John 4:5-42

Desire, Disappointment, and Living Water
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Last week I was away attending a conference held at Providence Presbyterian Church in Hilton Head, South Carolina. I have gone to this conference for several years now, and almost always I am the youngest person there. As you can guess, this is not unusual for a church conference in the Protestant mainline.
 
This year, however, was different.
 
Present at this conference were about one hundred young people, representing Presbyterians for the Kingdom, a Generation Z renewal movement started by Richard Ackerman, better known online as “Redeemed Zoomer.” His YouTube channel has over 670,000 subscribers!
 
At the final session, the conference organizer invited several of these young people forward to speak. He asked them a simple question: What brought you here?
 
Each of them had a unique story, but the themes were remarkably similar.
 
Some of them had grown up in the church but drifted away. They entered a world without boundaries, without rules—a world where moral anarchy reigns, as one of them put it.
 
They followed their desires. They indulged their appetites. They did whatever our culture tells young people will make them feel good.
 
But eventually each one of them came to a crisis.
 
They discovered that a life spent chasing desires did not fulfill them. Instead of satisfaction they found disappointment. Instead of meaning, they found futility.
 
Each then spoke of a decisive encounter with God’s Word, which they began to read for themselves, and then later even the catechisms and the confessions of the Presbyterian Church, with an increasing desire to learn more and more.
 
They spoke of the claim that Christ made on their lives, and how they then began to live no longer for themselves but for him, as his disciples.
 
Think about it! These are young people, in their twenties, in the post-Christian, secular culture of the twenty-first century! There is hope for the church—including even the Protestant mainline!
 
What we heard, with rapt attention, in that final session of the conference were stories of conversion.
 
This is language native to the Gospel of John. In fact, what John gives us during the season of Lent are portraits of conversion.
 
The first we heard last Sunday. Let me remind you of Nicodemus, the august rabbi, the Teacher of Israel, who sought Jesus under the cover of night.
 
Dissatisfied with himself, haunted by those questions that we ask at 3 AM, during those sleepless nights, he found himself drawn to Jesus, without fully understanding why. He came to Jesus one man, and left, still under cover of night, a different man.
 
Today we hear a second. We have before us this morning a woman, from Samaria, who undergoes a change after meeting Jesus no less radical than that of Nicodemus.
 
She comes to a well to draw water. Now this is the daily routine for women in the ancient Near East. Nothing unusual here, except for one small detail.
 
Most women would have come in the cool of the morning, together with other women. But she comes at noon, alone. She comes alone because she cannot bear to be with the others. Whatever has happened in her life has placed her outside the circle of belonging.
 
And so, like Nicodemus before her, she moves through this day in a way meant to avoid detection.
 
He came at night; she comes at noon. Both choose hours when they hope no one will see them. Both have a need that only Jesus can meet.
 
As she approaches, she finds a man sitting there, a Jewish man. He breaks into the lonely silence of her isolation by speaking first, asking her for a drink.
 
She is stunned. She knows enough about not belonging to recognize a boundary when she sees one. Jews and Samaritans do not intermingle. No self‑respecting Jew would ask a Samaritan for a favor, let alone begin a conversation.
 
They were feuding siblings in Jesus’ day. Samaria was the remnant of the Northern Kingdom, separated from Jerusalem by political intrigue, rival kings, and competing visions of faith.
 
Later they were conquered and resettled by the Assyrians, intermarrying with them and becoming, in the eyes of Jerusalem, “impure.” They built their own temple on Mount Gerizim, rejecting the temple in Jerusalem. One chosen people, divided.
 
But there is another reason for her astonishment. In Jesus’ day, it was improper for a man to ask a woman for help, let alone engage her in conversation.
 
Rabbinic wisdom put it bluntly: “A man shall not talk with a woman in the street, not even with his own wife, on account of what others may say.”
 
No wonder the disciples, when they return, are astonished to find Jesus speaking with her.
 
Yet here he is, crossing every boundary she has been forced to respect, stepping into the quiet ache of her loneliness, asking her for a drink.
 
Realizing that Jesus is breaching a code of social etiquette, the woman tells him so: “How is that you, a Jew, asks for a drink me, a woman from Samaria.”
 
Parenthetically, there is a principle here it is important for us to highlight.
 
A speaker at the conference said that the most memorable thing his theology professor ever told him was this: “The Bible is like an old fashioned child: He does not speak unless spoken to, and he never talks with strangers.”
 
“Jesus, how is that you, the Son of God, have any interest in me?” Jesus, what do you have to do with me.” Like the Samaritan woman, we ought to approach Jesus in the Bible with questions like these, and be ready for what he will show us.
 
"If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water" (4:10).
 
The woman misunderstands. "Sir, the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?"
As is so often the case throughout John's Gospel, the misunderstanding serves as the occasion for the further elaboration of the point.
 
Our misunderstanding, even our inability to grasp what Jesus is saying — this is not necessarily an obstacle to revelation. In fact, it may be precisely the occasion through which revelation goes deeper.
 
The water Jesus offers does not merely quench thirst temporarily. It becomes in the one who drinks it an inexhaustible spring, welling up to eternal life.
 
The woman wants this water, even though she doesn't entirely understand what it is. And Jesus is ready to give it to her. But first…
 
“Call your husband and come back.”
 
The woman replies: “I have no husband.”
 
Jesus knows the truth about her. The truth is that she has had five husbands, and the man she has now is not her husband.”
 
The text has stirred up controversy, especially in the Protestant mainline.
 
Some see in this disclosure of her private life a sad tale of abuse and abandonment. In a culture where a man had only to write a certificate of divorce and send his wife away for any and every reason, there were divorced women.
 
And in a culture where a woman depended on the provision and protection of a man for economic survival, she married another, if she could, out of necessity. How can you blame her?
 
But John never tells us why the woman had five husbands, or whether her current arrangement is voluntary, exploitative, or something in between.
 
To speculate that all those men “used” her objectifies them as caricatures, which is neither fair nor necessary. Some may have loved her genuinely. Some may have left her, or died, or cast her aside. We just don’t know.
 
What we do know is that the text is about desire, even sexual desire, about the kind of desire that brings a man and a woman together in marriage.
 
Water is a symbol of sexual desire in the Bible. Thus, Proverbs counsels a young man to find joy in the wife of his youth, “drinking water from your own cistern.”
 
And in the Bible, the well is site where a man meets the woman he is to marry. Thus, on behalf of Isaac, Abraham’s servant meets Rebekkah at a well. And Moses meets his bride Zipporah at a well.
 
Desire is a thread that runs throughout this lesson. The Samaritan is a woman marked by desire. She desires the water that Jesus promises to give her, the water that satisfies so completely that the one who drinks of it will never be thirsty again.
 
But when Jesus sends her to fetch her husband and come back, there emerges a more complex picture of who she is as a woman marked by desire.
 
And to be told: “Here is what you have desired, and here is where it has led you” is hard to hear. 
 
Many women (and men, too, though often in different registers) recoil from this because desire exposes the self.
 
It is far easier to narrate oneself as “acted upon” than to confess, “I wanted this. I sought it. I enjoyed it. And yet it failed me. And in the end I failed myself.”
 
I mentioned YouTube earlier. Social media, for better or worse, is how young people interact with one another, with their world.
 
On YouTube, there is a category of videos that feature accounts of conversion to the Christ— conversion stories.
 
I saw one of these in which a young woman recounted her past with men. Having come out on the other side, she counseled the young women watching her video:
 
“I know that you want to feel that you are enough, that you are chosen, that you are special, that you are loved.”
 
She speaks as a woman who brought the weight of her longing to one relationship after another, only to come up empty each time.
 
She spoke as a woman who desired with all her heart, only to be disappointed. She knows, like the woman at the well, what it feels like to drink and still be thirsty.
 
Today’s hookup culture promises intimacy without vulnerability, gratification without commitment. In sum, it offers water without depth.
 
What Gen Z has discovered—and what the young people at the conference testified to—is that it leaves you more thirsty than before.
 
Note what Jesus doesn't do. He doesn't shame the woman. He doesn't condemn her desire.
 
Indeed, desire is what makes us alive to one another and even to God. Desire is what makes us human. God makes his appeal to our desire—to our hearts, where desire lives.
 
Now note what Jesus does do. He interprets her life not as a string of moral failures, but as evidence of a craving unmet: “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again.”
 
But the water that I give will be a spring welling up to eternal life.
 
Hope that there is new life, a new beginning, new possibilities—it liberates us from our self-obsession.
 
Shame and self-obsession are inseparable. When we are trapped in shame, we are entirely self-focused—on how we appear, how we are perceived, and how we are judged because of what we have done.
 
The Samaritan woman came to the well alone, precisely because her self-consciousness narrowed her world. It needed to be only big enough to accommodate the painful interior monologue she carried on with herself.
 
But the moment Jesus enters, with the offer of living water, one can look up and out. There is a world out there, a world that opens itself up to us, a world perhaps in which we can even find our own place, without having to hide.
 
The Samaritan woman’s interest in this world revives. She speaks not defensively, not evasively, but avidly.
 
She speaks with genuine intellectual and theological engagement about her people’s religious traditions, about their hopes, in which she is actually quite versed.
 
She is bright, with a mind of her own. But before Jesus entered, it was all locked up. She was too ashamed to reveal herself to the others at the well.
 
And it is worth noting that the longest theological conversation recorded in the Gospel of John is this one, between Jesus and the Samaritan woman. It was not between Jesus and Nicodemus, the scholar and Teacher of Israel, but between Jesus and a woman—and a Samaritan to boot.
 
Jesus reveals himself to her. “I am the Messiah—the one who is speaking to you is he.”
 
Just as Nicodemus before her, she had a feeling, a presentiment that there was something special about this man; hope was already welling up within her.
 
But with Jesus’s self-disclosure, the woman is transformed.
 
John hints at this transformation with these words: “Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city.”
 
Remember the reason she came to the well in the first place: to draw water. But after her encounter with Jesus, she forgets the jar.
 
Seldom if ever is a detail in John ever by accident. The jar represents the ordinary purpose that brought her to the well. When she leaves it behind, she indicates that her priorities have changed—and not only her priorities, but her whole life.
 
She came to the well for water; she leaves talking about Jesus. She came to the well alone; now she runs back to the town. She came to the well as a loner; now she becomes a witness who tells others in the town: “Come, see a man who told me everything I did.”
 
In sum, she came to the well thinking about water, obsessed with her own thirst; she left thinking and talking about Jesus, having found the source of satisfaction of her thirst.
 
This is what conversion can and does look like. A person encounters Christ, and suddenly the things that once seemed most important are no longer the center.

Something else—someone else—has taken their place.
 
Those young people I heard last week at the conference described something very similar. They had their purposes, organized around the gratification of their desires. But when Christ claimed their lives, his call became their purpose. In a sense, they too left their water jars behind.
 
In conclusion, let me suggest a concern. There may be many, even in our own town, who have encountered Jesus at noon. But they are still there, at the well, alone. They are not here to worship God in Spirit and in truth with God's people on Sunday mornings, at this church, or at any number of churches in this area.
 
They are drawn to this Jesus, but at the same time they are too afraid that what they have done, what they have desired, what they have chased, has made them unworthy.
 
We the church need to be open to them, to welcome them into the new life to which Jesus has called them and to nurture them in it. They have a place among us, because they belong to Jesus.
 
And to belong to Jesus is to belong to his body. Contrary to popular opinion, you really cannot have Jesus apart from his body. The two are inseparable.
 
Here perhaps we can learn from Joseph Ratzinger, once Archbishop of Munich and Freising, and later Pope Benedict XVI.
 
He invites us to compare the church with Monica, the mother of Augustine, who waited patiently for her son, as he chased after his pleasures and indulged his passions, as did the Samaritan woman before she met Jesus. Monica kept the lights on for her son, trusting that Jesus claims his own in his own time.
 
Let us also trust, and wait expectantly — keeping the lights on — for those like the Samaritan woman to come among us, to this congregation as well as to congregations throughout this town. For they, too, belong to Jesus. Amen.  
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