So, let’s try something different this morning.
I want to you to close your eyes and picture yourself. Picture yourself as you see yourself – what you do well, what you love doing, what your greatest joys are, your favourite pastimes. What do you look like?
Hold that image for a minute. Do you like what you see? Of course you should – that’s what self-esteem is all about, after all. We can construct an idealized image of ourselves and work to fit in it.
But now imagine this: you walk outside of church today, and see a man leaning up against your car. You begin to speak with him, and eventually realize that somehow he knows everything you’ve ever done. With a shock, you realize that it’s Jesus. And he’s talking about your salvation. And he knows.
Everything. Even those things that you try to keep hidden from yourself.
You can open your eyes. How do you feel now?
Did that imaginary encounter make you feel a little uncomfortable? Knowing that Jesus would know those silly little secrets you keep hidden from everyone?
It’s often hard to think of it, but that’s exactly what Jesus does with the woman at the well.
A few months ago I was out for supper with a very good friend of mine who is also a pastor. We were chatting with our waitress, and through our conversation we found that she worked two jobs, and had recently moved. My friend and I began to speculate about her situation. I guessed that she was paying off student loans and had left a relationship. He disagreed, thinking that she had bought a house and moved into it.
To settle our little contest, the next time the young lady came around my friend simply said to her, “so, do you like owning your own home?” And the look on her face was simply priceless. She almost dropped her tray, completely flabbergasted and weirded out that my friend knew she had bought a home. She spent the rest of the evening trying to figure out how my friend knew, even when he explained to her how he had reached his conclusion.
Now, I don’t think that she went away telling everyone he was magic. Actually, I think she found the experience totally creepy. And that’s how it is – when somebody knows something about us that we think we keep hidden, and we think is personal, we most often respond by wanting to hide ourselves from that person and from the knowledge they have about us. We try to bury our feelings – our shame? – rather than live with the knowledge that person has about us. Because we know that they may use it to cause us hurt.
As we’re gearing up for another federal election, now is the season that attack ads and scandals are unleashed upon us. Can you imagine being one of those leaders – hoping, praying that something from your past won’t become fodder for the nightly news? It’s unbelievable. Knowledge is power in our society, and the wrong kind of knowledge about the right person is an incredibly powerful tool.
In today’s gospel lesson we met the Samaritan woman at the well. It’s worth mentioning that she’s there at noon – the time when she should be gathering water is in the early morning, when all the other women are out. She speaks with Jesus. As a Samaritan, she shouldn’t even be seen near a Jew, let alone a male. This isn’t looking good for anyone.
But they have a conversation about water. It’s actually kind of cute – a glimpse into the humour and repartee that Jesus could have with people. “Give me a drink…why do you ask me?...if you had asked me, I would have given you living water…you have no bucket, where do you get it?...everyone who drinks this water will never be thirsty, it will become a spring in them, gushing up to eternal life…sir, give me this water so that I don’t have to come here anymore.
Then Jesus tosses in a comment that derails the entire conversation: “god and call your husband, and come back?” Why does Jesus say that? Can you imagine how that woman felt? Her downcast look, the sudden flushing of her face with shame and embarrassment? Any of you here who have experienced first-hand a divorce, either as a spouse or a child, knows the pain that questions like that automatically cause.
And she replies – “I have no husband…” and Jesus goes on, and digs even deeper. She’s right, he tells her, she has had five husbands, all dead or divorced, and the one she is with is not her husband. What that likely means is that her last husband died, and she became the property of his brother or half-brother; such a union had no religious rite under the law, and such people were usually second-class citizens.
Thus, we find her here. At the well of her shame, outcast from her community, having known the shame and stigma of abandonment, of loneliness. And this man, this man in whom for a moment she was beginning to have a microscopic glimmer of hope, this man just dashed it again.
And she acknowledges that he is a prophet, but she knows that prophets only denounce women like her. She’s a example, and not a good one. She’s a “scarlet woman” – it doesn’t matter what her former husbands may have done; since she’s a woman the fault is hers.
But the prophet, the Messiah, the Christ, keeps speaking with her. He doesn’t denounce her; he doesn’t make her an object lesson. Knowing her deep secrets and desires he takes the knowledge of them and instead of using them to hurt her, he returns to her her dignity. The woman who came to the well to draw water instead comes to the font of living water, and finds the wellspring inside of her.
We often toss off a cliché – Jesus knows your heart, and we usually mean it in a pretty passive-aggressive way. If you don’t agree with what I’m saying, Jesus knows you’re wrong. Or, as an excuse – he might be a pretty nasty piece of work, but he’s got a good heart. But those don’t really matter. Jesus is going to show you all those deep wounds in your soul, wounds that are as deep as that well where the woman sat.
And when our wounds are that deep, we come to them to draw our own water, seeking endurance, character, and hope through our suffering. But that gets old, quickly. And as endurance fails, hope fails faster. As our own supplies of spiritual water that give us strength fail, we become angry, turned in on ourselves, and ready to vent our anger at anyone, and especially at those who we think might dare to lead us. When we come to depend on ourselves instead of Christ for our spiritual food, we come up empty, but find that we can’t blame ourselves and instead find fault with the institution, its leaders, and its Saviour.
But when we are thirsty, and when Christ comes to us and offers us that living water, we can drink deeply and often, and we find that it truly does form a spring inside of us, a spring from which the Holy Spirit flows in, around, and through us.
God, who can bring water from a rock, can even bring from our own wounded and fragmented hearts abundant life; life that is restored to relationships we thought long dead, to feelings we thought long dormant, and to a Saviour we thought was laid in a tomb.
As in those days of the Israelites God struck the rock and water poured out of it, on that darkest day when our Saviour hung on the dead wood of the cross, God struck that tree and from it came the spring of eternal life.
From the dark stain of death and suffering came endless and eternal life, the gift of God through Jesus Christ, who reconciled us with God so that we may sit with him at that eternal well, dwell with him in glory, and join in the work of the harvest.
Let the people of God say amen.
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