Sermon: Living Water

There are many venues and vessels, but one Living Water.

Surprising Words of Life:  THEM
John 4:5-42
March 27, 2011

Jerusalem United Church of Christ, 

Palmerton PA

“She is not a prostitute.  She doesn’t have a shady past.”

Yet, if you have ever heard this story of “The Woman at the Well” you have probably heard this woman described as a prostitute, a woman of ill repute, a multi-married harlot.  If you talk to your friends and relatives who heard sermons on this woman today, you will hear her described as shameless, shameful, and sinful.

And yes, she was an outcast.  She is all alone at the well in the heat of the day.  In the middle eastern desert culture, all of the other women in her town would have come in a group to draw water from the well in the cool of the morning or the evening.  The woman who encounters Jesus at the town well is alone there at noon with her bucket.  She was outside the circle of “us” women. She is a “them” - the “other” - obviously the outcast.

There is no doubt that this woman was different. She was probably a lot different from the other women who gathered at that well who were married to their first husbands.  When Jesus invites this woman to call her husband, she replies that she has no husband.  Jesus agrees:  "You have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband" (4:18).  She is an outcast -- a THEM, not one of the US crowd.

She is not just different from the other women, she and Jesus are very different from each other, the conditions perfect for an US-THEM fiasco.  Jesus is male and she’s female, and that alone foreshadows the Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus understanding gap.  In that culture, a man and a woman would not be even that much alone together or to talk to each other directly.  What’s more, Jesus is a Jew; the woman is a Samaritan.  Jews and Samaritans the text tells us “do not share things in common,” another way of saying they avoid each other to keep from being tainted by the other and to keep from killing each other.  The woman is known, perhaps even famous, for her lifestyle; Jesus is the stranger in this town.  

The beginning of the conversation foreshadows a major misunderstanding.  She is there to get the cool wet well water that Jesus is thirsty for but has no way to reach.  So, Jesus asks her for well water, and then he provokes her by saying that she should be asking him for something called living water that she doesn’t even know she’s thirsty for.  Water!  Sitting at a well, they can’t even talk about water and understand each other.