AND DIDN’T HE RISE…:THIRST

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from John 4:5-30, 39-42

February 24, 2008

John 4

⁵So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.

⁷A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) ⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) ¹⁰Jesus answered her, “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.” ¹¹The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹²Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” ¹⁵The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

¹⁶Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” ¹⁷The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” ¹⁹The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” ²¹Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” ²⁶Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

²⁷Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” ²⁸Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ²⁹“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” ³⁰They left the city and were on their way to him.

³⁹Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹And many more believed because of his word. ⁴²They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

A hot day in a steamy valley ringed with humid hills. After a vigorous game of Frisbee or volleyball, all you wanted was to stick your face into that water fountain in the mess hall and drink until water was oozing out of your pores. Which is what we did. But there was one problem. Back in the 1970s Camp WaKonDaHo was not on city water. Tanker trucks would haul water to the camp and pour it into an old cistern in a covered shed. In order to fight the bacteria that can collect in such a system, chlorine would be added in copious quantities. Do you know what chlorine does to you? It dries you out; it makes you thirsty. So the more we drank from the water fountain, the thirstier we got. We could spend all day with our faces under that cool stream of liquid, but our thirst only got worse.

When you are drinking from the wrong fountain, pursuing the wrong solution, even though you are immersed in effort, your life-thirst can never be quenched. Anna Quinlen writes, “Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset…. And something bad will have happened: you will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be.” How can we fill that black hole with something of ultimate importance? Much like drinking out of that chlorine-spewing water fountain, we don’t spend the appropriate time looking for the right source, developing our inner selves, trying to fill what many authors refer to as “a God-shaped hole” inside us. And so we thirst, we hunger, we yearn for something more. “There has got to be something more to life,” we insist. Isn’t there?

Jesus isn’t even supposed to be walking through Samaria. Good Jews avoided it like the plague. The audacity of these Samaritans; they even built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim in 331 B.C. in spite of the fact that there was supposed to be only one temple and that was already built in Jerusalem. The Jews and Samaritans were so alike; both groups were looking for a Messiah who would unite the old northern and southern kingdoms of Israel and shatter all divisions. But they were so different; the Jews had a feeling of superiority to the Samaritans, as if they had stuck to the real path of their forebears while the Samaritans had been influenced by foreigners intermingling with their people. Even Jesus seems to feel this way, saying to the Samaritan woman: “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews.” Most preachers who deal with this text spend all their time on this conflict between the Jews and Samaritans, or the fact that Jesus was alone and talking to a woman, another taboo among the Jews. And those distinctions are interesting. But this sermon is about thirst, yearning, aching. It’s odd, Jesus is the one who asks for a drink of water here at Jacob’s well. But it is the Samaritan woman who has the thirst.

The new bride moved into a small house with her husband. She put a shoe box on a shelf in her closet and asked her husband never to open it. For sixty years her husband never touched the box, until his wife was old and dying. One day, as he was putting their affairs in order, he found that box and thought it might hold something important. He opened it and found two lace doilies and $50,000 in cash. He took the box into the bedroom where she lay wasting away and asked her about the contents. She explained, “My mother gave me the box the day you and I married. She told me to make a doily to help ease my frustrations every time I got mad at you.” Her husband, looking into the box at the two doilies, was touched that in sixty years she had only gotten mad at him two times. “So, what’s the $50,000 for?” he asked. She replied, “Oh, that’s the money I made selling the other doilies.” Husbands are not the easiest things to tolerate. Why would anybody want five of them?

When I read about this Samaritan woman who had had five husbands and was living with soon-to-be number six, I sense an unsatisfied thirst in her. And I hear the words to the Eagle’s song about the woman who marries for money instead of love: “She gets up and pours herself a strong one, and stares out at the stars up in the sky. Another night it’s gonna be a long one; she draws the shade and hangs her head to cry.” That unsatisfied, burning yearning in us. That thirst for something more important than the mundane, for something more meaningful than the material, for something that fills that black hole in our souls. Where is it? What is it that satisfies our existential ennui? And Jesus says to the woman who had not even identified her own thirst, “[I] would have given you living water, all you had to do was ask…..Everyone who drinks of this [well] water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water I give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” And the woman asks the correct question, “Where can I get that living water?”

It was apparent that the well woman believed in a day when all hearts’ desires would be met, when peace would guide the planets and love would steer the stars, when the Messiah would come and all things would be known and we would finally understand. She had the right concept; she just couldn’t see what was standing right in front of her face. And Jesus said, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.” Can we see him? Can we see the truth, the reality, the path to earthly fulfillment and eternal life right here in front of us?

During the Children’s Sermon the Youth Minister asked, “What is gray and furry with a long tail?” One little girl replied, “I know the answer must be Jesus…but it sure sounds like a squirrel to me!” In addition to that answer, the little girl also had the answer to life’s aching, to our yearning. So do we, but we say, “It can’t be that simple.” And it’s not. Just saying, “Oh, Jesus is the Messiah,” doesn’t suddenly make everything okay. You have to feast on that truth and let it fill you little by little. You can’t take a malnourished child and feed him so much at one meal that he is healthy again. It takes regular, daily, consistent nourishment over a long period of time before he is healthy and filled. You and I can’t go from aimless wanderers or misguided materialists to meaning-filled children of the kingdom in one day. It will take some lingering in the scriptures, some dwelling in prayer, some absorbing in worship, some stretching with mentors, some lapping at the living water.

But in that one day we can recognize what is missing and we can start drinking at the fountain that satisfies our thirst instead of just increasing it. And it can seem as miraculous to us as it did that day to the woman at the well. This woman headed to the well for what must have seemed like the umpteen millionth time, thinking, “What a drudgery life is.” But waiting for her on life’s routine path was the answer she had been craving.

And don’t forget, this one who confirmed that he is the Messiah sent from God, this Jesus hung on a cross where he too cried, “I thirst.” The humanity in Jesus knew everything we know, experienced everything we experience, felt everything we feel—even that unfulfilled thirst. Then God answered Jesus’ cry and God will answer ours as well. Jesus cried, “I thirst! Is this all there is? Is this it?” And no doubt that cry lingered in the darkness of the tomb, echoing off its confining walls, but then the stone was rolled away…and didn’t he rise?