have to walk down to the well together to get a drink, but to offer someone a drink isn’t a matter of turning a faucet. It’s to offer something you hauled out of the earth and carried home. This is the world in which Jesus finds himself today. This Gospel is a strange story. It’s a long story. In fact, it’s the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in any of the gospels. But it’s not just the length that’s strange, and it’s not just this unfamiliar scene of a woman drawing water at a well. What makes it surprising to me is the sheer number of things about which Jesus seems simply not to care.
Some of them are things we also aspire not to care about, and so we applaud Jesus for them. Jesus doesn’t care, for example, who you are, your ethnicity or nationality or ancestry. “‘How is it that you, a Jew,’” the woman asks, “‘ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)” (John 4:9) Jesus doesn’t really answer the question. He deflects. But even simply ignoring the question is remarkable. Samaritans and Jews really were unhappy neighbors. There really was ethnic tension. But Jesus doesn’t care. Jesus doesn’t discriminate on the basis of nationality or race; he reaches out across those divides, and we can and we should applaud him for it.
It may be more surprising that Jesus doesn’t care what your religion is, or where you worship. This is, after all, the primary thing that distinguishes Samaritans from Jews, and I say in this in the present tense because a small community of Samaritans does still exist: Samaritans and Jews live in neighboring regions, worship the same God, read the same Torah, but while Jews believe that the Temple in which God needed to be worshiped was on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, Samaritans believe this was incorrect and that the Temple God had chosen was actually the one on Mount Gerizim, just to the north. So the Samaritan woman tries to draw him out: “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain”—until the armies of the Jewish high priest destroyed it, a century or two before—“but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” (John 4:20) Now, Jesus is a good Jew. He acknowledges that his people, not hers, are right. But then he says that it’s irrelevant: “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.” (4:21, 23) It’s not where you worship that matters, Jesus says. (And the Vestries and the welcoming committees of a thousand parishes recoil in horror.) It’s in what Spirit you worship.
But what may be the most surprising is that Jesus doesn’t care what you have done. He says to the woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” And she answers him, “I have no husband.” “You’re right,” Jesus says, “for you’ve had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband at all!” (4:17-18) But Jesus simply doesn’t care. He doesn’t condemn her serial monogamy, he doesn’t wag his finger at her extramarital cohabitation. Even though this is Lent, there’s no call to repentance or offer of forgiveness. Jesus offers no moral judgment at all, simply an observation, and the only role this seems to play in the story is that it convinces the woman that Jesus is a prophet, and sends her back to the city to tell other people what he’s said. This is not like the stories of the repentant tax collectors in the Gospels who promise to amend their ways. it’s simply a surprising and most-likely not-so-public fact, which Jesus seems miraculously to know. But Jesus doesn’t respond in a moralizing tone. What’s surprising is not just that Jesus doesn’t care about her nationality or her religiosity; he doesn’t even seem to care about her personal morality.
He’s there for something else. Not to avoid her because she’s a Samaritan, not to warn her that she’d better start worshiping at the right Temple, not to condemn her for having a man who is not her husband hanging around the house. No, he’s there to ask for a drink from the well, and to offer her something in return: a “gift of God,” something better than any water she could draw, “living water,” a “spring of water gushing up to eternal life,” so refreshing that those who drink from it “will never be thirty.” (4:10, 14) That’s the only reason Jesus is there: to offer something that can quench her thirst.
And the woman responds in the only way you could imagine, if you had to draw your own water out of the well and carry it back home with you: “Sir, give me this water.” (4:15) She goes back to the city, and tells her neighbors and her friends, and many of them believe her, and they go out to Jesus too, and ask him to come for a visit; and he stays with them for two days. (4:39-40) And when they encounter Jesus face to face, they say 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.” (John 4:42)
It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from. It doesn’t matter where you worship, or what you call yourself. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done; it doesn’t even matter that much what you do. And it certainly doesn’t matter what anyone else has told you about God. It matters whether your thirst has been quenched, whether you yourself drunk from the living water that gushes up to eternal life; whether you have invited Jesus to come, and stay with you for a while.
And this can be good news, or bad news, or sometimes both.
It can be especially good news if you sometimes feel like the Samaritan woman. “I don’t have right background.” “I didn’t grow up in the church.” “I’m fumbling with the prayer book.” “I don’t like these hymns.” “I’m not sure I believe.” “I’m not sure I’m really that good.” If you ever feel this way, then I’m happy to say that Jesus doesn’t care. Not about you—God cares about you very much—but God doesn’t care about any of that. It doesn’t bother him a bit. And that is pure good news.
But for some of us on the other end of it, it can be tempting to lean on the very things that Jesus doesn’t seem to be so worried about. “I’ve been an Episcopalian all my life,” or “my family have lived here for eighty years.” “I go to church twice a month,” or maybe twice a year. I’m a good, upstanding, respectable person. I’ve put in hard work. I’ve given back to the world. And I’ve held onto the faith my family taught me, and I’ve passed it on. I’m a priest, for heaven’s sake! (I’m on the Vestry! I’m in the choir!) Isn’t that enough?
And all of this is good. Don’t get me wrong.
But there’s something more at stake—or maybe something less, or simply something else.
We come before Jesus without any of the labels and stories that define us, as thirsty people in a dry place. We come before Jesus, as the Psalmist says, “athirst for the living God,” (Psalm 42:2) and he offers us a drink. We come with souls that are heavy-laden, bearing great burdens, and he offers us rest. We come before him, feelings like there’s also more work to be done, and he sends us out to “reap that for which we did not labor.” (John 4:38) When we come before God we don’t do it as cradle Episcopalians or half-traumatized Catholics, as skilled musicians or as silent hymn-mumblers, as perfect people or notorious sinners. We come as people who are too worn down to imagine drawing that bucket full of water up from the well and carrying it all the way home, and he gives us something to drink.
So “Come, let us sing to the Lord; *
let us shout for joy to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving *
and raise a loud shout to him with psalms…
For he is our God,
and we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand.” (Psalm 95:1-2)