How often have we found ourselves in situations where we are meeting with a person who is a stranger to us, a person who seems to have an unusual, an uncanny ability to draw us out of ourselves so that we are able to reveal intimate details about ourselves that we have not even shared openly with our best friends? How often have we approached someone, a total stranger, and offered to them the gift of love through an act of kindness?
We all know the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.
Jesus is sitting at the well. The woman comes to draw water. Jesus asks her for a drink. She retorts with a question: Why is he, a Jew asking her, a Samaritan woman for a drink? Jesus comes back with the response that if she knew who he was, she would have asked him for the living water which he offered.
The woman is bewildered by the fact that this Jew who offered her living water had no means of getting water out of the well and asks how he intends to draw this living water?
Then comes Jesus’ reply in a loving and caring way: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up into eternal life.”
The woman responds again, with a request that Jesus provide her with this living water that she might not have to return again to the well to draw water. Her thoughts are only of satisfying her physical thirst.
Now Jesus responds by telling the woman to go and bring her husband back to the well, and she quickly responds that she does not have a husband. And this is the first step to finding and receiving the living water.
This is a time of revelation. Jesus reveals his awareness that this woman has been married 5 times, and that the man with who she is now living is not her husband.
The Samaritan woman is obviously taken back by this prophetic insight. So she tries desperately to change the subject. She begins speaking about where the Samaritans worship and where the Jews worship.
But Jesus is not to be detoured. The time is coming he says, when the true worshiper will worship the Father in Spirit.
Sir, she says, I know that one day Messiah, the one who is called Christ, will come and he will tell us all things.
at this moment Jesus reveals a second revelation. “I who speak to you am he.”
For the first time the great messianic secret has been revealed. This is one of the most dramatic moments in Biblical history. Jesus lets his true identity be known. Look at what happens here. Does he reveal his identity to the Sanhedrin or the Jerusalem Bar? No! Does he make this pronouncement at the Temple to the priest? No!
This is the moment that history has been waiting for — the hopes and fears of all the years — and Jesus ushers in this glad news through this gentile, this woman, this outcast among a people of outcasts.
At this point the conversation is cut short by the return of the disciples. They are stunned to find Jesus talking with this Samaritan woman, but we are told that they said not a thing. It’s the only time in scripture that Peter didn’t have a comment to make. He had an opinion on everything but even he is stunned. But Jesus knows of their disapproval. How? The face tells all doesn’t it? Their lips may have been silent but their faces screamed out disapproval.
But not even the twelve disciples can stop the woman now. She has found what she came to the well to receive. She has found her water. Living water. She sees the truth in Jesus’ words. She sees him as Messiah. This is the second step in finding living water for a thirsty soul, recognizing and accepting Jesus' as the Messiah. Watch what the woman does. She abruptly leaves her water jar and runs back to her village to tell the people what she had experienced. You can’t evangelize and tell the story until you first believe the story. You can’t be convincing unless you are convinced. She stirs up the entire town and Jesus sees this throng of people coming and he says to the disciples: “You say that there are four months left unto harvest. I say to you lift up your eyes and see that the fields are white unto harvest.” Jesus is saying to these twelve not TO draw boundaries around the kingdom of God. Don’t limit its scope. No people, no race, no gender, no sinner is exempt from God’s grace. The time is now and the people are all around.
And that’s the third step in finding living water for a thirsty soul. When we have filled our cups the living water spills out all around us. We bring the living water with us wherever we go. The grace we have received changes us, makes us reach out, empowers people to move beyond their normal habits.
The villagers ask Jesus if he will remain with them. Many villages in Galilee ask Jesus if he would leave, this one asks him to stay. And he did remain for several days, we are told. At the conclusion of this time the townspeople say to the woman: “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard him ourselves and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the World. It is no longer second hand; it is a firsthand witness. It is the strongest witness in the world. No one can argue against it. It is a witness that says, yes, I know that it is true because I have experienced it in my own life.
There is something that has not changed or vanished with the ages. That is the living water that is offered to you and to me this morning. Drink from it and you shall never thirst.
Amen.