Awesome Love, Awesome Responsibility: John 4:5-42 - Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

 At Bible Study last week, a beautiful question came up in our conversation: what will it be see Jesus face-to-face? 

I immediately thought of the song I Can Only Imagine by the band MercyMe:

Surrounded by your glory
what will my heart feel
will I dance for you, Jesus,
or in awe of you be still?

Will I stand in your presence
on my knees will I fall?
Will I sing alleluia?
Will I be able to speak at all?
I can only imagine.

Thankfully, we have today’s Gospel to inspire our imaginations.

It begins with Jesus returning to Galilee from Judea via Samaria. He stops and rests by Jacob’s Well, which was not far from the Samaritan city of Sychar. 

Around noon, a woman approaches the well, and Jesus her for a drink. She immediately objects. Men aren’t supposed to talk to unescorted women. Jews aren’t supposed to associate with Samaritans. But that doesn’t stop Jesus. He teaches her about the living waters he gives, and how those who drink of it will never thirst again. 

The woman asks Jesus to give her this water. He asks her to call her husband, and return.

This is where the drama builds, because she bears a terrible secret. She has no husband. She had five husbands, and now lives with a man who’s not her husband. 

Bear in mind, that in Jesus’s day, a woman could not divorce her husband, but her husband could divorce her if she displeased him in any way. Maybe she burned his dinner. Maybe she hadn’t given him a male heir. It’s also possible that she buried five husbands. In those days, if a brother died, his younger brother was required to marry his widow. Perhaps all five of her husbands were brothers. 

Whatever the case, there’s no reason to think that her predicament was a consequence of her sins. Still, with no life insurance policies or divorce settlements, she was destitute. She could be living with another Good Samaritan who took her in because she had nowhere else to go. 

The fact that she comes to the well in the heat of the noonday sun rather than in the early morning, when women normally gathered water, suggests that she did not want to be seen. She may have been the subject of vicious rumors and gossip. Or, she was tired of people’s pity. 

Jesus wasn’t trying to shame or humiliate this woman. In the most gentle and gracious way possible, Jesus draws out her painful secret. He makes it clear to her that he knows everything about her and still loves her. Otherwise, she would’ve questioned everything Jesus taught her, thinking Jesus would not have loved her if he knew the truth about her.

But Jesus knew everything about her, and he loved her fully and completely. In that moment, all her shame, all her disgrace, all the labels and the gossip, all the fears that she’d been cursed by God—they all disappeared. For the first time in a long time, or maybe for the first time ever, she understood that she mattered to God. 

It’s hard to believe Jesus loves you when people judge and disgrace you, particularly if those people call themselves Christian. I worry that Christians are known for their hate and judgment than for their love and mercy.

It’s even harder to believe Jesus loves you when you don’t love yourself. You’ve done things that make you unworthy of love. There’s something about you that makes you unworthy of love. Things have happened to you that make you feel unloved by God. 

But Jesus doesn’t love you because you’re worthy. Jesus doesn’t love you because other people love you; because you’re righteous; because you’re strong; because you have faith; because you’re successful; because other people praise you. Jesus loves you because that’s who he is. 

The love of Jesus Christ destroys your shame, your disgrace, the labels and the gossip you’ve suffered, along with all your sorrows and fears. They all disappear in the presence of Jesus. That’s what happens when you’re face-to-face with Jesus

But with amazing love comes amazing responsibility. If you judge others as unworthy of love, because of their race, their religion, their gender, their looks, their orientation, their genetics, their income level, their weight, their political beliefs, you are slandering the name of the one whose love you claim. 

The worst example of this is in how we judge people for how they responded to problems we ourselves have never faced. What right do you have to condemn the Samaritan for cohabitating after having buried five husbands? How can you judge her when you haven’t had walked in her shoes?

If you feel loved on the merits of who you are and what you’ve done (or haven’t done), that’s not Jesus’s love you’re feeling. That’s your pride. You didn’t earn divine love. It was given to you freely at the price of Jesus’s body and blood. 

You can’t understand the magnitude of Jesus’s love until repentance shatters your illusions of worthiness. You may enjoy an abundance of the finest mineral waters bottled halfway across the globe. But only Jesus gives living water. 

The miracle we celebrate today is a woman who was dead in her shame and despair and is now joyously alive because she is loved by Jesus. Having drunk of the living waters of Jesus Christ, she is so full of radiance and new life that many Samaritans come to faith in him. He told her everything she had ever done, and loved her fully. 

When you partake of Christ’s Body and Blood today, may your Spirit sing for joy with the Samaritan woman at the love Jesus has for you. May God’s Holy Spirit make you every bit as eager to share the testimony of this love with everyone you meet. 

John 4:5-42 (NRSVue)

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

⁷ A 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.) ⁹ The 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.) ¹⁰ Jesus 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.” ¹¹ The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹² Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” ¹³ Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴ but 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.” ¹⁵ The 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.”

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

²⁷ Just 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?” ²⁸ Then 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?” ³⁰ They left the city and were on their way to him.

³¹ Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³² But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. ³⁶ The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷ For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

³⁹ Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹ And many more believed because of his word. ⁴² They 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.”