Jesus Talks With a Samaritan Woman | John 4:1-26

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Hi friends, my name's Alex. I'm one of the pastors here. Special welcome to you if you're visiting. And I'm excited to continue this. A series that we're navigating through the Gospel of John last week, if you weren't here good friend Kevin Butcher came and shared with us and he just, I think the phrases brought it, it was just imp impressive work and just really just spoke deep to my heart.

And I know lots of you as well. There's all these conversations in different fields of work as to when the peak ages and clearly in pastoring and preaching, it's 71 years old or whatever. Wherever Kevin is right now. So if you didn't get a chance to go back and listen go back and take a listen this week.

I'd love to kick us off with a question and a story to start with. The question may seem a little weird. You may have to process it just a little bit. It's this one. Have you ever ended up in the wrong part of town? Now the kids I grew up with would've said I lived in the wrong part of town. They were all better off than I were.

It wasn't that we were poor, we just didn't have any money. Whatever the gap is between those two things. And so we experienced that and then I moved. To the part of Michigan I lived in afterwards. And these people just wouldn't stop talking about brunch and their second houses and all those kind of things.

And until that point, I'd never met anybody that owned a second house. So that was all new information to me. And then when I moved here, I moved to Michigan in 2013 and my first job, or one of my first jobs as a youth. Pastor was to take a bunch of middle schoolers from the area that we lived in Plymouth, Michigan, nice suburban town, queen Think stars Hollow, that very, perfect kind of environment.

And we were supposed to take them. To down to Uptown Detroit to 4 8 2 0 2. The poorest zip code in Detroit. So this was a different new thing for me too. My wife's family have lived in that area for a long time, but they didn't really go to Detroit except to see Tiger's games and Red Wings games. And Lions games.

You got in the picture of why we went to that part of Detroit and I got these kids, these eight, 11, and 12 year olds and threw them in a 15 seater passenger van alongside my 21-year-old in turn and off we went to 4 8 2 0 2 piety Hill. Very impoverished part of Detroit. I knew something was different as I entered this part of town.

We pulled up at an intersection and as we're waiting there checking for traffic, we watched as two men jump out of a truck and start this big fight with another guy on his driveway right opposite us. One of the 11 year olds sat behind me. Turns to me and says we should go help. And I turned to him and said, we like, like you mean me, right?

I've read the story of the Good Samaritan and so I knew what my responsibility was and so I picked up a phone and hit nine one one is like my first experience. Now I, I was outta my depth had that been my hometown, Birmingham, England, while things would've been very different.

Because you can't call 9 1 1 there, so I'd have to call 9 9 9 instead. It would've been a different story. It was a different experience for me than any I'd had before. And then after that first trip, I went back a second time and then a third time. And something about the neighborhood got deep into my soul.

I would remember coming home to our nice suburban area and just feeling the loss of beauty of this community. I remember some moments that just stood out distinctly. Remember some of the conversations, some of the people we were able to walk alongside. I remember conversations with pastors who lived down there about the struggle of that area, telling us about $1,400 a month, car insurance payments, and the problem that created for people in those communities.

Or do you have a car illegally? Do you spend all your money on car insurance? What do you do in that environ? I remember speaking to a young man who just had something about himself who managed to get a job all the way, the other side of the famous eight mile at one of the shopping malls, but then lost it within two weeks because the first time his bus didn't come the second time, the bus he had to catch after that bus came four minutes early and he missed the second bus.

And started to see what it took to live in this kind of community, had the beautiful experience of watching 11-year-old suburban kids, work alongside 25-year-old drug dealers that have experienced the struggle of that community. Watch them experience new life together. As the youth group grow, I got the experience of watching 40 white suburban kids dance at the front of the church alongside all of these beautiful black kids from the hood, and seeing the life of Jesus just emerge from these moments.

Remember conversations with my brother from a different mother Aus, the pastor of the church down there, and he'd tell me about how just recently one of the kids got shot in his neighborhood. And he wasn't sure what to do to start with. And then he said, I grabbed the hand of my little 4-year-old girl, and together we walked over to the house to lead worship with the community because I wanted her to know she didn't have to be afraid.

And somewhere in the midst of that, he helped me know that I didn't need to be afraid as well. Life came out of these kind of communities. And yet the lines were always there. This is Piety Hill 4 8 2 0 2. Look at the difference in house prizes across where the line ends. There are 21 homes for sale ranging from 3,500 to $2.2 million.

Houses look like this in one part of the zip code, and then they look like this and like this. And somewhere there's a line that's been drawn that nobody will ever cross, even though there's no walls there. I think when you do cross those lines though, beautiful things begin to happen. And this story I would suggest that we're about to enter into today.

This story isn't like those stories. It's why those stories can happen. It's why relationships are different than we think they are at times. Let's start at the beginning, John chapter four, verse one to two. Now, Jesus heard. That the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptized more disciples than John, although in fact he was not Jesus who baptized but his disciples.

So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee. All of the gospels have this tension in Jesus' ministry. He has this home town area of Galilee where often he's heard and then Jerusalem, where at times at least he's not heard, not received. And then John gives us a curious sentence. Now he had to go through Samaria, had to go through Samaria.

No Jew of the first century would say they had to go through Samaria. They had not to go through Samaria. You walked around it you found long roots and based on where we think Jesus was, probably around the place John was in this season of ministry, it was probably actually quicker. For him to go multiple other routes than it was to go through Samaria.

And yet that's where Jesus goes. If you were to ask a first pen per first century person, they would've said, Jesus takes a wrong turn. He went in the wrong direction, went to the wrong side of the tracks, wrong part of town. He went where he wasn't supposed to go. And then as we keep reading, we see the story pushes into more complex.

Areas Now, he had to go through Samaria, so he came to the town of Samaria called Shar, near the plot of ground. Jacob, one of the patriarchs from the Old Testament, we'll get to him later, had given to his son Joseph Jacob's well was there the Jacob had dug to make that property fertile, make it livable, and Jesus tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the it was about noon.

It was a beautiful representation of Jesus that John gives. This is someone who tires, who feels the same struggles of eking out an existence in this life that you and I feel at different times. You know that feeling that you have when a day follows another day and follows another day, and you're like, man, just what Jesus experienced that just like you and me.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, will you give me a drink? We talked at the beginning of this series about John, how John creates these moments for Jesus. What everybody else seems to disappear and Jesus and one person enter into this moment, but never does He put so much work into it as this.

Usually it's like a happens organically, but here he wants us to know his disciples have gone to town to buy food so unusually for this society, it's just Jesus. And just her at a he meets a woman. When a Samaritan woman came to draw wars at water, Jesus said to a, will you give me a drink? He makes a request of, we might summarize it like this.

So far what Jan has told us is that Jesus is in a place he shouldn't be at a time. He shouldn't be there. And you might add, although it's not in the notes. And talking to someone he shouldn't be talking to. She's a Samaritan and from a Jewish perce per perception, she's an outcast and nobody, there's a whole history between Jews and Samaritans that I can only just run through really quick.

It's broadly this, the, originally there were two kingdoms in what is now Israel. 12 brothers split 10 and two. The group of 10 becomes Israel. The group of two becomes Judah, and this group of 10 goes into captivity and a whole bunch of other people get moved into their towns. Those people interrelate.

They build new relationships, they take on new gods. And now to the pure bloods, as they see it the people of Jerusalem, of Judah Samaritans are a mixed up mess of nobody's outcast people, but she is more she's alone. She has no companions. She comes at noon in the middle of the day and to a Jewish reader that tells you everything you need to know about her women didn't come for water alone.

And she comes alone. Not only is she an outcast, she's an outcast of outcasts, and there John has Jesus and her alone with nobody around. To a first century reader, this breeds of something. It smells of something. You know how cues about relationships change over times? I'm gonna show you a picture.

Some of you'll get it instantly, but Kevin set the standard for images or film quotes that nobody gets. So I'm good. I'm on good territory. How many of you know where this is from? Pride and Prejudice 2005. Terrible rendition of the book. So if you are still reading and still liking literature, don't watch this, but there's this moment when Mr.

Darcy is stood by the carriage and Elizabeth Bennett, the one he will fall in love with eventually, he is about to step in, and he reaches out his hand and they touch and the camera zooms in on it, and it's a moment. And afterwards he does this weird little hand flex 'cause he realizes what he's done to us.

This is nothing to us, this is just politeness, but to them in the 19th century, it means something. It's too familiar. It's the beginning of a connection. And so a first century reader begins to read what John has written so far. And he says something is happening here in literature, the term or film, the term is meet Cute.

It's a moment when two characters come together and I could explain it, but it's best explained by the short movie clip.

So this is the brilliant Christmas movie, the Holiday, and you see these two characters that meet for the first time. He's a famous writer. She is just visiting America. For just, she's visiting America for the first time and he gives us this beautiful little summary of what it is for two characters to come together in this way in the first century and back before it.

In Genesis, the first book of scripture a Meet cute happened at a well. You can go through all of the famous characters in the Old Testament, especially in Genesis, and find that one after another. Meet at a, moses meets his wife at a well. Jacob meets his wife at a well. Isaac he doesn't meet his wife at a well, but his dad's servant meets his wife at a well, which is for them, the same thing.

This is how it happened in, in the first century. So as we start to read this, we start to see how John takes this and he begins to subvert this idea. The Samaritan woman said to him, you are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? And John gives us succinctly for Jews do not associate with Samaritans.

She's shocked that he's having a conversation with her at all, and Jesus answered, if you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you'd have asked him and he would've given you living water quickly. The story moves from on the surface, it looks romantic. To suddenly it's now spiritual.

It's different. Four 11, sir, the woman said you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? I'm going to ask you to remember back to weeks, which I know is challenging, but think about how similar this response, this question is to what Nicodemus said in John chapter three.

How can someone be born when they rolled? Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother's womb to be born. Jesus is trying to have conversations about spiritual things and people keep failing to understand him. Keep bringing it back down to a normal human understanding. Nicodemus never gets beyond that point, but watch what happens with this story.

She has a question. First, are you greater than our father Jacob? Who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did his sons and his livestock. You can't possibly be greater than our father. Jacob might be a way of rewriting that in a way we can understand. She can't possibly believe that the person speaking to her is more significant than her distant ancestor.

There is a beautiful irony into the passage because she has no idea who she's speaking to. Leslie Newgen, the commentator on John says this. The woman is standing all unsuspecting. On the brink of a much deeper gulf than the one that defy divides Jews and Samaritan. It is the Gulf between the author of life and the world that is thirsty for that life.

Jesus comes back at our with another response, everyone, he says, who drinks the water from this? Good as it is with high reputation will be thirsty. Again, everyone who drinks this will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed. The water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life, and a response suggests that something is happening in her.

This is what she says, sir, give me this water so they won't get thirsty. And have to keep coming here to draw water. She may be not sure on what level she's speaking, but she, I think, is becoming aware that she's deeply thirsty for something that life cannot provide. Have you ever experienced those moments?

Those moments perhaps, where you thought you were on the cusp of everything that you ever wanted and then you get it? And it's not quite what it was promised. You chase after something because you believe it will be the source of all SA happiness and you get close and realize as you're about to wanna open it, that it may be not what you thought it was.

This is this kind of story. This is David Foster Wallace and one of the truly great writers of the last hundred years. Multiple books, multiple articles, incredible success for a writer, and the dollars began to stack up. But within it, he found that none of it provided what he hoped it would. And he gives this famous convention, commencement speech to Kenyan College, and he says this, there is no such thing as not worshiping.

Everybody worships. The only choice we have is we get, sorry. The only choice we get is what? To worship. The only choice we get is what to worship. This isn't a person that followed Jesus particularly. It's a person who experienced what she experiences of this deep sense of dissatisfaction as some of the rest of the speech that I went to read you.

'cause I just couldn't do it justice from memory. This he says, might be the most compelling reason to worship God. Everything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough.

Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age starts showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you'll need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Worship intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid. A fraud always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious things about these forms of worship is not that they are evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just slip gradually into day after day, getting more and more selective for what and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that is what you are doing.

Yeah, this is this kind of story. I suspect Tim Keller famous pastor, preacher, writer says this. Jesus says, unless you're trying to get your spiritual thirst quenched through me and not through these other things, then whatever you worship will abandon you. In the end. She's awakening to this sense of spiritual thirst, but isn't quite sure where it is met, and we don't know yet what it is behind the scenes that has left a feeling like this.

The woman said to me, gimme some water so I won't get thirsty, and have to keep coming here to draw water. And then we come to the most challenging point where she has to face everything that she is and bring it in front of the guard of the universe who stands unknown in front of her. And Jesus prompts her by asking this question.

Go call your husband and come back. Perhaps you've stood in a conversation where you hope that someone doesn't bring the thing that you know is your greatest weakness or greatest hidden secret to the surface, and she stands there and Jesus brings exactly what she hopes he'll never bring. Go call your husband and come back.

I have no husband. She replies when she meets Jesus, she puts on a mask. I think the mask is probably called something like respectability. It's a surface kind of cover that doesn't allow the deep parts of us to be revealed because we don't want them on show, and yet Jesus doesn't allow that mask to hold in this beautiful moment.

He says to her, you are right when you say you have no husband. The fact is you have had five husbands and the man you have now is not your husband. History has not been kind to her. It's very unlikely in a first century society that she's just left one husband after another and is now not married to anybody.

It's an unlikely story. It's just as possible that she's had the tragedy of five husbands that have died and left her, and she's now known as the woman that is cursed. So much so that no man will go near her. It's possible that they have left her. But it's also possible that in a broken society, she's broken in a behavior too.

Jesus comes to the very core of her, the very most broken parts, and gently says to her, you have no husband. In fact, you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband, maybe somebody else's. Husband, but not yours. We don't know. We're not interested actually in what she has done, I don't think.

I don't think that's Jesus' point at all. The point is that she would long to cover up all of the things that are most broken in her, and Jesus beautifully invites her to take off the mask and come exactly as she is. This is what I find to be different about Jesus in comparison to every other religious story in the world.

Yeah. Every other religious story seems to say you have to go and improve that. Cover it up, perhaps yes, or at least fix it under the surface, and yet Jesus simply becomes, comes with what you have said is quite true. It reminds me of a similar story in the Old Testament and one about Hagar, a woman who is mistreated by the people that she serves.

She runs away, finally pregnant, sick of the abuse, and arrives at a well. There she meets God and she goes away with this idea that the God is the one who sees her. She says, you are the God who sees me. I have now seen the one who sees me, and that's this story too. It's the beauty of what it is to, as your true self be seen by God.

Not with judgment, but with love and care. I found this anonymous quote that was just worth sharing. Even though it's anonymous. He wants to meet you right where you are at. Stop pretending. Stop putting on the face. Let Jesus heal you. Where you kneeled need to be healed. That's what this story is about.

What do you keep under the surface? What is no one allowed to see? What is the deep story within you, the one that still comes back, especially in the times when you are alone? What is that story? What is my story? We all have things that we hide from each other, and Jesus says, you don't have to pretend not with me.

You get to be who you are. On one hand, that's what this story is about, a single person. It's a changed life. God has run towards her with open arms as the father has run towards the prodigal son. That is a good story, a wonderful story. The woman's world has changed, but I suspect there's so many clues that point to this other story going on at the same time.

So what I hope you come away with is the beauty of this story and the sense that this, Jesus is just brilliant in the way that he ties so many things together. The story sits intentionally next to the story of Nicodemus. We read about him a couple of weeks ago. An insider of insiders, the insider of insiders, the Jew of Jews.

The teacher of Israel is presented with this same story and he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand who Jesus is, or at least can't let Jesus in. And what he offers at this point is a facade now. Now it seems like he gets the story later on, but in this moment, the insider of insiders doesn't understand what Jesus's doing, and then we move to her story.

Once she does get it, at the end, she'll finally be, Jesus will finally reveal himself to her. As the one, as we heard last week, is he the one who was to come? The outcast of outcasts sits alongside the insider of insiders. The one who should get it doesn't, and the one from a first century understanding who shouldn't understand, who shouldn't even have the privilege of this truth being revealed.

She does get it. If you've ever felt like you are in the behind group, in the group, that's like the remedial class or however you term those things. The good news is that Jesus is often understood by those who don't have the pretensions of an insider. Of insiders. This is the first clue that there's another story going on.

Jesus is starting to talk about who is invited and it's broad and inclusive, and he's starting to talk about who's likely to get this. And it's surprisingly the people that you don't expect, and that pattern will be repeated over and over again. But there's another prompt, another idea that we're supposed to notice.

I think. Because right after this moment where Jesus allows her to be herself and meet her in this beautiful moment of acceptance, she asks another question that seems somewhat detached. Sir. She said, I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place we must worship is in Jerusalem.

She's now talking again about that same history we heard about at the start, about the split between Samaritans and Jews. And she points to a mountain that's nearby and she said there used to be a place of worship there, and you Jews came in and destroyed it and wiped it out. You've been our enemies.

You've been the ones against us. How can there possibly be anything good that comes from Jews and Samaritans being together? We're not the same people. We don't align. We stand apart. Woman, Jesus replied, believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

You Samaritans worship what you do not know We worship. What we do know for salvation is from the Jews. Jesus reiterates this idea that everything that God is doing is gonna come right now through this people, but then instantly expands it. To include everybody around them. Yet a time is coming and now has come when the true worshipers will worship the father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the father seeks.

God is spirit and his worshipers must worship in the spirit and the truth, right after bringing his message to the very heart. Of Jerusalem, the very heart of the spiritual world, Jesus again pushes it to the margins. John, for four chapters now, has repeatedly told us this same story. First, it's about Jewish purity culture, and he says, this is really about me.

Then it's about Jewish teaching and the law and the Pharisees, and he said no, all this is about me and now it's here in the neighbors. And he says, no, this. He's about me. This moment is about the uniting of people that have been apart for so many years. That Jacob story is an old story. It's an old history.

It's one that never seems like it can be healed, and Jesus says, now I'm bringing all sorts of people together from all sorts of backgrounds. The woman said at the end, I know that Messiah called Christ is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us. Jesus has denied being the Messiah in multiple other accounts, but to her, he simply gives this reply.

I the one speaking to you. I am He. The first revelation of Jesus is to an outsider of outsiders who doesn't belong, who's part of a different people group who don't belong, and Jesus starts to reiterate in his story, know anybody. Can be involved in this thing. For a first century audience, they'd have to look at it like this.

Yes, the woman's world has changed. She has experienced the God who sees her for herself, but then our worldview changes. If you have a strong sense of the fact that you know who's in and who's out, you know who's included and not included, then this story is designed to mess with you. It is designed to remind us that the differences between us are not as great as we suspect, and that Jesus is welcoming everything.

Everyone in and Jesus' mission is not to a single group of people, but to all who will have him. He creates across every divide that we can create amongst ourselves. All who find themselves thirsty may come. There is only one condition. All must come as sinners forgiven. This story is beautiful for a moment where we come to a table like this because think about this group of people.

We all come here regularly for the most part. Maybe some of you are new, do it, but a lot of us are here regularly, week after week, perhaps month after month, and we all have little in common. You look across the room about people that you may not know, may never have spoken to. We have all sorts of ages represented.

We have 11 year olds and we have 91 year olds and some of you outside those ranges too. We have all sorts of mixtures of ethnic background, national background. We have the political divide that we talk about regularly. We have all the sort of different frustrations, different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Different levels of wealth. We have some people that are single, some people with kids. We have all sorts of stories that we might allow to define us, and yet Jesus takes a couple of people over a series of chapters and he says, all of you can come. You just have to let me be the lead story. So we come to this table and we remind ourselves that all the things that the world will say matter.

Don't matter here. This table is for all who will come. All who will come. We're gonna sing this song together. It's a beautiful song. It's a song called All Ye Sinners. It's a celebration of the group of people that get to come here, and it's anyone who can take off the mask say, this is the broken me inside.

Still loved. By a God who ran towards me, not away from me.

Aaron's gonna lead us through the first couple of verses and we're gonna hit a musical interlude and I'm gonna invite you to come and actual fact, no, we will come now and he'll sing over us the first two verses and then together we'll take the communion, take the bread, take the wine. And then I want you to stand and listen to this last verse, this celebration of a humanity invited into God's presence.

On the night that he was betrayed, Jesus gathered with his first followers taking bread. He handed it to each of them and said, this is my body broken for you. And then he took the cup. And handed it to each of them saying, this is my blood shed. For the sins of the world, for the world, for anyone, for everyone.

As long as you gather together, do this in remem remembrance of me. If you are thirsty, come. Thank you, Jesus for this great gift, this reminder in the ways that we might become focused on so many other things together, we focus in on you, we gather our scattered senses, everything that might be on our minds, and we put it to one side and come solely with this table in mind.

Thank you, Jesus. Amen.