Thoughts going in, Sunday March 23

John 4:5 So Jesus came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. 6 Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon. 7 When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, "Will you give me a drink?" 8 (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, "You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?" (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans. ) 10 Jesus answered her, "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." 11 "Sir," the woman said, "you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?" 13 Jesus answered, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life." 15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water so that I won't get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water." 16 He told her, "Go, call your husband and come back." 17 "I have no husband," she replied. Jesus said to her, "You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true." 19 "Sir," the woman said, "I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem." 21 "Woman," Jesus replied, "believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, "What do you want?" or "Why are you talking with her?" 28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 "Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?"
39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman's testimony, "He told me everything I ever did." 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers. 42 They said to the woman, "We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world."

As usual in John’s Gospel, there’s a **LOT going on in this passage. The reading is quite long, even after I omitted a few ‘sideroad’ sections. Of course it appears on the Lenten cycle of readings due to its obvious baptismal overtones—the mention of “living water.”
By the way, this is a good time for a ‘sideroad’ comment of my own. I’ll never forget a particular seminary prof from back in the day who used to make the point that a sacramental reading/understand of the scriptures was a matter of having ‘eyes to see’.....or even more bluntly...a *willingness to see. This prof never named the colleague, but he routinely quoted another Lutheran professor who ostensibly said, “after all, the bible really doesn’t have that much to say about sacraments.” It’s a true statement—so long as one is stubbornly looking for the actual words “baptism” or “holy communion.” But such a statement, and such an intentionally narrow perspective is foreign to the Lutheran tradition as a whole, foreign to the historic creedal faith we all claim to hold, and certainly foreign to the bible itself. The ‘living water’ passage of John 4 is a perfect example. NOWHERE is the word baptism mentioned—and yet, what else could possibly be implied? Attaching an entirely non-sacramental (or worse, anti-sacramental) understanding to this story completely removes Jesus’ offer from the physical and entirely into the metaphorical. With no hook to baptism, “living water” becomes a **metaphor of the gracious favor & relationship of belonging that Jesus offered this woman. But why settle for just a metaphor when the dots are so easily connected to the tangible reality that what Jesus offers is actually **conferred in baptism? Hence, have NO DOUBT that baptismal themes run rampant through this passage even though the word itself is never mentioned.
The theme for the day suggested for this Sunday is “Called to drink AND share living water.” And there are so many potential angles that suggest themselves when it comes to exploring this theme in a group. For instance, we could and should take some time to examine what “Living Water” looks like in the person of Jesus. In so doing, it would strike us (and challenge us) to note that Living Water in the person of Jesus is immensely BOUNDARY DESTROYING.
If you live in a floodplain, you’ve probably heard the phrase “water takes the path of least resistance,” and that’s certainly true. Living Water, in the person of Christ, however, overcomes our prejudicial resistances. The woman in this story is a 3-time loser. First, she is a woman (duh)...but the point is that no pious Jew would be seen talking to a woman in public. Such behavior constituted the seeds of scandal. Second, Samaritans and Jews had a centuries-old hatred for each other; they did not mingle. From the Jewish perspective, a Samaritan was lower than a common Gentile. Finally, the nuances of the story seem to indicate that within her own community, this woman was something of an outcast. Both Wright and Barclay point out that it’s highly curious that she would be (a) using this well....a half mile outside the village of Sychar, as it is, when surely there would’ve been a village well; and (b) that she would be getting water at this hour of the day, rather than the more common/cooler hours of morning or evening. Both commentators surmise that the woman was such an outcast in her own community (the five+ husbands thing) that the other village women drove her away, and that she took steps altering a normal routine so as to avoid contact with them. In other words, Jesus dares to converse, dares to enter relationship with an ostracized person of a marginalized group. As Barclay says, this is what “For God so loved the world” looks like at ground level.
Certainly a key point we can take from this text is that WHEN we’ve been changed by our encounter with The Living Water, we too will have eyes to see the worth & dignity of the ‘outcasts’ we come into contact with. Put another way, no one could *ever accuse Jesus of adopting a “holier than thou” attitude—even though, ironically, he **is holier than thou! Again & again, the story of Jesus reflects for us the truth that real holiness embraces the unwanted.