Encounter with the Sinner

Jesus always meets us at our point of greatest need.

Last week, we saw that Jesus met a group of seekers – men who were searching for spiritual truth, for meaningful answers to life’s biggest questions. And he met those men at their point of need – he invited them to enter into relationship with him. He said “You’re seeking for truth? Then come and see – you’ll discover that I am the truth, I am the way, I am the life that you’ve been looking for.”

This week, Jesus is going to meet a woman who, in those days, would have been labeled a “sinner”. That was the term that the religious folks hung on a certain class of people whose behavior was so outlandish, so morally reprehensible, so obviously sinful that the religious people wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with them. They were “sinners”.

This woman was looking for love and acceptance. But she was looking in all the wrong places. Her search had led her in and out of a series of failed relationships with men. She had been married five times, and was currently living with a man who was not her husband. She had a reputation. She was notorious. She was the star of the gossip pages in her little hometown newspaper. She was a sinner.

And Jesus met her at her point of greatest need. The story is found in John 4.

The Pharisees heard that Jesus was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John, although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. When the Lord learned of this, he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. Now he had to go through Samaria.

You can’t really appreciate this story unless you know a little historical background. So let’s do that right now.

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee

(The Destruction of Sennacherib by Lord Byron)

700 years before Christ, a nation called Assyria invaded Israel, and when the carnage was over, the northern ten tribes simply ceased to exist as a nation. The Assyrians were unskilled in the intricacies of colonial administration, so they practiced the politics of deportation. They moved and resettled their conquered victims, and brought other peoples into the occuppied lands in their place on the theory that if you kept your subjects off balance and struggling merely to survive, they could not rebel.

So it was recorded in the book of Second Kings, chapter 17 that…

…the king of Assyria captured Samaria and deported the Israelites to Assyria. He settled them in Halah, in Gozan on the Habor River and in the towns of the Medes. The king of Assyria brought people from Babylon, Cuthah, Avva, Hamath and Sepharvaim and settled them in the towns of Samaria to replace the Israelites. They took over Samaria and lived in its towns.

Actually, King Sargon left records which tell us that he deported 27,000 Israelites - mainly the upper class, the intelligentsia. The peasants he left behind, and over the years they began to intermarry with the foreigners who had moved in. Their descendants became known as the Samaritans; a people of mixed ethnicity. They worshiped the God of Israel, but did not strictly keep to the teachings of the Old Testament.

The pure Jewish people who were left in the nation Judah looked down their noses on their unfortunate cousins to the north. And when Judah’s turn came to go into exile a century and a half later, relations soured even further. For when the Jews returned to Jerusalem from Babylon following their seventy years of captivity, they wanted to rebuild their Temple. The Samaritans made a generous offer to help, but the Jews abruptly rejected it. So the Samaritans, in a huff, decided to build their own temple on Mt. Gerizim, where they practiced a irregular form of OT worship. And by the time the Jews set out to rebuild Jerusalem’s walls under Nehemiah, the Samaritans tried every possible way to derail the project.

So it went between the two peoples for the next three hundred years until the year 128 BC. The nation Judah had by that time regained a measure of independence and under John Hyrcanus, a member of the Maccabean family. Hyrcanus conquered the Samaritans and destroyed their temple on Mt. Gerizim. Naturally, this served to drive the wedge between Samaritan and Jew even deeper so that by the time of Jesus, there was a simmering hatred between the two peoples, similar to that which exists between Jews and Palestinians today.

Further complicating matters was that some Jews had settled in the region of Galilee, so that the territory of Samaria lay between the region of Judea to the south, where the city of Jerusalem was, and the region of Galilee to the north.

This unhappy geographical sandwich guaranteed that there would be constant friction between the two groups. Jews who had to travel between Jerusalem and Galilee fell into the habit of taking a long and extended detour on the eastern side of the Jordan River, simply to avoid having to travel through Samaria. They felt that any contact whatsoever with Samaritans would defile them. In fact, Rabbi Eliezer wrote in the Talmud “He that eats the bread of the Samaritans is like to one that eats the flesh of swine.”

The Samaritans, for their part, refused to offer hospitality to a Jew who dared to travel through their territory. That was an extremely radical policy, since the virtue hospitality has always been a high priority in Middle Eastern culture. We see just a little of this interracial tension in…

Luke 9:52-54 And he sent messengers on ahead, who went into a Samaritan village to get things ready for him; but the people there did not welcome him, because he was heading for Jerusalem. When the disciples James and John saw this, they asked, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?”

And when in the heat of an argument, the enemies of Jesus wanted to pin the worst possible label on him, they said…

John 8:48 …”Aren’t we right in saying that you are a Samaritan and demon-possessed?”

So that was how things were between the Jews and the Samaritans in the time of Jesus.

(Incidentally, there are still Samaritans living today. They have a small community of several hundred people, very poor and backward, living in Nablus and Joffa in Israel. They cling to their traditions, they have several ancient scrolls of the Samaritan Pentateuch - the only part of the OT they accept, and they intermarry which over the years has led to a high incidence of birth defects and mental incapacity.)

So it is surprising, when we come to John 4, to read that Jesus deliberately chose to go through Samaria on his way to Galilee. Jesus never avoided anybody, or any group of people, on the basis of their ethnic background. Nor does he expect us to. When he gave his final commandment to the church in Acts 1:8, he said “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth.”

Let’s pick up the story again in v. 5…

So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about the sixth hour. When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

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.)

The time is around noon (that’s the sixth hour), and Jesus and his disciples have probably been walking since dawn. Samaria is hilly country. Jacob’s well is located down in a valley, and the town of Sychar is up on a hillside, about 30 minutes away by foot.

v. 6 tells us that Jesus is tired from the journey, so he sits down by the well. What an amazing statement about the humanity of Jesus. Here is the Creator who made the hills of Samaria, and now he is tired from walking up and down them. Here is the One who made the aquifer, and the rivers and the rain, and he needs a drink from Jacob’s well.

What a picture of the Incarnation. God became a man, and suffered as a man.

The disciples go up the road into town to buy food. And along comes this woman to fill her jar with water. The drawing of water was a woman’s work, and the women of the Middle East usually drew their water at sundown, in the coolness of evening. They didn’t want to come down that hill from the town of Sychar and then have to lug the water back up in the heat of the day.

So there is only this one woman there to draw water. Someone has suggested that it was because of the kind of woman she was, and because of her reputation, that she chose to go to the well when the other women weren’t there.

Jesus asks her a question – a question that surprises her on several counts. He asks her for a drink. In asking her for a drink, Jesus jumps across three major cultural barriers…

1. Jews don’t talk to Samaritans

2. Men don’t talk to women

3. Religious people don’t share utensils with “sinners”

What does it tell us about Jesus that he would so casually disregard these cultural and religious conventions? It tells us…

1. He didn’t care about tradition

2. He didn’t see the world as divided up into “classes” of people

   1. those who were acceptable; those who weren’t

   2. those who were “in”; those who were “out”

3. He cares about each individual human being

   1. regardless of race, gender, religious persuasion, status in the community

Jesus initiated this conversation with this woman because she was a human being created in the image of God. And this is how we need to remember to see every person who crosses our path.

The woman is shocked that he even speaks to her. “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” What are you thinking?

John 4:10 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.”

And I think he says this with a smile on his face. He says “Woman, if you only knew. If you only knew how much God loves you. If you only knew what God has for you. If you only knew who you are talking to. If you only knew.”

And the point is, she doesn’t know. Not yet. And we, today, are surrounded by people who don’t know. Do we have that caring attitude that says “If you only knew?” Are we willing to do whatever it takes to help them to know?

The woman is skeptical. Here is a man who is claiming to have special water when he doesn’t even have a jug!

v. 11-12 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 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?”

Are you trying to tell me that there is a source of life that is greater than this well that we have in front of us here and now? Our father Jacob dug this well. He drank from it. His sons drank from it. We drink from it today. This is life. This is what I have to do. This is all there is.

Jesus answers (v. 13)…

“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 to eternal life.”

“Woman, you come down to this well every day to get what you need to survive another day, only to have to do it all over again. You come down here under the fierce sun at noon, because you know there won’t be anybody else here. Nobody else to cast snide glances at you, to whisper about you, to remind you of what a mess you’ve made of your life. Woman, that’s not living, that’s merely existing.”

She said to him (v. 15), “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

And maybe there’s a catch in her voice when she says it. There’s a deep longing and hunger in her life. Jesus has met her at her point of greatest need. She doesn’t like her life, the way she’s been living – she detests it. But she doesn’t know any other way to try to get her needs met.

Now you would think at this point that Jesus would simply explain to her the plan of salvation – she’s obviously ready, isn’t she? But no, he doesn’t do that. Out of a clear blue sky, Jesus drops a bombshell (v. 16)…

“Go, call your husband and come back.”

In the course of this brief encounter, the woman has started to open the door of her life just a crack. But now, you can almost hear the door of her life slamming shut, and the locks and bolts being turned. This guy has wandered into forbidden territory…

“I have no husband,” she replies coldly in v. 17

Once again, Jesus is not put off…

He said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 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.”

Notice that Jesus does not condemn her. In fact, he commends her for her honesty, in what little she does reveal about herself. She admits that she has no husband and that is true, as far as it goes. But then Jesus goes on to reveal that he knows all about her. He knows that she has had five husbands, and that the man she is now living with is not her husband.

He knows all about that, yet he still does not condemn her. That is because Jesus is always more interested in where we are going, and what we’re becoming, than where we have been.

The religious community was only interested in what that woman had done. They had labeled her, and they had ostracized her. And there was no way, in their eyes, that she could ever be anything more than what she had been.

That is not the message Jesus gave us. The message he gave us is that “No matter what you have ever done, I love you. and I want to give you life. Real life. Nothing you have ever done can put you beyond my reach.”

I believe that Jesus zeroes in on the specifics of this woman’s situation because he wants her to know that he loves her in spite of what she’s done.

But for the woman, having a total stranger reveal the deepest secrets of her life, is quite overwhelming. She is under conviction. She is feeling exposed. And so, like many of us in a similar situation, she tries to take refuge in theology. “This is getting too personal – let’s talk about something theoretical.”

“Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

Let’s have a theological discussion! I remember sharing the gospel with a man in his living room one day. As the conversation zeroed in on his need to receive Jesus Christ as his Savior, I asked him if he would like to do that right then. He replied that he had one more question. His question… “Where did Cain get his wife?”

The Gospel shines a searchlight on our sin. And a person who is under the Holy Spirit’s conviction of sin will do just about anything to get off the hook. They will offer the most trivial excuses like “the church is full of hypocrites”, or they’ll try to start theological arguments like “what is God going to do with people who have never heard of Jesus?”, or they’ll ask the most annoying questions like “why are there so many different denominations?”

You see, sin is like a cornered animal. It doesn’t like to be exposed by the light of the Gospel and it will do anything to avoid the glare. That is why this woman said what she did about the Jewish-Samaritan controversy. Discussing religion is a safe way to avoid the Gospel.

Jesus, in a nice way in v. 21-24, tells her that this religious debate is really irrelevant, to which she replies in v. 25…

“I know that Messiah is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

The last resort of a convicted sinner is to procrastinate. As far as the woman is concerned, this is the end of the conversation. You can almost see her pick up her water jug and turn to leave? But Jesus has one more thing to say to her in v. 26…

“I who speak to you am he.”

Jesus tells her who he is. So now she knows who has been talking to her.

Just then, the disciples return, and in v. 28, there is a telling detail…

Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town

Her water jar was the symbol of her old life. It was the thing she used to try to survive. And in the realization of who Jesus was, and how he cared about her, and how he wanted to give her eternal life, her whole perspective changed.

She left her water jar and walked…no, she ran all the way back to town, all the way up that long hill. She ran back to tell the very people whom, a few hours earlier, she had been trying to avoid. And what did she say when she got there?

v. 29 - “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did.

“Come and see!” Does that sound familiar? Come and see for yourself. Come and make up your own mind. That is always the way of grace. Not forced. Not manipulative. Not demanding. “Come and see.”

And come they did, and met Jesus, and they put their trust in Him as Savior too.

v. 39 - Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony

And they asked – no they urged, they begged (v. 40) – Jesus and his disciples to stay with them. Imagine, Jews and Samaritans fellowshiping together! That’s what the Gospel does.

Perhaps you are here today and you are tired of drinking water from the wells of this world. Maybe you have drunk at the well of success and found it’s water bitter; maybe you have drunk at the well of pleasure and found its water stale. Perhaps you have drunk at the well of riches and found it unrefreshing; you have drunk at the well of human love and found it could not ultimately quench your thirst.

Jesus said “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 to eternal life.”

When you put your faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, your life becomes a fountain, a place where not only you can find refreshment but others can as well. Does this describe your life today?

Prayer _______________________________________________________

After the woman had left Jesus at the well to run back up the path to the town, Jesus spoke with his disciples about the harvest of souls for the kingdom. As he sat there talking with them, I like to think that he could see over their shoulders to the path that wound up the hillside to the town… a path which soon began to be filled with the townspeople, who were coming down to the well in response to the woman’s story.

And as Jesus said to his disciples in v. 35 “Lift up your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest!” perhaps he was looking over their shoulders and urging them to turn and look up the hillside to the town to see the spectacle of a host of people, like dots in the distance, like ripe heads of grain in the fields, coming down the path and through the fields to meet Jesus.