Room and Board
Exodus 17:1-7; John 4:5-42

March 3, 2002

“I don’t want realism...I want magic!” is the cry of a character in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire. Realism is one of our biggest problems in the 21st century. We think we know what is real a little too much for our good.

The public order to boil water before drinking is no longer a catastrophic disaster. Yet we know well that death can come from the liquid which makes up the vast majority of our bodies. Walkerton, the Battlefords, and a handful of other small communities which have had to boil their water has made us long for the living water promised by Jesus. Or have we misunderstood Jesus like all the others?

The wandering Israelites are dying for water and would prefer slavery and oppression. God allows Moses to produce water out of a rock, an impossibility. “Is the Lord among us or not?” they clamour to know. The presence of God does seem impossible in some situations, perhaps still ours.

The evangelist John is very interested in water as the sign of the presence of God. Asking for a drink of water at high noon is direct as one gets.

Jesus did not want to travel in Samaria. He had no choice, because he wanted to get home to Galilee and Samaria was in the way. Jesus and company were on retreat, for the news of their success in Judea was breeding jealousy and unwanted suspicion. It was time to cool it for a while, and it brought them to the village of Sychar.

Perhaps, though, Jesus was taking the scenic route. Sychar was the site of Jacob’s well on the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. It was outside of the town; just maybe it had one of those markers, “Point of Interest,” directing the way. High noon and on the long road home, it was hot and they all needed refreshment. Jesus sat by the well with no bucket or ladle, while his disciples went scrounging to buy food in town. Room and board is what they sought.

There’s a lot hidden in the narrative we should know about. It’s more than a road trip. Samaritans and Jews despised one another. Both claimed to be descendants of the Old Testament patriarchs and especially Moses. The Jews looked upon the Samaritan version of things as counterfeit, not unlike some Christian denominations view the theology and practices of other denominations. The Samaritans, being the smaller group, felt oppressed, yet quietly righteous in their own faith. The Jews just would not talk to them. That is the punch line of the parable of the Good Samaritan.

Jesus’ movement was doing something to his followers. The last thing they would have allowed themselves to do would be to stop in an unclean Samaritan town and actually buy and eat their food. Off they go without a comment. The times they are achanging.

A woman comes along ready to draw water from the deep well and just like the Israelites ask Moses Jesus asks her for something to drink. As far as we are told, Jesus never gets any liquid. He gets a lecture in social impropriety - Jews don’t talk with Samaritans and rabbis don’t talk with women. Jesus knows that and later when she brings up the issue of the authenticity of the Samaritan faith, Jesus does not answer graciously, affirming the superiority of the primacy of Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, Jesus offers her a way out of this cycle of hatred and conflict - living water which quenches all thirst on the way to eternal life is his offer. But he never specifies exactly what he means by this living water.

The nameless woman’s conversation parallels Jesus’ talk with Nicodemus. Nicodemus sneaked in to see Jesus in the middle of the night, while this encounter by the well is in broad public daylight. The world changes where everyone can witness it.

She tries hard, but like Nicodemus cannot grasp completely what Jesus is saying. She is stuck in reality, water is H2O, and if she can get Jesus’ brand, she won’t have to fetch water at the well again.

Jesus responds in an odd way. Go, call your husband. Then it’s all out in the open: she has no legal husband right at the moment, though five are in her past. How could Jesus know all this from just looking at her if he were not a prophet? Did she look that guilty? Was she a bad person?

The conversation heats up as she turns to the sectarian battle between Samaritan and Jews. No light at first from Jesus as he insists only the Jews know what they are worshipping. Yet he calls for an open, above and beyond sectarian worship, prefigured by all of his actions. Here is a person whose actions speak louder than his words: what counts are who he drinks with, who he talks to, where his friends are willing to go for him.

Nicodemus was a learned Pharisee, but he could say nothing to Jesus’ ideas. This nameless Samaritan woman of some ill repute can see a lot more. She professes a faith in the coming of a Messiah who is the source of truth and wisdom rather than power and victory. Unlike in the other Gospels in which Jesus dodges the issue, unequivocally he says back to her, “I am he.”

Just then the disciples came back and when they saw the two together, they had old thoughts of impropriety. Why is he talking to that woman? They didn’t say it, but you wonder how these internal thoughts ended up in the Gospel. The times they are achanging.

Leaving behind her water jar, for she will not need it again, she runs back into town and tells everyone she can about this man. Like Nathaniel a little while before, she believes because Jesus could tell everything about her. “He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”

The disciples sound just like the Samaritan woman when they ask Jesus about the food he hasn’t eaten. “I have food you don’t know about,” and they too are trapped in literal interpretation, wondering who supplied Jesus with a meal.

The woman has convinced her fellow villagers and they come to see and hear Jesus. They believe and persuade Jesus to stay for a couple more days. Jesus’ influence grows even more.

In the end, the villagers of Sychar tell the woman that her testimony about Jesus is not the only one now, we have heard him ourselves - a little petulance is discernible here. They knew her as the many-husbanded woman and did not want her to gain any moral edge over them. Yet she is the reason they first believed. That normally doesn’t happen. One learns the important things of life from a wise moral person. But they learned from her that here is truly the Saviour of the world.

A person who is greater than we can comprehend - and control - is the man Jesus. We learn little by little about him, experience his love and freedom, but we can never figure him all out. He is the one who comprehends all that we are.

Jesus is the saviour whose new order breaks down all social and political barriers we have erected around the way we relate to one another and our religion. Today there are Arabs who are Christians, Iraqis who have been Christians longer than any European, Russians, Chinese - any people who are supposed to be our enemy all have learned to worship in spirit and in truth, to drink from the living water. When we drink from the same well, we know one another as brothers and sisters, in spirit and in truth.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan